updated review of Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble since i finally finished playing/watching all of the extreme worlds
this is a classic type of game that doesn't work with a star rating scale. It's monkey ball. Its goals are singular: to be Monkey Ball. It succeeds resoundingly at being Monkey Ball, which basically no other game does. Some of the speedrun medals really swung back and forth on how harsh they were, but I was pretty fully satisfied with my playstyle of retrying basically every level until I'd got the speedrun medal. It's a very fun way to play (until you get a hand pain flareup in world 8 and give up for a bit and don't go back lol). I've had my fill with the base worlds, not going to do the EX worlds myself, but Monkey Ball is Monkey Ball and Monkey Ball is a unique and beautiful physics toy format. It rolled so that Neon White could fly.
Update because I did 5 EX worlds and watched the rest: yeah, still 5 stars. Oceanus is my pick for favorite world, it's legitimately really pretty and slightly gloomy in a remarkable way; but Rose Garden also has the best music. Something about that cutesy feminine backup vocal is just dead-on perfect for the vibe. The music does the right job of encouraging your play to be groovy and repetitive (in a good way), too. My only minor gripe is that the sequencing in the EX worlds felt kind of weak, like an album that's in the wrong order. Like, for one, you're tellling me EX10-9 Overturn and EX10-10 Bumper Barrage are the true final levels in the game? They don't have the visual intrigue for it!! Literally you just switch them respectively with EX10-05 Big Four and EX10-07 Neo Broken Cylinder and you're done! But anyways ya the levels are consistently so novel and get brutally hard. Some of my favorites are EX02-03 Gift Box and EX04-08 Eastern Gates. Monkey Ball is bad ass.