Well, it happened again. All of the apes got out - three-hundred monkeys to be exact. Three-hundred funny, dangerous, clever monkeys of near-human intellect have escaped across the corners of the Earth. From their native jungle to the concrete jungle of New York City, to Las Vegas, Italy, Spain, Japan and the Arctic, the goofy monkeys have dispersed in several key locales around the globe and it's up to Jimmy, Natalie and the Professor to work together to round the apes back up and put an end to the evil Specter once again.
Ape Escape 2 serves as the sequel to the original game, which launched worldwide in 1999 for the PlayStation. This was the series' first major release on the PlayStation 2. There was one Japan-exclusive Ape Escape game known as Pipo Saru 2001, that released on the PlayStation 2 while Ape Escape 2 was in development. Ape Escape was a critical success for the original PlayStation console and sold respectably, so the anticipation was quite high for Ape Escape 2. People wanted to see what the considerably more powerful PlayStation 2 was capable of. We wanted to catch those rambunctious monkeys in sterling high-definition! We wanted to see their individual hair fibers as they got scooped up by our net. Did that happen? Of course not. Ape Escape is a highly stylized and cartoonish series, so the graphical improvements weren't quite at that scale, though they did look crisper and more detailed. So what exactly did Ape Escape 2 do to set it apart?
Ape Escape 2 is very similar to the original game. The core Ape Escape entries have never departed too far from their central gameplay elements, which ultimately is fine, because the games are very fun. You enter a stage and pursue runaway monkeys, utilizing your reflexes, your brain and a whole cavalcade of devices that the game offers in your ape hunting quest. The iconic gadgets have returned: the Stun Club, the Monkey Net, the Super Hoop, etc. But, there are some new inclusions this time to mix up the challenges that you encounter. There is a very helpful tool called the Bananarang, that has you throw a massive banana that soars out like a boomerang and can attract monkeys to its scent. Another gadget is the Water Cannon, which you use to put out fire hazards that can block off pathways that need traversing, and can potentially be used to free up much needed navigable space that a fire hazard might have taken up during a battle. The last new device to assist in your monkey catching is the Electro Magnet. This lets you cling to metal, magnetic surfaces and navigate otherwise impossible sections of levels.
Another new feature is that of Pipotchi, a baby monkey sidekick that offers Jimmy (Ape Escape 2's protagonist - more on him soon) crucial tips and advice, as well as helping to reach high ledges and most importantly, reviving Jimmy once per life, upon losing all of his health. A small, but fun inclusion in Ape Escape 2 is a gashapon machine that exists in the home base, where you select what stage you wish to enter, save the game and receive story updates. The gashapon machine takes Gotcha Coins, the main collectible item in the game (beyond the titular Apes of course.) The machine spits out collectibles like concept art, music tracks, comic strips and three impressively detailed minigames: Dance Monkey Dance, Monkey Climber and Monkey Soccer.
The Ape Escape franchise is somewhat lacking on the story front. In Ape Escape, Specter, a white-haired monkey at a monkey-themed amusement park, receives a prototype helmet from a character known as The Professor and accidentally becomes warped and evil and then proceeds to provide identical helmets to the rest of the monkeys of the amusement park. The Professor has a nearby laboratory where he is constructing a time machine, and Specter and his army of intelligent monkeys seize the lab and consequently the time machine. Spike shows up at the lab to help and is sucked into the time machine along with Specter and the apes, and they are scattered across various eras of history. Spike travels through time, catching the myriad apes and ultimately Specter himself, saving the day and history as they knew it.
Ape Escape 2 features Jimmy, the cousin of Spike, as the player character. The story picks up a few years
after the events of Ape Escape, in which the villainous Specter was
stopped in his quest for world domination. The Professor is on vacation and his assistant Natalie and Jimmy have been left looking after the laboratory. Jimmy has a task from the Professor to drop off a load of "monkey pants" (the iconic shorts that Ape Escape monkeys are wearing) to the monkey amusement park, but he accidentally includes the helmets, leading to another disastrous scenario involving Specter and the monkeys putting on the helmets and becoming hyper-intelligent again. This time instead of traveling through time, Specter sends his monkeys across the globe, and they seek to conquer the world in the present. So Jimmy must travel around to many famous locales and capture the runaway monkeys. This time Specter has an inner circle of even smarter and stronger monkeys, dubbed the Freaky Monkey Five, who serve as bosses that Jimmy must defeat and capture to get closer to Specter. Eventually Jimmy does succeed in taking down the Freaky Monkey Five and travels to the Moon where Specter plans to fire a massive laser down at Earth to make the humans lethargic and unable to fight the apes. Upon thwarting Specter's plans, he is captured and Jimmy in an effort to escape the Moon base, accidentally crashes a spaceship into the Professor's laboratory. We actually see Spike again at the end, where he shows up at the lab just as the spaceship crashes into it. Spike is then available as a player character in New Game Plus mode.
If you enjoyed Ape Escape, I would highly recommend Ape Escape 2. It's largely more of the same gameplay, which is perfect for me, as I love the way that Ape Escape games work. Seeing the creatively designed monkeys, with their clever names (which are typically puns themed around whatever activity the monkey is doing) and figuring out exactly how each of them is supposed to be caught is a satisfying loop, especially with the diverse maps and handy, new gadgets given to Jimmy. There are some legitimately challenging sections of Ape Escape 2 as well, so it's not a cakewalk by any means. If you find yourself hankering to catch apes with a net in a Japanese castle or in the Venetian waterways, do yourself a favor and check out Ape Escape 2.
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