The strongest aspect of Yoshi’s Story is how much control it gives the player over how much they want to do, and rewards them appropriately. It’s a very short game, there are only really 6 levels you can play through, but each level is represented by a “page”, and each page has 4 possible levels, making a total of 24, so you’d need a minimum of 4 playthroughs to play them all. The thing is, other than page 1 which has all 4 unlocked at once, you need to earn levels 2-4 on every other page by collecting hearts in levels. 1 heart found in page 1 = 1 level unlocked in page 2. This means the amount of theoretical content you can get is directly proportionate to how much exploration you do. Want to rush through the game and only play level 1 one each page? That’s an option. Want to play all 24 levels? Then you have to go out of your way to find every heart in whatever level of the prior page you’re doing. And if you want something in-between, like 2 playthroughs with different levels in each, that’s available too by some very light exploration.
This also acts as a subtle difficulty mode, as the difficulty of the levels seems to increase the higher the number (so level 1 in page 1 is easier than level 4 in page 1).
Exploration rewards don’t just stop at hearts though. The game technically has 4 endings, and although the only real difference is that the words in the final cutscene are changed a bit, it’s still nice to have score milestones to shoot for rather than just existing for trying to beat your own score. Getting this maximum score basically requires you to get only melons, which is the highest scoring fruit. These are of course usually harder to get than all the regular fruit, being hidden, in hard to reach places, or even require minigames. Unfortunately it also requires my least favourite mechanic which is “sniffing”. Press R to sniff the ground, and sometimes you’ll find a hidden item. There’s rarely any tell when a good time to try and sniff is, so if you want to find these hidden items it tends to just be a lot of stopping your progress to press R, which is the kind of mechanic I dislike in games. Luckily it’s ignorable if you’re not going for that top score.
A melon-only run also adds extra difficulty since gaining health is harder as your fruit options are limited.
Like most Yoshi games it chose an art style that lets it age gracefully.
I thought the lives system working with the in-universe reasoning was neat (1 life = 1 actual Yoshi, all of different colours). As a side note, I’m not sure why this game gets a reputation of being baby easy. Like it’s far from the hardest game, but there’s quite a lot of things that can one shot you (bottomless pits, being crushed, enemies like the giant fish that can swallow you whole). If you only wanna play through all the first levels of each page, collecting only the easy fruit, then I guess it’s easy, but the game has difficulty options that aren’t tied to just a simple menu choice. The bosses are all piss easy though, even the last boss.
Honestly I just had a good time with the game. I will even say the horrible sin that I probably like this more than Yoshi’s Island. It only really loses out on being much shorter, even when all levels are taken in to account and having less memorable music. At least there’s no crying baby.
This also acts as a subtle difficulty mode, as the difficulty of the levels seems to increase the higher the number (so level 1 in page 1 is easier than level 4 in page 1).
Exploration rewards don’t just stop at hearts though. The game technically has 4 endings, and although the only real difference is that the words in the final cutscene are changed a bit, it’s still nice to have score milestones to shoot for rather than just existing for trying to beat your own score. Getting this maximum score basically requires you to get only melons, which is the highest scoring fruit. These are of course usually harder to get than all the regular fruit, being hidden, in hard to reach places, or even require minigames. Unfortunately it also requires my least favourite mechanic which is “sniffing”. Press R to sniff the ground, and sometimes you’ll find a hidden item. There’s rarely any tell when a good time to try and sniff is, so if you want to find these hidden items it tends to just be a lot of stopping your progress to press R, which is the kind of mechanic I dislike in games. Luckily it’s ignorable if you’re not going for that top score.
A melon-only run also adds extra difficulty since gaining health is harder as your fruit options are limited.
Like most Yoshi games it chose an art style that lets it age gracefully.
I thought the lives system working with the in-universe reasoning was neat (1 life = 1 actual Yoshi, all of different colours). As a side note, I’m not sure why this game gets a reputation of being baby easy. Like it’s far from the hardest game, but there’s quite a lot of things that can one shot you (bottomless pits, being crushed, enemies like the giant fish that can swallow you whole). If you only wanna play through all the first levels of each page, collecting only the easy fruit, then I guess it’s easy, but the game has difficulty options that aren’t tied to just a simple menu choice. The bosses are all piss easy though, even the last boss.
Honestly I just had a good time with the game. I will even say the horrible sin that I probably like this more than Yoshi’s Island. It only really loses out on being much shorter, even when all levels are taken in to account and having less memorable music. At least there’s no crying baby.