And so ends my re-journey through the mainline Ape Escape games. This, like 2, was one I rented and played a decent bit as a kid, and didn't remember being quite as good as 2, but still being very good. While there is a fair bit in 3 that is more "different" from 2 than outright "better", there is also a lot here that is plain better. It took me around 8 hours to complete the Japanese version of the game and capture every monkey.
Ape Escape 3 is the most colorful and wacky of the mainline games, continuing the pace that 2 set down, and that extends into the story. Specter, the evil mastermind monkey from the previous two games, has escaped once again and is using the Freaky Monkey Five and his legion of monkeys (over 400 to capture this time around!) to try and take over the world. But this time, he's got an ace up his sleeve: a human accomplice! Dr. Tomouki (which is a fairly amazing pun that also is nearly a real name "tomo" being "friend" and "uki" being the sound a monkey makes in Japanese) is the delightfully camp, afro-sporting human scientist aiding Specter in his plot to turn all of humanity into hapless couch potatoes by brainwashing them with immensely inane monkey-based television programming. It's up to the series new heroes (the other ones having been couch potato'd), twins Satoru and Sayaka and their super scientist mother, to stop him! Each level takes the form of a TV show the monkeys are filming on location somewhere, and you're capturing enough of them to shut down their broadcasts, while each member of the Freaky Monkey Five guard a transmission tower you need to beat them to destroy. This gives all sorts of opportunity (which the game takes in spades) for all sorts of pop culture parodies for the kind of shows the monkeys are making, from their horror show "Monday the 16th" to their hotspring documentary to their Star Wars parody (complete, of course, with Darth Vader monkey to fight). All of the silliness, from the main characters to Specter to the Freaky Monkey Five to the absolutely wonderful Dr. Tomouki, has been cranked up to 11, and it's all in a way I absolutely adore. Even the music is a significant improvement, and I'd go as far as to say that 3 has better music than even the first game. The only real downside is that the game hits some significant framerate problems in certain stages due to how much is going on, but that luckily doesn't affect the actual gameplay much (certainly not as badly as the first game's slowdown harms its gameplay). The gameplay itself is very familiar from the previous two games, but has been modified in a way to further tighten up the gameplay improvements introduced in 2 as well as add a new gimmick entirely. You're still going from stage to stage, using your tools to fight and catch monkeys, but thankfully the incredible bloat of tools in the 2nd game has been massively trimmed back down to a far more manageable 8 (down from the like 14 or 15 in 2). The number of monkeys you need to catch in each stage has been pumped up a fair bit though, and their frequency within the stages (not nearly as many droughts with no monkeys to fight like 2 has in its later stages) as well as their natural ability to avoid your net have also been increased. The level design is significantly better as a result, leading to stages that are often smaller compared to its predecessor, but more content-dense and overall difficult due to just how good the monkeys are at avoiding capture. Even normal enemies are a bit more complicated this time around, as Dr. Tomouki's little robot minions all have turnkeys on them somewhere that you can aim for to do far more damage than a normal body hit. To even the odds in your favor a bit, the game gives you its most noticeable change to the gameplay of the previous two entries: transformations! By holding down both R buttons, you can initiate a transformation into a super form that you can use for about 30 seconds (or longer if you keep getting powerups to fill your meter more). You unlock more and more transformations as you progress through the game for a grand total of 9, and while there is certainly a power curve as you go along (the 8th being the best and the 9th being a secret finding tool), they all have some kind of special ability (either combat or mobility-wise) that gives them their own sense of usefulness. Each of the two twins even has their own (admittedly predictably gendered) cosmetic version of each costume, like how Satoru has his Fantasy Knight and Sayaka has her Fantasy Witch. This is sorta where the game hits its stumbling blocks. It can feel at times, particularly as you progress through the game, that the power difference between your normal form and the transformations is too significant. Fighting enemies, especially monkeys, is really difficult as your normal form, particularly with how good their auto-dodges are (not to mention if they hit you hard enough they can steal your tools!), but your transformations are often enough to totally wipe the floor with them. While I would say that the bosses in this game are overall a little better than the ones in 2, if you fight them with the appropriate transformation, you can really trivialize most of the fights difficulty-wise (although they're still quite fun even then). Beyond that, there are some other presentation issues the game has that serve to harm the overall experience. The twins are effectively entirely similar with the one exception that Sayaka, the girl, is basically an easy mode the game doesn't tell you about. Certain monkeys will see her and be so struck by her that they fall in love and sit on the ground harmlessly waiting to be captured. Ignoring the fact that she's a 4th grader and that this is still a