It's about time I continue my attention towards Ape Escape by playing through its first sequel. Much like how I treated Brave Fencer Musashi and Musashi Samurai Legend together, I will be uploading my videos of both Ape Escape 2 and Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex alternatively as my next two playthroughs for Playstation 2 games after Samurai Legend.

Yes, I've been in a bit of a fever for sequels, lately.

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Ape Escape 2's intro is much like AE1's. It's pretty much a showcase of many of the game's apes running loose and wild. Several old faces from the first game come back with new looks, and this game even introduces some new faces, both good and bad. Two of the good ones are actually two that you'll be using in this game.

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In the Prologue cutscene, you meet Jimmy. He looks like Spike from the first game, but that's because Jimmy is actually Spike's younger cousin. That cute little flying monkey with him is his best friend, a creation called Pipochi.

Sometime after Spike finally captured Specter and returned him to the Monkey Park, the Professor decided to go on a vacation. With Spike gone at this point, but Jimmy visiting, the Professor left a video message behind that tasked Jimmy to transport a stock of new-and-improved monkey pants to the apes that needed them at Monkey Park.

Unfortunately, Jimmy is a very naive kid, and he ended up going over the weight limit on how many pants could be sent at a time. This caused the Professor's lab to blow up. The Professor's granddaughter, Natalie, came back to the lab, furious at Jimmy for what he's done.

It gets worse than that, though. The reason why Jimmy quickly went over the weight limit is because he also sent to the monkeys brand new Peak Point Monkey Helmets, believing them to be the same helmets as Pipochi's (they aren't). Natalie remembers what happened the last time those monkeys got their hands on those (as you should too if you played the first game). It really hits a critical low when one of the monkeys that grabbed a helmet was none other than the albino Specter!

So with his high evil intelligence back with a vengeance, Specter leads a new horde of monkeys to go bananas on the world and turn it upside-down again! If the intro is to be believed, he's going to have more help with this than before!

Natalie then forces Jimmy to catch all of those monkeys! He really didn't have much of a say in this matter. It's his fault this all happened to begin with. So now, with Pipochi on his side, Jimmy has to clean up his own mess!

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In case you didn't realize already, Jimmy's voice is the original 4Kids voice for Ash Ketchum of the Pokémon anime. Likewise, Natalie gained a new voice, here: Misty's original voice, also from the Pokémon anime. Hell, she kinda even looks like her with more hair, you think?

Also, apparently just like the first game, there are two different English dubs between the American and European version of this game. For more clarity, I'm playing the American version, here.

In other words, in this game, Ash screws up and Misty makes him fix his mess, or he must face her wrath. There are 300 monkeys in this game, and you Gotta Catch 'em All!

So what are you waiting for, Jimmy? "GET MOVING!"

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