Super Monkey Ball: Sakura Edition is the latest SEGA Forever game that rolled out to Android smartphones and tablets, having hit the Google Play Store earlier this week. The new addition to the growing mobile collection comes in the form of a revision of a 2012 title that already launched on iOS, Windows Phone, and Android but was pulled from all app marketplaces some three years back. The re-release bears the same name and has largely identical ball-rolling mechanics, though its visuals now appear to be somewhat improved in terms of resolution, even though the Japanese game developer-publisher hasn’t optimized the title for 18:9 and taller displays which are now becoming prevalent on the market.
As is the case with other SEGA Forever offerings, Super Monkey Ball: Sakura Edition is a free-to-play game supported by advertisements, though anyone interested in getting rid of such promotional content can do so with a single in-app purchase worth $1.99. While the Google Play Store lists the Android game as being only 35MB in size, that client will prompt a 0.5GB download as soon as it’s launched. Super Monkey Ball: Sakura Edition doesn’t require any kind of unconventional device permissions and generally appears to be well-optimized for contemporary Android smartphones and tablets, save for its lack of support for elongated aspect ratios.
The portable title offers 125 stages spanning six worlds, as well as four mini-games with local multiplayer support, one of which is a tablet exclusive due to the amount of screen real estate it requires. The launch marks the end of SEGA Forever as a classic-only program, with Super Monkey Ball: Sakura Edition being by far the newest game that the company ever re-released as part of the gaming initiative. Worlds from Super Monkey Ball: Step & Roll and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz — both of which were released on Nintendo’s Wii — are also part of the newly introduced package. The arcade mobile game is presently enjoying a largely positive response from players, sitting at an average rating of 4.2 stars four days after its Google Play Store debut.