relatively small number of the overall monkeys in the game (less than 10%), it's still a handicap that Satoru doesn't receive in any form, and it's a bad way to make the game de facto easier for people who wanna play as the girl character (presumably from the perspective of the game's developers, girls :/). Then there's also the fact of how all of the personalities are cranked up in their silliness, and that also goes for Monkey Yellow, whose queer-coded creepiness has been further worsened to make him an outright child predator with how he gives Satoru (a 4th grader) the choice of fighting him or going on a date with him before his boss fight. These are by no means a deal-breaker for me for the game, and Sony had the good sense to remove that Monkey Yellow thing from the English version at least in part (he gives Satoru the choice of fighting him or "being [his] personal chef forever and ever"), it's still something that erk'd me enough that I can't not mention it here. The last thing I'll mention is the side games in Ape Escape 3. All 3 games have 3 unlockable fairly substantial mini-games you can unlock through the course of the game, but Ape Escape 3 has something really special: Mesal Gear Solid. It's an official crossover with Konami (as MGS3 got its own Ape Escape-based mini-game) where you play as Pipo Snake, guided on your tactical espionage mission by Solid Snake himself (all as a favor for the professor of Ape Escape from his "high school buddy" Colonel Campbell X3). It's a really solid and quite substantial (although obviously very silly) side mode that does a good job of replicating the feel of the first two MGS games but using assets and enemies from Ape Escape 3 that you unlock after beating the main game. It's a really neat historical curiosity, as well as likely the tricky licensing reason that has led to Ape Escape 3 never joining its sister games on PSN, if I had to guess (and also likely why the series never got a trilogy release on PS3 like basically every other major Sony IP did last generation). Verdict: Highly Recommended. Warts and all, Ape Escape 3 is still the best the franchise ever got. While it's certainly a shame that the series never really continued after this, and that Ape Escape 3 is really only playable these days on this original PS2 release, it's still a platformer that has weathered the test of time really well, and is still loads of fun. If you like 3D platformers and don't mind needing to probably shell out a decent bit for the physical release of this, then this is a game that's a no-brainer to pick up and give a whirl.
0 Comments
As much as I love the 2nd and 3rd Ape Escape games, I couldn't remember if I'd ever played the first one, let alone beaten it. Having played through it in Japanese now, I can say quite confidently I had never played it before XD. It is simultaneously quite surprising how similar it is to Ape Escape 2 and also shocking just what an improvement the sequel is by comparison despite how little overall is changed. It took me like 8 or 9 hours in total to get all of the Specter Coins and all of the monkeys.
Story-wise, Ape Escape 1 is much more grounded than its sequels. There's a big monkey park run by The Professor, and one day their star attraction monkey gets his little hands on one of the experimental new Monkey Helmets. It corrupts his mind and gives him super smarts and telekinetic powers which he then uses to build monkey helmets for all his monkey buddies. Now dubbed Specter, he attacks the Professor's lab, and uses his time machine to go back in time and rewrite history to make monkeys in charge of the world instead of humans. It's up to our intrepid boy hero Kakeru to catch all those monkeys messing up history and stop him! I say it's more grounded, but that's mostly in terms of the locations and the villains, as the Freaky Monkey Five are an invention of the sequel. Your main rival here is your childhood friend Hiroki, whom Specter has brainwashed into being his servant, and even then the rivalry isn't that present up until your final encounter. You could also say the story has somewhat of a point of strength not being about power (and by extension, technology), and technology itself being a potentially horribly corrupting influence, as is at least implied to be the case with Specter's relation to his original monkey helmet. Regardless, it's a 3D action platformer from late-ish in the PS1's lifespan, so the plot isn't really the most interesting thing here. The most interesting thing is capturing those monkeys, and the game does a pretty good job of that. This is the only game I know of on the PS1 that outright requires the dualshock controller to work, and was clearly developed as a vehicle to convince people Sony's new controller was worth the upgrade. The D-pad handles camera direction and the face buttons change your weapons. Movement is handled by the left joystick and your attacking is done by the right joystick. Compared to the sequels, it takes a bit of getting used to with how you attack, as there isn't any tracking in how you swing your baton or your net. This does have the effect of making the baton a far more useful weapon, as trying to catch a feeling monkey with just the next is far harder to do with how much slower and less accurate your net is in this game. Other than that, the overall formula of the game is really similar to how the mainline games would go on to do. You start a mission, you gotta collect so many monkeys in order to pass it. There are some slight differences such as there being hidden Specter Coins in each stage to also collect, but they're just an extra thing to collect to unlock some extra mini-games. Other than that, it's just Ape Escape on