I had heard about this show's existence for a while, but I never really watched it because from what I had heard and seen, it didn't look good at all. But with the rumors about a new ape escape game happening, I decided to check it out.
And oh dear God... I knew this show was gonna be bad, but I wasn't expecting it to be THIS bad. In my honest opinion, this cartoon is not only one of the worst shows I had ever seen in my life, but I genuinely think this is the worst piece of official media to ever come out of the franchise, like I think it may be worse than both ape quest and Playstation move ape escape.
The animation, backgrounds, and art style are all hideous. Everything looks cheaply made from the animations being rather stiff, the backgrounds (especially the school in episode 3) look like they were doodled by a 3rd grader due to how sloppy they are drawn, and don't even get me started on the art style. It really makes everything worse due to how ugly the character designs are, like seriously. Compare Jimmy, Natalie, Professor, Specter, and the pipo monkey's desgins in the showcomparedd to their appearance in the games.
And the "comedy" is painfully unfunny. Pretty much everything that gave the games their charm, humor, and fun factor was thrown in the garbage. In their placeares the most inept, generic, boring kids cartoon cliches you can think of. The show is just fart and poop jokes (while the games did have these jokes as well, they were used very sparingly and they had plenty of other types of humor as well) and piss poor attempts at "LOL RANDOM" humor that even the rabbids and minions would groan at.
For this next part, I am just gonna say it. The people who made this show straight up did no research on the series they were making a cartoon for. Despite coming out in 2009, long after 3, million monkeys, and big mission, this show exclusively uses ape escape 2 as a base. Aside from generic human and animal characters, the characters from the games who appear consist of only Jimmy, Natalie, Professor, Specter, and the pipo monkeys. Characters like Spike, Jake, Casi, Helga, Kei, Yumi, Aki, Dr tomoki, and the pipotrons are completely absent, hell, Pipochi and the freaky monkey 5 are nowhere to be seen. But I actually consider this a good thing because it ment they were not botched.
Jimmy is a complete idiot who can't even solve basic math problems (he was no where near the level of intelligence as say Casi, Aki, or the Professor, but he wasn't this stupid), and has none of what made him good in 2.
Natalie is now trying to win the heart of some guy for whatever reason, and while her character wasn't as assassinated as Jimmy, she hardly feels like her game counterpart. And what I have said also applies to the Professor.
But what's most unforgettable is what they did to our beloved albino overlord...
Specter was done the most dirty by far. Instead of the cool, badass villain who could mind control people, build several giant robots to pilot, had incredible psychic powers and could create lasers, force fields, and clones of himself, had bases like a amusement park, a castle in the sky, a moon base, and a space station that had a chop rocket that could destroy the earth, a character who even when he wasn't the main villain like in pumped and primed or million monkeys was still someone who could still hold his own, and what do we get instead?
A complete joke who's gets bossed around by his own monkeys, can't even take over a city, bases that consist of a banana and a generic house, doesn't have any of the powers he did in the games, can't even get himself some ice cream or his teeth cleaned, and who's villain plans include... using evil toilets... using monkey vampires who are completely incompetent of their jobs and who are helpless against garlic and sunlight... and a machine that shrinks people, but unlike the nano cannon from big mission, isn't a cannon and is more like a machine you step into. And I thought he was butchered in ape escape move.
In conclusion, the nicktoons ape escape show is among the absolute worst video game adaptations I have ever seen. I genuinely think it's up there with the borderlands movie in how little it understands what makes the source material work. As a adaptation of ape escape, it's a disaster in every sense of the word, as a kids cartoon, there's nothing about that stands out as every episode is painfully unfunny and disgusting at best and plain boring at worst, and there's so many other way better kids cartoons you can watch. There was no reason for this show existing, when the 2 Japan only animes are way better in every way, and I have no idea why Sony didn't just dub those instead. And am so glad to be done with it. And is it any wonder why Sony never promoted this show at all?
