ape academy is the series big debut on psp, taking one of the most defining traits of the mainline games, the minigames, and making them the focus, it's short and mostly pretty easy but it has all the charm of the main series and it has a lot of fun ideas and games in here! the minigames are as creative as the mainline games, though they don't really use the psps unique features anywhere nearly as much as the first game did with the ps1, iot does try and showcase the little nub stick with a lot of minigames using it, like the UFO shotput, and one does require you to turn the psp on its side which was so cute, it helps that it's also one of the more fun puzzle minigames, expecting you to guess where water currents will land your salvage ships hook, but outside of these they're just kind of standard minigames not really doing much special, though there is a full remake of the famicom game "kung fu" in here as the final boss area and its one of the most fun parts of it! the rest can range bigly, some trivia and math stuff, some guessing games like one which uses japanese as a spot the difference, which was neat! though i imagine it could be a little difficult for some, there also more silly minigames like a space shmup variant of rock paper scissors or bowling with the monkeys, some of these could even be fun outside the game, like the air hockey, the shield defence minigame or the football one, i'd say they're well above average for your usual minigame collection stuff, some even have multiple varients, like the quiz game and the rhythm game which has a few songs to it. it has a full campaign too and multiplayer which even works on a single psp, its not a long campaign though, you got 5 sets of 9 minigames in a grid and you need to beach each grid to go up a year in the academy, but if you get the right rows and unlock the spector coins you can get some cute larger minigames based on other sony games, like everymonkeys golf, gran turismonkey, monkey dice (based on devil dice) and monkavision, these minigames are the games highlight.

it looks pretty great to for an early psp game, it mostly seems to use assets from 2 like the bosses, some levels like breezy village showing up in the monquixote minigame and a lot of the monkey models seem to be from it too, though this one does let you make your own monkey and mine was cute, he had lil sunglasses. it looks really nice and it makes me wonder how an ape escape 2 port would have worked for the system, its a shame we never got one. the music is a mixed bag though, some tracks are a little boring but others are certified classics on par with the best of the original game, though i didn't spot anything that calls back to that game and this game is composed by someone else, one Kemmei Adachi, a sony veteran working on things like legend of dragoon, dokodemissho, freedom wars, Aconcagua, god eater, patapon, locoroco and even some gran turismo games, he's a legendary composer, and although i wouldn't say this is one of his best works, it has a cute kids game vibe to it, very mischivous music and some songs like the mon quixote theme have made their way into my playlists. the story too is just set-dressing, which is all it really needs to be, but any game with spector in it is bound to be at least a lil charming, he's a personal fav villain of mine.

it's nice and short, you can breeze through to the ending in about 2 hours and a chunk of that will just be the final level, there's maybe another hour if you want to unlock every minigame, as some show up at random and you may need to repeat things for the spector coins if you missed them the first time, but its an easy one sitting game, and it's cheap too, despite not having much to say about it, i do wholley reccomend it, it's a new favourite minigame collection of mine and it's more ape escape which is reason enough i think to reccomend it. it'd get a sequel a few years later with ape academy but it only ever came out in europe, it seems to add a new card system to the mix and from what i've seen it seems even better! it was developed by shift inc, a japanese studio you may know from the fantastic god eater series, one of the best last gen rpgs: code vein and they also did a ton of cool stuff under sony like devil dice, ape quest and xsai, they even helped make one of my favourite games, freedom wars! one other interesting thing is the game actually had 3 directors, which is strange for what seems to be a smaller project, it had Takayuki Saito (known for his shmups like raiden 3, raiden aces and mamorukun curse) Yoshikazu Hiraki (known for games like blazing blade, spectrobes, chaindive and he even directed the remake of fire emblem: shadow dragon) and Junichi Yoshizawa (of games like freedom wars, 13 sentinels, patapon and a personal fav pc engine game Bazaru de Gozaru). idk i just thought that was neat, i wonder what development was like on it for it to have this many.