Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
I don’t know if you guys are hungry for another single-player playthrough, but after a long hiatus for health-related reasons, I decided to give this a try. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble is, after over a decade of mediocrity, considered by fans a return to form, inspired more by the first two Super Monkey Ball games than Banana Blitz and onward. It keeps the current character designs and characters (Doctor and YanYan are already part of AiAi’s group), introduces Palette (and a few other characters, which we’ll get to), and the Spin Dash, which works much like Sonic’s Spin Dash and is overall a better fit for the game’s rolling-physics gameplay than the jumping introduced in Banana Blitz.
Unfortunately, this game bombed in sales, most likely due to a lack of marketing for it and the reputation that its many years of neglect had taken on it. This likely means there won’t be another Super Monkey Ball game for a while.
I’ve put up Super Monkey Ball 2 and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz videos in the past, but it has been quite a while ago, so here is a reminder to how it works: the premise simply is to roll your character in a ball from the starting point to the goal without falling off the stage. This is easier said than done because the stages themselves can be pretty merciless. When the series began, every character had the same stats (so Baby was preferred because he was physically smaller and thus blocked the least screen space), but now, they vary on top speed, weight, maneuverability, and, in this game, Spin Dash strengtn and Spin Dash charge speed. (For instance, Doctor, whom I’ll use in World 7, has a long charge time for his Spin Dash but also a powerful boost from it, but he has a low unboosted top speed.)
The story this time, though it’s really just loosely attached to the main game, is about AiAi and his friends meeting up with Palette, who happens to be hanging out at the Juicy Island resort with them. She steals AiAi’s banana to get his attention and teaches him the Spin Dash because she needs his help getting the Legendary Banana, an artifact that supposedly can grant unlimited delicious bananas. (These monkeys apparently have total immunity to hyperkalemia.) To even get to it though, they need to find the seven Chaos Emeralds…well, OOParts, which instigates a world tour. The first one is right near Juicy Island, at the Banana Farm, where they’re holding a festival. This being World 1, and the traditional Stone Age jungles-and-waterfalls location at the beginning of the game, it has the easiest stages.
An OOPart stands for “out of place artifact,” an archaeological term for something found at an excavation site that doesn’t geographically belong in the area. It was likely derived from the Super Monkey Ball 2 Master difficulty stage.
NOTE: I simply intend to get to the goal in each stage. Unlike the classic series, three additional missions were added on: getting the Golden Banana, finishing within a certain time, and getting a minimum number of Bananas. (There are also two missions past that: an even stricter time limit and getting every Banana on a course, which is so far beyond me.) I may come back and show a Golden Banana montage.
Because this is World 1, we’ll begin with our protagonist, AiAi.
05:00 - 1-01 Twin Islands
05:20 - 1-02 Zigzag
05:54 - 1-03 Down and Up
06:04 - 1-04 Stop and Go
06:30 - 1-05 Spin and Jump
07:05 - 1-06 First Slope
07:37 - 1-07 One-Eighty
08:17 - 1-08 Floating Boat
08:59 - 1-09 Bumpy
09:35 - 1-10 Rail Slider
1-05, Spin and Jump, is the first one to require the Spin Dash, and gives you a space with a lot of room for trial and error to understand it better. Later applications of the Spin Dash might not be do obvious.
1-09, Bumpy, not to be confused with Super Monkey Ball 2’s Bumpy (also found in World 1), is the first of a series of stages made up of a path of undulating peaks and valleys. This one is wider and shallower than the ones to come after it. You’ll see they can become a lot meaner later, starting with World 3-9, Egg Pack.
The time mission for 1-10, Rail Slider, asks you to finish within 6 seconds. What I did there, use a Spin Dash to fall off and hopefully land near the end down below, is what you need to do to clear that mission, to give an idea of the stunts asked of you even in World 1. My time of 5.417 seconds is good enough for the mission, but not good enough for the Expert time limit, which is 5.1 seconds, to give an idea of how insane it all is.
The following destination is Rose Garden, a flowery place with tea parties. Also, that last shot is slanted, but the flames on the temple are still rising upwards relative to the screen. Does that mean it’s not so much the camera is slanted at a Dutch angle, but that they slanted the world?
