Platinum Difficulty?

[Mr_Wright95]

Trying to get a sense on if this is a hard platinum or just a long grind.

I enjoyed these games on the PS2 and wouldn't mind giving it a go, but just curious what everyone feels this is /10

Anyone with a ballpark on difficulty and time to Platinum would be great.

Thanks! 

[JarudeG]

I haven't got the platinum yet, and not sure if I will any time soon.

 

Obviously the hardest challenge is complete conquest, some of these missions are really tough - particularly the mini game ones.

 

If you played Deluxe on the PS2 the story mode missions are fairly easy, finishing in a time frame/collecting bananas, hitting red/green goals is quite achievable.

 

Challenge mode is doable as well, just practice and complete Marathon mode not using too many lives, you'll get it with practice and a good run. Same with Golden/Dark Banana mode missions.

 

The mini games are the real frustration though, monkey golf in under so many strokes is super frustrating, beating the hardest AI on some mini games like soccer and tennis is super frustrating as well. It's achievable, but definitely has some challenge to it on the mini games, especially on the ones you may not enjoy.

 

Can't really put a ballpark on difficulty or timings, but it's for sure on the higher end for me difficulty wise and I've played a lot of SMB2 before coming into this.

Edited December 17, 2021 by JarudeG

[Trigonometrize]

I played through all of the levels normally, getting all of the individual level missions. And then for much of my SMB1 challenge mode runs I played normally, as well as the special modes. At this point I was somewhat shocked to learn that the jump you can buy does NOT disable trophies, which was surprising because they went out of their way to program assist mode to disable. I proceeded to use the jump for the remainder of the main game mission cleanup.

 

With that caveat out of the way, I would say... 6/10? 7/10? The main game wasn't as hard as I remembered, and even putting the jump button aside, they give you a lot of breathing room for the challenge modes (as many as 99 chances to die). YMMV on which party game missions you'll find frustrating, but you're guaranteed to want to throw your controller at the screen for at least one. For me it was Monkey Tennis, but a lot of people seem to hate Monkey Golf's under par mission. About half of the games I was able to do all the missions without *too* much effort, and the other half have at least one that's nasty. Again, YMMV on some of these because it's a bunch of unrelated skill sets, so please don't hurt me if you find 6/10 to be on the lower end.

 

I got the platinum in Banana Splitz not long before playing this game so I was definitely (1) trained in the way of the monkey ball and (2) numb to the difficulty of the series, so maybe keep that in mind as well.

 

My PS5 is telling me I played Banana Mania for 41 hours.

 

 

Edited December 30, 2021 by Trigonometrize

[Miku-30-10-98]

Difficulty in monkey ball? If you look up the word difficult or frustrating in a dictionary, it will appear as a synonym Super monkey ball, having said that, you can consider it an 8 or 9 out of 10

[Wurstmann69]

8/10 or 9/10  - i've done several other hard games and this one fits perfectly.

[Adamdudepure]

You have to be insanely good at the Monkey Ball main game.

Mini Games are a 7/10, there's a couple of hard ones but most of it is short and with a bit of time and mastery you can get all this. It just sucks cause it doesn't prepare you for main game at all.

SMB1 Marathon 99 lives is a 7/10 because so many levels can be cheesed with jump, it does have the hardest level in the game Master level 3, but you can make it there with plenty of lives to retry, and there's only 109 levels.

 

SMB2 Marathon 99 lives is a 9/10, jump will help but the cheesable levels have gone way way down. You have to just continually practise levels you get stuck on and you will randomly get stuck at levels you thought you mastered. 140 levels, with a good 40% of them being in the very difficult range.

 

Took 40 hours, in theory if you were good at everything you could get it done in 15 or less... but you have to grind for skill.