Super Monkey Ball: Sakura Edition

AiAi, MeeMee, Baby and GonGon roll through this one in clear plastic balls, and you tilt the world around them. Super Monkey Ball: Sakura Edition began as an iPad release in April 2010, published by SEGA with Other Ocean, and reached Android in spring 2012. It is an expanded version of the earlier mobile Super Monkey Ball 2, adding a cherry blossom world called Far East on top of the existing stages.

What Is Super Monkey Ball: Sakura Edition

Each stage is a floating course with a goal gate at the end and a timer counting down. You never push the monkey directly. Instead, tilting the phone tips the whole stage, and the ball rolls with gravity, so every slope, bumper and narrow beam has to be handled by changing the angle of the floor. Fall off the edge or run out of time and you lose a life. Bananas scattered around the course add a life for every 10 you collect, which tempts you into riskier lines.

Six Worlds And 125 Stages To Roll Through

The main game spans six worlds:

• Jumble Jungle
• Pirates Ocean
• Sinking Swamp
• Cobalt Caverns
• Ultra Heaven
• Far East, the Sakura Edition addition

The first five worlds each hold two sets of 10 stages plus crown stages, while Far East has 10 levels of its own. Counting Master stages, the total comes to 125. Practice mode lets you replay any stage you have reached, and Quick Play throws random stages at you.

Mini-Games In Super Monkey Ball: Sakura Edition

Four party games come along with the main mode. Monkey Golf is mini golf with a monkey ball, Monkey Bowling is ten-pin with tilt aiming, and Monkey Target launches your monkey off a ramp so it can glide onto scoring platforms. Monkey Base supports up to four players, though the store listing said it was only available on tablets. Fans of the GameCube games often spent more time in Monkey Target than in the main mode, and the mobile version keeps its gliding and wing-opening mechanic.

Tilt Controls And How Players Took Them

Reviews of the iPad and Android versions praised how natural the tilt scheme felt in the opening worlds, where gentle slopes and wide platforms let you learn the physics. By Ultra Heaven the stages turn into moving platforms and thin rails, and many players found the accelerometer less exact than an analogue stick. Holding the phone flat before a stage starts, and making small wrist movements, helps more than any setting change. Once you know a course, speed comes from tipping the stage hard at the start and easing off before corners.

Removed In 2015, Free In 2018, Gone Again In 2025

The game has a messy store history. SEGA removed it in May 2015, along with other titles, as part of a review of its mobile catalog. On May 17, 2018 it came back as a free SEGA Forever release, supported by ads and with a $1.99 purchase to remove them. Playing with ads needed a connection. In June 2025 SEGA put end-of-service notices into its remaining SEGA Forever games, and Super Monkey Ball: Sakura Edition was delisted from Google Play shortly afterwards. Installed copies continue to work offline.

How Sakura Edition Compares To Later Monkey Ball Games

Newer players who want the series today will find Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble on Switch and Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania on consoles and PC, though neither is on Android. Compared with those, Sakura Edition is smaller and simpler, but its stage design comes straight from the GameCube era that many fans still rate highest, which is why people who installed it before 2025 tend to keep it on their phones.