The strange thing is, I kind of like it.
Jungle Book is the story of a little boy who romps around a disease infested jungle in his underwear, but never seems to get sick. Some animals are his friends; while other animals want to snap his neck, carry his lifeless corpse into a tree and feast on his bloody remains. Mowgli's animal companions like to express their affection for the kid by dancing with him. Mowgli's enemies like to show their desire to suck out his delicious bone marrow...by dancing with him. If that's not the best premise ever for a video game, I don't know what is.
Unlike many of those other, less messed up dancing games, Jungle Book follows a story. And what a story it is. It seems that Shere Kahn, a particularly nasty tiger, has decided that the best place for Mowgli to be is in his digestive tract. Mowgli's mentor, a panther named Bagheera, disagrees and sends the kid off on a long journey to the nearest human village, where he'll be safe. As you might imagine, antics ensue. Dancing antics.
During the game's sadly short story mode, your little Tarzan rip-off will find himself drafted into a dancing elephant army, denying a dancing orangutan the gift of fire, and adopted into a family of dancing vultures with Beatles-esque haircuts. Tell me that that isn't cool!
Gameplay
If you've ever played any of the Dance Dance Revolutiongames, you know pretty much what to expect from Jungle Book. Arrows drop from the top of the screen in time with the music, and when they reach the circles at the bottom of the screen, you hit the corresponding direction on your controller. Miss enough times and poor little Mowgli falls over and is presumably eaten by whatever jungle creature he's dancing against at the time -- Pretty standard stuff. To mix things up a bit, a series of arrows will sometimes appear in the middle of the screen, and remain there for a few seconds. Dance out this combo successfully, and you'll trigger a special move. These specials perform a variety of functions, from multiplying your points to clearing your side of the screen of arrows. Since you have to enter them while keeping up with the arrows still dropping, fleetness of foot is a must.
That's not to imply that Jungle Book is a difficult game. In fact, it's far and away the easiest dancing game around, obviously a nod to the license's young fan base. If you're one of those guys who spends all your money at the local arcade doing spin flips off the bar on the back of your favorite DDR machine, you might not find much of a challenge here. For the rest of us, setting the game to the highest of its six difficulty levels should ensure that dancing victories are not guaranteed, at least not at first. After a few times through though, even the "crazy" difficulty setting can get a little easy. That's when it's time to start singing.
Yes, singing. Jungle Book is thoughtful enough to include a karaoke bar at the bottom of the screen, encouraging players to work on developing their pop star chops. As any busty teen pop star will tell you, singing and dancing at the same time is hard work. You try belting out a happy, upbeat song while a giant snake is trying to dance you to death. It ain't easy.
The folks at Ubi Soft apparently understand that not everybody can do two things at once, and have included a unique karaoke-only mode. Without the arrows to confuse you, or the original vocal track to distract you, you're free to simply sing along to your heart's content. Fun!
Jungle Book also has some more or less decent two player modes. First there's the story mode co-op, where a second player can jump in and catch any arrows that player one might have missed. I guess this mode is meant for the children of parents who refuse to let them play games against each other, lest it foment deep-seated sibling rivalries that may one day culminate in murder. Truth be told, it's not that fun.
The competitive modes fare better. In Dance Marathon, you and an enemy simply dance your hearts out through an entire song. Best score wins. It's nothing original, but it can be mildly entertaining nevertheless. In Power-Up Confrontation, special moves combos will appear as you dance. The first player to enter the combination sends a negative power up, such as more arrows or faster arrows, to their opponent. Be sure to place the dance pads right next to each other, because you'll want to be able to sucker punch your friend the moment that power up appears, giving yourself a distinct advantage. Hey, life in the jungle is harsh.
Oh, do be sure that you actually own a dance pad, or are willing to pick one up before you play this game. Just like every other dancing title, there is absolutely no fun to be had using the standard controller.
Graphics
Let me put it this way: You know that cousin of yours? The one who lives in some redneck town in the middle of nowhere and has never seen a video game system more advanced than the TurboGrafx-16? Well, this isn't the game that you're going to be using to show off the graphical prowess of your "futuristic" PS2 when he visits.
The graphics in Jungle Book aren't bad, they're just not very good. Even though the visuals are the only thing that has received an improvement during the game's port from the original PlayStation, they're still not very impressive. Mowgli and the dancing critters don't look like much more than higher-res versions of their PS One counterparts. One could even argue that the simple character models are simply an aesthetic choice designed to match the animation of the style of the film, but I don't remember Baloo being quite so...blocky.
The CG cut scenes in between levels are a definite improvement. They're colorful, well shot and generally look pretty nice. Not "oh my god you have to see this" nice, but they get the job done without embarrassment.
Sound
First, the negative: There are just not enough songs. You get ten tracks, plus one not-so-hidden bonus song. When other dancing games are offering upwards of fifty songs, it's hard not to be a little disappointed with less than a dozen.
On the other hand, the songs that are on here are all pretty darn good. If you're not a commu-terrorist space alien, you've probably seen The Jungle Book, and thus have heard a lot of this stuff before. You've got "The Bare Necessities," "I Wanna Be Like You," and other assorted classics, as well as some new stuff. As far as I'm concerned, these are some of the best songs to ever appear in a Disney film. They're fast, upbeat, and fit perfectly into a game like this. Just try dancing to "We are the Vultures" and not flapping your arms up and down. I can't do it, but maybe I'm just secretly epileptic.
Jungle Book's voice acting is top notch. At least some of the original voice actors from the film appear to have reprised their roles for the game, and everybody else sounds uncannily similar to the original actors. It's really quite good.