I don’t know if you guys are hungry for another single-player playthrough, but after a long hiatus for health-related reasons, I decided to give this a try. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble is, after over a decade of mediocrity, considered by fans a return to form, inspired more by the first two Super Monkey Ball games than Banana Blitz and onward. It keeps the current character designs and characters (Doctor and YanYan are already part of AiAi’s group), introduces Palette (and a few other characters, which we’ll get to), and the Spin Dash, which works much like Sonic’s Spin Dash and is overall a better fit for the game’s rolling-physics gameplay than the jumping introduced in Banana Blitz.
Unfortunately, this game bombed in sales, most likely due to a lack of marketing for it and the reputation that its many years of neglect had taken on it. This likely means there won’t be another Super Monkey Ball game for a while.
I’ve put up Super Monkey Ball 2 and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz videos in the past, but it has been quite a while ago, so here is a reminder to how it works: the premise simply is to roll your character in a ball from the starting point to the goal without falling off the stage. This is easier said than done because the stages themselves can be pretty merciless. When the series began, every character had the same stats (so Baby was preferred because he was physically smaller and thus blocked the least screen space), but now, they vary on top speed, weight, maneuverability, and, in this game, Spin Dash strengtn and Spin Dash charge speed. (For instance, Doctor, whom I’ll use in World 7, has a long charge time for his Spin Dash but also a powerful boost from it, but he has a low unboosted top speed.)
The story this time, though it’s really just loosely attached to the main game, is about AiAi and his friends meeting up with Palette, who happens to be hanging out at the Juicy Island resort with them. She steals AiAi’s banana to get his attention and teaches him the Spin Dash because she needs his help getting the Legendary Banana, an artifact that supposedly can grant unlimited delicious bananas. (These monkeys apparently have total immunity to hyperkalemia.) To even get to it though, they need to find the seven Chaos Emeralds…well, OOParts, which instigates a world tour. The first one is right near Juicy Island, at the Banana Farm, where they’re holding a festival. This being World 1, and the traditional Stone Age jungles-and-waterfalls location at the beginning of the game, it has the easiest stages.
An OOPart stands for “out of place artifact,” an archaeological term for something found at an excavation site that doesn’t geographically belong in the area. It was likely derived from the Super Monkey Ball 2 Master difficulty stage.
NOTE: I simply intend to get to the goal in each stage. Unlike the classic series, three additional missions were added on: getting the Golden Banana, finishing within a certain time, and getting a minimum number of Bananas. (There are also two missions past that: an even stricter time limit and getting every Banana on a course, which is so far beyond me.) I may come back and show a Golden Banana montage.
Because this is World 1, we’ll begin with our protagonist, AiAi.
05:00 - 1-01 Twin Islands
05:20 - 1-02 Zigzag
05:54 - 1-03 Down and Up
06:04 - 1-04 Stop and Go
06:30 - 1-05 Spin and Jump
07:05 - 1-06 First Slope
07:37 - 1-07 One-Eighty
08:17 - 1-08 Floating Boat
08:59 - 1-09 Bumpy
09:35 - 1-10 Rail Slider
1-05, Spin and Jump, is the first one to require the Spin Dash, and gives you a space with a lot of room for trial and error to understand it better. Later applications of the Spin Dash might not be do obvious.
1-09, Bumpy, not to be confused with Super Monkey Ball 2’s Bumpy (also found in World 1), is the first of a series of stages made up of a path of undulating peaks and valleys. This one is wider and shallower than the ones to come after it. You’ll see they can become a lot meaner later, starting with World 3-9, Egg Pack.
The time mission for 1-10, Rail Slider, asks you to finish within 6 seconds. What I did there, use a Spin Dash to fall off and hopefully land near the end down below, is what you need to do to clear that mission, to give an idea of the stunts asked of you even in World 1. My time of 5.417 seconds is good enough for the mission, but not good enough for the Expert time limit, which is 5.1 seconds, to give an idea of how insane it all is.
The following destination is Rose Garden, a flowery place with tea parties. Also, that last shot is slanted, but the flames on the temple are still rising upwards relative to the screen. Does that mean it’s not so much the camera is slanted at a Dutch angle, but that they slanted the world?