PS1. However, being Ape Escape on PS1 DOES carry with it some unfortunately conditions. The game has a pretty poor draw distance which can make navigating some levels a bit of a pain when you're hunting for monkeys (even with your monkey radar). Even worse, some levels have really significant slowdown, and it makes the already somewhat clunky/awkward controls even worse by affecting the latency (especially for jumps). I was beginning to think my controller was broken because the button delay was so bad for jumping, but no. That's just the slowdown. That slowdown is the main reason I would say this game might be difficult to stick with for fans of the PS2 games like I was. However, it's not all bad. The game looks quite good for a PS1 game, even despite the low polygon count. The music is also good, and I'd say even better than the sequels, as well as the VA being excellent as well (at least in Japanese). Verdict: Recommended. Somewhat clunky controls and fairly annoying slowdown aside, this is still an excellent game. Good music, good gimmick, good level design. It's all things that are improved in the later games, but they're still really solid here as well. If you're a fan of the series or a fan of 3D platformers in general, you can certainly do better than the first Ape Escape game, but you can easily do a lot worse as well. With the new Animal Crossing coming out around a month ago, I thought it'd be a fun idea to stream some of the original N64 game (which I did this past Saturday~). However, when I picked it up a few weeks back, I was met with the realization that while the save battery in the cart worked, the time-keeping battery did not. My appetite for classic Animal Crossing had been not been satiated though, so I finally broke down and got a Gamecube controller so I could finally play GC games on my Wii. I recieved my golden statue in front of the train station earlier today, so I'm calling this game "beaten" in that regard, and I did this pretty casually over the course of a few weeks.
Doubutsu No Mori is the original N64 game that got a straight up port to Gamecube in Japan with the same title. Doubutsu No Mori+ is a fairly significantly upgraded version of the same game, and it's also the game that would serve as the basis for the international release a few years later: the game we in the West simply know as "Animal Crossing" (and that game would then in turn lead to Doubutsu No Mori e+, which was a further modified version ported back to Japanese from the international version). This upgrade that '+' brings to the table brings the N64 original far closer to what we know with Animal Crossing, but there are still some interesting differences between them. The biggest additions to the N64 game are the Able Sisters' shop as well as the Museum. Another house upgrade or two (namely the basement) have also been added along with 16 more bugs and 16 more fish to catch. You also have a calendar now so you can know when which holidays are! The framerate is also WAY smoother, which is something I didn't even realize until I played them back to back XD Things it lacks compared to the American version that would follow it are 8 bugs and 8 fish, as well as many fossils and paintings (there's like half as many of each in this version), another couple house upgrades, e-reader functionality, and some American holidays like the Thanksgiving and Christmas-themed ones. The main reason to play this over the American Gamecube game would be the inclusion of several Japanese holidays and aesthetic designs that the American version would take out (like the trees turning pink for cherry blossom viewing), as I think they make this game feel more different than it actually is (aside from, you know, it being in Japanese instead of English XP), but they're still very close to the same thing. Other than that, it's still classic Animal Crossing. The village is divided into 5 rows and 6 columns of acres, you can do chores for villagers with a direct action with them, and you catch lots of fish and bugs to pay off your loans and make your house bigger. Your town is immutable, for the most part, and you're just someone who lives there. You aren't some hot shot mayor or island owner like the newer games. I wouldn't say it's better in that regard, just different and clearly created with a different gameplay loop in mind. This isn't really supposed to be a game you play for untold hours at a time. It's more something you give an hour or two every day, or every few days. Verdict: Highly Recommended. In an age of far more in-depth and customizable Animal Crossing games, I think this far more passive, relaxing experience is still worth going back to. I have a lot of nostalgia for the series, but if you want a relaxing time with no Nook Miles or such weighing on the back of your mind, classic Animal Crossing is still as good as it's always been. Even if it may be a bit dull at times, it's still a nostalgia piece that will always be close to my heart <3 A best friend of mine visited me earlier this month before he headed back to America (this was before the pandemic got very serious around here), and he gave me his Japanese PS2. Now with the ability to finally play PS1 and PS2 games, I hurried to the resale shop near me that I knew had this game and picked it up, since I've been wanting to play it for months. I'd never played the Japanese version of the game before, but it's a game I've 100%'d at least twice in English many years ago, so this was very much a trip down memory lane. It took me about 7 or 8 hours to capture all the monkeys and beat every stage (the English localization uses "ape" and "monkey" interchangeably, despite them clearly being apes, so I'm gonna do that as well here :b).
