Ape Escape 2 (2002)

Started out my replay thinking I might like this more than the first game. Ended up going back to thinking the first game is better by the end.

• Better models and animations.
• More variety in enemies. This applies to both monkey and non-monkey enemies.
• Vehicle controls feel more responsive. Less issues from rowboat, submarine, tank, and robo sections.
• Movement speed feels better. First game felt sluggish, I remember thinking that the super hoop speed should have been the standard move speed. I didn't have that issue with the second game.

• Levels are less of a sandbox and more of linear routes. This makes them feel longer and bloated.
• Stun rod, monkey net, and sky flyer feel nerfed for no reason. Stun rod is almost unusable to stun monkeys, being used mainly for traversing through levels. Monkey net can't be spun around like the stun rod. Sky flyer feels clunkier to use and less useful overall.
• Camera is bad.
• Platforming is bad. It's really hard to maintain horizontal momentum. Double jumping and using the sky flyer basically kills all horizontal momentum.
• A lot of games do this, but I was annoyed when this game did the thing where content is locked away until you beat the game. The first game did this too, but it felt worse in the sequel because you quite literally have to play every single level again to get an extra monkey that was inaccessible before. Felt like padding.
• New gadgets feel underwhelming. Joining the list of gadgets are the bananarang, water gun, and magnet. I'll give them props for introducing more gadgets that interact with the environment, but they suffer from the same problem that a lot of items in Zelda TP do, where they're only applicable in certain scenarios rather than being usable throughout like the sky flyer and super hoop for example. I will concede that I don't know what else they could introduce to make the dual analog gimmick enticing. The gadget menu is worse too. They changed from a grid system to a wheel, so it takes longer to choose certain gadgets than it would have if they just used the old system.
• Stealth was basically unusable from my experience, so that took away variety in catching monkeys
• This is probably just me, but I found it hard to aim in this game. I struggled a lot to land hits with my gadgets.
• The levels themselves feel unique from the first game, but the themes they used felt like re-visits. Not sure how we ended up getting a dinosaur level again, but we did.
• They really could have made the gacha less tedious. Getting the same reward multiple times when there are still things to unlock just feels bad. Only being able to do one pull at a time makes doing gacha pulls feel like a chore.