Love/Hate: Ape Escape 2001

Welcome back to the Ape Escape Love/Hate series! I covered the main entries in this franchise last year, and at the time I had noted that there were several spin-offs that I was not intending to cover. While that’s still true, I was kind of bored one day and decided to check out a game called Ape Escape 2001 to kill a bit of time. Let me lay the groundwork for what I thought this game was going to be: I thought that this was a remake of Ape Escape, just with slightly improved graphics (that would actually be Ape Escape: On The Loose, which released on PSP). What I actually got was something much more bizarre. Would it live up to the classic status of the main series? Read on to find out…

Ape Escape 2001 was a Japanese-exclusive PS2 game which was actually the first Ape Escape sequel to be released (beating Ape Escape 2 by a full year). It seems that there were plans to bring it overseas, but they ultimately fell through. Unlike most of the Japanese-exclusive Ape Escape games (of which there are many), this is the only one with an (unofficial) English translation patch, which make it a far more accessible game to play in modern days thanks to the ease and accessibility of emulation.

Love

• Returning Characters – Easily the coolest aspect of Ape Escape 2001 for fans of the franchise is that nearly every main character from the first game returns. Maybe this sounds like a given, but Ape Escape has a terrible history of replacing characters on a whim for no reason, so it’s kind of cool to get to see Spike, Natalie, and the Professor going on another adventure to stop Specter. It’s not like we learn much about them or get any new insight into their characters, but the fact that we already have a pre-existing connection to them all makes them more effective than if they had just given us an entirely new cast.
  • In fact, Specter actually has some good points to make regarding allowing apes to live how they please, so if we didn’t know already that he was not to be trusted, then the protagonists might have come across as utter jerks.
• On-Screen Ape Hordes Are Impressive – The main selling point for Ape Escape 2001 seems to be “jam as many monkeys on screen as you possibly can”. In Ape Escape, you couldn’t have more than a few apes on-screen without causing the game to stutter badly, but in Ape Escape 2001, you can have dozens of them all running around causing havoc with no hit on the game’s performance. It seems to be the same sort of mentality that led to Dynasty Warriors 2: just throw as many enemies as possible at you and hope that it makes the game more fun. It certainly lends this game a far more chaotic energy than its predecessor had.

Mixed

• Bizarre Premise – Ape Escape 2001 is clearly intended to be a breezy spin-off, rather than a mainline entry, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the initial cutscene. With all the apes captured in the previous game, the Professor has put them into a virtual park for safekeeping until they can go back to the zoo. Unfortunately, they’ve all gotten dirty doing ape-business, so somebody’s got to… wash all their pants? Natalie and the Professor are grossed out by this, but then dumb ol’ eager Spike comes to visit and they thrust this chore onto him to deal with. So, uh, yeah: Ape Escape 2001 has you vacuuming the pants off of the apes and then throwing them in the washing machine. It’s so ridiculous that I kind of have to give it some level of respect.
• Never Got a Western Release – I’m really mixed on the fact that this gave never got released outside of Japan. On the one hand, it’s a unique experience that’s part of a pretty major PlayStation franchise, so some accessibility would have been nice. On the other hand, if I had bought this at full price back in 2001, I would have been extremely disappointed and may not have even bothered playing Ape Escape 2 (which would have been awful to miss out on)! With that in mind, maybe it’s for the best that it has been relegated to a curio that’s available for fans willing to find it.

Hate

• The Game Mechanics – Your opinion on Ape Escape 2001 is probably going to make-or-break depending on how you respond to the core mechanics. To put it simply: they ditched everything that made Ape Escape such a unique and enjoyable classic.
  • Dual analog controls? Gone, even though this game was released on PS2, which only had a dual analog controller. A bunch of fun and interesting gadgets? Gone, you’ve just got a vacuum cleaner and a couple one-use items you can pickup in the levels. Do you at least get to catch apes!? Haha, no, that’s gone too, now you just suck their pants off (uhh, phrasing?) and leave them running around naked through the level.
  • Ditching the best parts about Ape Escape is bad enough, but if they replaced that with something that was also fun, then it wouldn’t really matter. Unfortunately, the gameplay of Ape Escape 2001 is very dull and repetitive. For most of the game, you just chase after the nearest group of apes and spam the square button to use the vacuum… and that’s about it. Once you’ve done one level, you’ve more or less seen all that the game has to offer, aside from throwing more monkeys at you, or making you jump through some really annoying hoops before you can reach the monkeys.
  • In addition, the controls feel pretty bad – you can’t aim your vacuum, so you just have to hope that it goes where you want it to. That said, you can hold down square to “grab” a monkey and then launch them in a particular direction, but the aiming controls are really imprecise, which makes this ill-advised. The only camera control you have is to press L1 to move it back behind you, which means that you’ll often struggle to get your bearings in the midst of the chaos. Again, the game is not using the right analog stick, so why they didn’t implement camera control there is anyone’s guess.
  • And… uh… that’s it. I’m being serious here, there’s very little to do in Ape Escape 2001, aside from chase monkeys and use the vacuum. It really struggles to hold your interest, even over the course of its fairly short runtime.
• Crowded UI – I really do not understand what they were thinking when they designed this game’s UI. As you can see from the screenshot above, a large chunk of the edge of the screen is taken up by symbols indicating how many pants you need to get. It’s not even all that helpful, because you can be tasked to get fifty pants or more in a level, but you don’t have the time to count them, so it’s not until you reach the last few that you really have a sense of how many are left to get.
  • In addition, the game is really poor at presenting information. There is a guidance feature which can point you to the nearest set of monkey pants, but you have to find it in the level as a pickup, and it flies around you in 3D space, meaning it can easily get lost in the chaos. The apes’ signature helmets are also kind of worthless at giving you any information about their temperament, since you’re always just going to beeline any ape you can see.
• Level Design – Levels in Ape Escape 2001 are tiny. These aren’t the full-fledged platforming levels from the mainline games, but instead basically just a small room or arena where you chase after a couple dozen apes until the level ends. They usually will have some sort of small twist (eg, having to jump across multiple islands), but nothing that substantially shakes up the gameplay. The one major exception is the cemetery levels… which suck. This is because all of the apes are hiding underground, and the only way to access them is to throw a bomb pickup at their headstones. In order to make the bombs spawn, you need to press a switch, which will give you a few seconds to grab the pickup. You’ll need to repeat this several times to get all the apes in this level, and it just becomes so tedious, padding out a boring level for basically no reason.
• Graphics – Ape Escape 2001 looks like it was originally developed as a PS1 title and then was switched over to PS2 late in development. It has that Dreamcast feel to it, where the graphics are better than anything on PS1, but aren’t quite at the level that you’d expect from a PS2-era title either. Considering how impressive Ape Escape 2 would look only one year later, it’s pretty disappointing to see such low effort put into this game in comparison.

Ape Escape 2001 is a truly bizarre game. It’s just too silly and chaotic for its own good, far too repetitive to get into, and it ditches nearly everything that made Ape Escape so good in the first place. If you really like the franchise, then it might make for an interesting distraction, but I was left feeling very disappointed and underwhelmed.

Now, that said: I’ve looked into some of the other Ape Escape spin-offs, and I might cover them at some point in the future. There are a couple Japanese-exclusive entries which look fascinating, but without an English patch, I may not be able to get very far in them… I guess we’ll see how things shake out in time!

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Barloq

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Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

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