Super Monkey Ball purists who are concerned about having to play through an "adventure" to reach the puzzles can rest easy, since there is a straight challenge mode with all the arcade puzzle action a person could stand. Think of it as the traditional game plus some serious extras. The puzzle levels work as you would expect and the adventure levels contain puzzles scattered throughout several worlds. Trying to translate the timed puzzle format to a more open-ended world seems to be hit or miss for these monkeys.
In Story Mode, you choose one of four default monkeys and start rolling around the first world. There are some banana pickups scattered throughout the world that require various levels of skill to obtain. There isn't one exclusive objective or storyline to knit the game together. Super Monkey Ball Adventure suffers from kitchensinkitis - that all too common malady afflicting games where the dizzying range of options leaves the player a little confused. Stay confused long enough and you may lose interest. I found the diagrams in the manual that show where each quest is located on each island annoying; a well-designed adventure game gives you the sense of freedom while subtly tracking you along... the control you never know is there is the best kind. Quests are also not all available at once and seemed to require some sequence of events rather than being weighted according to difficulty. In the first two or three quests, I went from a simple treasure hunt to very difficult timed platforming. The sad part about players losing interest is that there is clearly a whole lot of game built into Super Monkey Ball Adventure. Five worlds to explore, lots of NPCs and quests...
As a sidebar to the adventure style of play, there are seven "Party" games and a "Challenge" mode that lets you just play the puzzles. As in the first Monkey Ball game, puzzles increase in difficulty and gradually introduce new elements of gameplay. Somehow the physics and control scheme for the puzzles felt better than in Story Mode. Whether this is by design or application I can't say. The party games are often not anything to do with the traditional "rolling ball" play. Racing around a track, using two halves of the ball to hang-glide, and punching opponents off a floating platform... all for playing with up to three human or CPU opponents. If you like the Monkey Ball challenges and puzzles and have some friends you know will play with you, there's enough meat on the bone in these two modes to make up for the relatively weak Story Mode. As mentioned in the section above, visual scale is sometimes reduced to the point that it's hard to see what you are doing with your monkey, but not enough to ruin the fun. The only bad news about these two modes is that some special items, characters and tracks are only available for purchase by playing Story Mode. This is a neat idea and would have been a great selling point if Story Mode was more fun to play.
