Super Monkey Ball Wants Every Player to Have Fun, Even If They Need Extra Help
How watching teenagers play the latest Super Monkey Ball game prompted its developers to add in features that helped my own kid enjoy the game.
It brings me great joy to watch a game “click” with my kids. It’s even better when they’re struggling, and the game lends a hand to meet them where they are. This happened recently with my seven-year-old and Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble, and thankfully, I recently had an opportunity to ask the team about how this happened.
One of Sega’s most enduring franchises has been Super Monkey Ball. The series about tilting a board to help a monkey trapped in a ball reach the end of the stage started as an arcade game in 2001, before being ported to the GameCube later in the same year. It became a certified hit on a platform that often struggled to have enough games.
Now, more than 20 years later, Sega is still producing Super Monkey Ball games, with Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble arriving as a Switch exclusive today. Due in part to its arcade roots, the Super Monkey Ball games have always been challenges meant to delight and frustrate, a tension made all the funnier by its absurdly cute aesthetic.
I mean, it’s a monkey trapped in a ball. Why wouldn’t you want to help the monkey?
The last game, Banana Mania, came out in 2021 and proved instructive to Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio—yes, the same developer behind Like a Dragon—about its audience.
“Looking at the percentage of purchasers of the previous title Banana Mania,” said Banana Rumble producer Nobuhiro Suzuki to Crossplay. “We believe that families and children are the primary target audience for Banana Rumble, as these two groups accounted for a large percentage of the player base. The development team was aware of this and created the characters, design, and storyline, as well as the game content itself with this understanding.”
In Banana Rumble, the game tracks how many times you’re dying. In early levels, if you die three times, the game quickly offers up a few ways to make the game a bit easier.
Later on, this prompt doesn’t appear until you die five times. You can also disable it.
What the game offers up, then, are three very helpful tools:
The ability to rewind gameplay.
A guide that shows the “correct” path through the level.
Checkpoints throughout the level.
When these showed up, my daughter breathed a sigh of relief—and kept playing!
You can see how it works by watching the video below:
Banana Mania director Daisuke Takahata told me the team’s own children didn’t have a direct impact on their approach, but watching other children play it absolutely did.
“During our playtests during development, many teenagers actually touched the game, and they had an influence on the game's development,” said Takahata. “Initially, the game was more difficult than we had anticipated, and after seeing how disappointed they were that they fell down repeatedly, we made adjustments to the game so that more customers are able to enjoy it.”
As I’ve outlined over and over at Crossplay, understanding your game will be played by families and children is different than actually tweaking your design for that audience. Super Mario Bros. Wonder was clearly pitched at the same groups, yet lacks a number of helpful features that would make the game more accessible to families and children.
“What had the biggest impact on us more than anything else was the sight of children being overjoyed after clearing a difficult stage,” said Takahata.
Each of the “helper functions” serves a different goal, in the eyes of the developers.
“The key to rewinding time is that you can go back to the specific point that you want,” said Takahata. “We thought that it would support light users in their strategies if they could immediately resume from just before a gimmick that they have difficulty with, rather than starting over from the beginning. We thought that resuming from a checkpoint would not only make them feel more comfortable by allowing them to return from the middle of the stage even if they had fallen off, but would also lower the hurdle to clearing the stage by setting an ‘intermediate goal.’”
The notion of an “immediate goal” is a keen observation. For advanced players, enormous fun is derived from trying to survive a level without dying a single time. The longer the level, the more tension there is—and often, more fun! For a younger player, though, that loop is often much tighter. A “short” level for you may feel like a lifetime for them. In that way, checkpoints become a level into itself, generating feelings of accomplishment on the way to beating the whole level. A smaller loop.
“During our playtests during development, many teenagers actually touched the game, and they had an influence on the game's development. Initially, the game was more difficult than we had anticipated, and after seeing how disappointed they were that they fell down repeatedly, we made adjustments to the game so that more customers are able to enjoy it.”
In the previous Super Monkey Ball game, Banana Mania, there was a “helper function” that slowed the game down. That feature has been removed from Banana Rumble.
“We wanted players to be able to clear the game without any of the helper functions,” said Takahata. “The previous game, Banana Mania, had a slow motion function, which allowed the players to slowly attack a gimmick, but the motion is very different from the normal state. So, even if you can pass through a section in slow motion, it does not support the attack at its original speed. In order for players to experience the sense of accomplishment when clearing a difficult stage, which is the most thrilling part of the Super Monkey Ball series, we introduced a function that supports the player's attack at normal speed.”
A slow motion function might have allowed a player to complete a level, but it was not building their skills. In Banana Rumble, the “helper functions” are an aid, but the player must actually accomplish the tasks in front of them. A fascinating distinction.
It’s less about a game where all players can accomplish every challenge, but all players having an opportunity to find the challenges they want and, ultimately, having fun.
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Also:
My daughter had a blast for an hour or so, but hasn’t asked to play it since. I think this has less to do with the game than my oldest being pool-obsessed.
When I was in high school, we turned Super Monkey Ball into a drinking game, and it did not end well for me. Maybe I should write about that for a post soon.
I’m not shocked the reason this game ended up with “helper functions” at all was watching kids play it. I hope more developers follow in the same footsteps.