The official Super Monkey Ball Twitter account has tweeted this morning that the upcoming Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania has scrapped the lives feature to make the game more accessible to newcomers of the beloved video game franchise. The team says that whilst the live system has been scrapped in Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania, the game will still pose a challenge even to the hardcore Monkey Ball fans. In previous games you would collect 100 bananas to gain an extra life and so it remains a mystery what you will achieve when you collect 100 bananas in the new compilation.
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania has scrapped lives feature
I wonder why this wasn’t just made a feature that can be toggled on or off. It’s never a great solution when devs intentionally lower the skill ceiling across the board to suit one kind of player and in spite of another. Kind of a lame way to hedge against the game’s own natural difficulty curve, but that’s just my opinion™. Still looking forward to it.
tbh I can’t name any game from the last decade or two, that had a lives mechanic, where it actually felt like it mattered.
It very much did matter with Monkey Ball. Finishing difficulties without using continues is how you unlock rewards and the hardest difficulty. I can understand getting rid of the limited continues as using one reset your points and playing the mini games already gave you unlimited continues as an unlock. But then again now you don’t have the fun of achieving that reward now.
The lives mechanic never really added anything to these games, so I’d call this an improvement.
Yes it did add something to the games, because the challenge was that you had to complete each Difficulty Mode with just 3 lives. During levels you could earn extra lives by collecting bananas (which made those bananas valuable as well: risk-reward). I will not spoil what happens when you succeed, but it is actually a very fun challenge. The tweet doesn’t say anything about how it will replace this, so I can only see this as a loss.
I mean after awhile in the original games, you could just buy unlimited continues thus rendering lives pointless, and the only punishment for continuing was having your score reset, which I think most casual players don’t care about in the first place.