Ape Escape 2 is the second main-line game in the Sony-published and produced platformer franchise. It's a 3D action platformer collectathon that has two main gimmicks: monkeys and the dual-shock joysticks. Gimmick #1 is that the "star" equivalents are the monkeys themselves, whom you need to hit with your net to capture them. As you go through the game, they have ever more sophisticated methods of both hiding and then defending themselves, and if you collect enough of them in a stage, you'll complete it and be teleported out. The game has a sorta Mario Odyssey feel to it, to compare it to something more recent, in that there's a kind of linear path (or two) through each stage, but only once you get enough of the collectible do you actually leave it. You don't need to restart it each time. There are even some extra monkeys that repopulate levels once you beat the game as an incentive to go back and get other monkeys you missed, also a bit like Mario Odyssey (although nowhere near as many new things in old levels as that game), and getting all of those unlocks the true final boss. Gimmick #2 is the dual shock, as this was a game series born on the PS1 more or less to show off the new DS1 controllers. You move with the left joystick, but the face buttons don't do anything but change your weapon. Actual attacking is done with the right stick (swinging in a particular direction, rotating it to spin up a propellor, etc.), and then you jump with R1. It can take some getting used to, and it honestly sometimes feels more like a contrived gimmick than a genuinely needed element for a few weapons, but it's gives the games a unique play style that is more good/novel than it is bad/frustrating. The plot is as silly as the nature of the adventure describes. Due to a mislabeled shipment of monkey pants getting mixed in monkey helmets at the monkey park, the evil supergenius monkey Specter is able to once again get back his super intelligence, give all his mischievous buddies better smarts as well, and escape from the monkey park. You as Hikaru, whose fault this more or less is, are tasked with going out there to the various places and times the monkeys have run off to to re-capture them. It's all a very light-hearted and silly affair that doesn't take itself too seriously. While I do certainly have a soft spot for the English voice acting (I don't really like how Specter sounds like a kid in Japanese), the Japanese VA is also very fun, especially the Monkey Force Five who are all similarly campy and fun in their own ways in both English and Japanese. As far as regional differences go, between my memory and the very small page for it on tcrf, there's very little differences between the English and Japanese aside from the VA and a nature around of the monkey's pun names. The only noteable ones are the English version technically having more monkeys out of the box, as 3 special event monkeys in the Japanese version are just wrapped into the main game seamlessly in English and don't require any special action on the part of the player to go and catch. Granted, that's 3 monkeys out of a total of 300, so it isn't exactly a mind-blowing amount of extra content, but the English version does technically have more to do. Then the weird thing I cannot imagine the reason for the English version lacking is the faster ability to change weapons by double tapping that face button to cycle through them. I mean it isn't a perfect system, as you have 14 of the things so going past the one you want can suck, but it's far faster and more fluid than going into the pause menu to change them every time like the English version forces you to. Perhaps they thought it was just a bit too fiddly to impose upon the international release of the game. The presentation of the game is very Japanese without being explicitly so, and I think that speaks to just how little of the game was changed for the localization. It's very upbeat, very colorful, and has good music (although not anything particularly MP3-player-worthy, in my opinion), but it's all still grounded within its own logic. It's still fairly 'anime' in its style, but it's no Stretch Panic or Incredible Crisis. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is one of my favorite games on the PS2, and one of my favorite franchises of Sony's. I love the presentation, the characters, the gameplay, and the level design. If you like action/platformer games, this is absolutely a game worth checking out. |
Categories
All
AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
|