Oddities - Ape Escape 2001

There's something very presumptuous about putting a year at the end of your game's name. It is like a tacit promise to the consumer of two things. The product you are selling is going to be followed up consistently, if not yearly then close enough to it that it makes sense to designate by year. The second tacit implication is that these future products are produced with the intention of outmoding the prior product. Whether they actually do or not is debatable, but that's the signal to the consumer. Ape Escape 2001, or Pipo Saru 2001 as it's more properly called, fits neither bill. Produced as the first spin-off in Sony's Ape Escape Franchise and as the first PS2 installment, the game was never meaningfully followed up on. While the franchise would see a sequel to the original game in 2002, it would then skip 2003 entirely. It is almost fitting that on every level the choice of name is baffling, because the game itself is as well.

I'd start by outlining how Ape Escape typically plays, but realistically it's totally irrelevant because this game plays nothing like it aside from nominally being a platformer. Still, the contrast will help demonstrate the point. In the PS1 era, the first game caught attention for innovative use of the right analog stick; this game completely eschews that. Where Ape Escape in its original form is an exploratory platformer where the player finds and catches monkeys in a big net, this is a time and score attack game with very small stages. The focus here is on vacuuming off the shorts these monkeys are wearing and putting them in a gigantic washing machine. The quicker you get the shorts and the more of them you return at once, the better your score will be. All of the gadgets and gimmicks for variety in the original game have been trimmed out, turning this utterly absurd game into one that is also curiously focused. Ape Escape 2001 for all its madcap stylings is a fairly tried and true gameplay experience, much moreso than its predecessor to be totally honest.

I don't want to belabor the point that this game is an odd creation, obviously from the word go it was meant to be, whether it's contextually or non-contextually odd is only so interesting. This is a game that has an aesthetic built entirely on novel absurdism. That said, the actual gameplay is reasonably interesting and feels very much like a throwback, given the context of its release. Vacuuming a monkey causes it to be put in a slingshot state where it can be fired into other monkeys or objects. Hitting objects is useful for finding power ups and hurting bosses, but it also knocks the pants off any monkey hit so it's a useful strategy just for the score attack. Unfortunately, setting up a slingshot also locks you in place, and any pants trailing behind you become much easier for the monkeys to steal back. It's not a complicated game, but it does reward mastery inasmuch as you could really expect from a game targeted primarily at children. Beneath the deliberately surreal premise is a game built on a structure that was, even at the time, surprisingly retro. In 2001 this kind of progression and core appeal had already become pretty niche, perhaps it could even have been considered at its nadir of popularity. During this period games became more defined by variety and novelty rather than mechanical mastery. Here the game suddenly begins to make sense though. Ape Escape 2001 builds its entire aesthetic on novelty to sell a game built around mastery. Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (the Japanese head office at the time) invested a surprising amount in extremely strange games, and while some of them played exactly as strangely as they appeared (for example Kuma Uta, a game about training a polar bear to sing Japanese Enka songs) many were also ways to trojan horse more traditional concepts to players through the guise of bizarre eye-catching premises. In that sense Ape Escape 2001 shares a creative legacy with NanaOn-Sha's Parappa the Rapper or Mojib Ribbon.

This of course isn't why I still care about the game. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but on its own it's a solid time but somewhat forgettable outside its own intentional ludicrousness. It doesn't have the raw style of a Masaya Matsuura creation, nor the sheer depth needed to be a memorable classic. I find the game fascinating in part because I spent so long knowing of it and not being able to play it. The first game had released in the U.S. and so many Western magazines reported on this game, hence why it's so often referred to by a localized title. It was one of those games that could instantly ensnare your brain as to what it could possibly be like just from the high concept and a couple of frankly unparsably weird screenshots. To me, Ape Escape 2001 is the peak of something that is honestly difficult to recreate or experience now. The idea of having a description of a game, a couple tiny images of it, and nothing else to go on about what it's like. It's not a world I think anyone needs to go back to, but tied as it is to my own personal experience I feel a horrible tainted nostalgia for it. The oddities you'd find would often be all the more inscrutable for your mind having to fill in a lot of blanks. The experience of playing them reeled them back in to something that had to exist in reality somewhere.

This game actually does have a fan translation now. It has some technical quirks but if you want to experience the weirdness in all its glory, it's there and it's more than functional. Sony would continue to ride this franchise hard throughout the early ‘00s before essentially leaving it for dead in 2007. Despite making many cameo appearances in other titles, multiple bad party games, and an episodic Dragon Quest knockoff for unclear reasons, Ape Escape 2001 was never really revisited. It's kind of a shame, there's potential here with a bit of expansion for something quite interesting, it's a focused kind of design that didn't sell then but as a relatively smaller budget downloadable title could maybe work now. Ultimately, Ape Escape 2001 was too late and too early, too complex but too slight. It wasn't the right game for the time it was in, but it's still a unique novelty at least.