Super Monkey Ball/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Awesome Music: Plenty of it, especially in 2. Boiling Pot and Dr BAD-Boon's Base especially.
  • Awesome: Video Game Levels: The "water slide" levels that seem to be a Super Monkey Ball tradition. Unlike most levels, the sides are heavily banked, so you can go fast for once. Chase (Advanced 18), the giant treble clef, from the first Super Monkey Ball is like no other level in that you have to chase after the goals as they run away (well, ski away) from you. The level design itself is quite fun, with the wide curvy track and banked sides.
  • Breather Level: The unusually merciful Bonus Stages. The set task is to collect several bananas within the time limit. However, unlike every other stage, you're not penalized if you run out of time or fall out.
    • Skeleton (Expert 8 in Super Monkey Ball 1), anyone?
  • Ear Worm: Inside The Whale so much.
  • It Gets Better: Exaggerated in DX. After an exaggerated Difficulty Spike from Dodecagon to Exam-C (Which turns out to be the hardest level in Expert), everything gets easier once you beat the latter.
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks: Step and Roll and 3D. Both are really easy compared to early games of the series.
  • Most Annoying Sound: FALL OUT!! Trust us, you'll hear that too many times to count on some levels.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Inverted with Expert 7 from Super Monkey Ball. It was moderately challenging at first, but DX made it a That One Level.
  • Squick: Dr. Bad-Boon looks how many years older than Meemee? And he keeps flirting with her after shrinking her and her friends down so he can cook them and eat them.
  • That One Level: Where do we start?
    • All the games are full of them in the later levels, but a lot of gamers have a fond memory of Super Monkey Ball 2's Labyrinth level.
    • Arthropod anyone? This video spends 6 minutes straight on it.
    • For anyone who doesn't want to watch that, it's an annoying puzzle involving having to wait a certain amount of time before dashing straight forward. If I recall correctly, the time to run is about 10 seconds in. Miss it, and you're probably dead. If you survive, you probably have to wait another thirty seconds or so for the goal to come back. In a game where almost every stage has a 60-second time limit.
    • Expert 36 in the first game. It's basically just Advanced 21, except the bumpers move twice as fast. It is very hard to get the proper timing to get onto the track, let alone maintaining it throughout the level.
    • Warp and Momentum in the second one. You have to be positioned just right on Momentum to get across the platforms that will come out from underneath you and Warp requires you to have enough force and speed to make the continuously curve increasing ramps or else you'll botch it and fall to your doom.
    • As shown above, Exam-C (Beginner 7 from the original) had its difficulty cranked Up to Eleven in Deluxe. The part of it that serves as The Scrappy is the curve bridge, where your 360º analog stick doesn't fare as well as the original's gamecube controller...
      • Averted with the next level, Skeleton. Played straight with the level after, Tracks (Beginner 9 from the original), which, again, has a thin bridge that's curved (5, in fact). The widest one is pretty thin, so you might resort to gimmicking above that wall seperating you from that goal...
    • The DS version was so kind as to give us Fluctuation. Oh, and you WILL either run out of time, or fall off too many times to count.
      • Fluctuation is actually the stage Excursion (or Expert 4), just renamed. That stage, on the DS with its limited visibility of your surroundings? Yeah.