Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island fully utilized the SNES's hardware to completely achieve its goal as a happy and lovely 2D platformer featuring expansive levels with lots of secrets to find.

As with most other SNES games, Yoshi's Island features gorgeous pixel art. The lack of major color restraints enables the picture book aesthetic to pop. Sprites feature plenty of fun and stretchy animations thanks to Mode 7. Often times, graphical elements will be stretched, rotated, transparent, and other adjectives thanks to the SNES's graphics power. Certain objects are 3D sprites going into and away from the foreground. I never found the use of Mode 7 as "forced" to show off the SNES power though. They all were neat effects that had some interesting gameplay implication.

The original Yoshi's Island OST avoids the campy, artificial happy feeling that the later Yoshi soundtracks fell victim to. They're happy, lovely, feel good songs but they don't forcefully grab your mouth to pretend you're smiling. I believe the lack of high quality sampling on the SNES prevented Koji Kondo from incorporating annoying instruments into the compositions. The other Yoshi soundtracks could be improved simply by changing the instrumentation. Rant aside, the game does use all of the SNES's sound channels to achieve its full arrangements, meaning when sound effects must be played, parts of the music cut out. To me, I hardly ever noticed parts of the song popping in and out, but it does slightly take away from the in-game music experience. Overall though, the Yoshi's Island OST is one of the SNES's best and one of Koji Kondo's best pieces of work.

Yoshi's Island feels like a modern 2D-platformer with an emphasis on expansive levels with lots of collectibles. Each level features a specific theme and runs through the usual process of introducing a mechanic and running that mechanic through multiple scenarios with increasing difficulty. The level gimmicks are mostly fun, with a few mediocre/boring ones (I didn't enjoy ice or mud). The game features lots of strange friendly and hostile creatures. The monkeys and penguins are so cute and silly (while also being serious threats to baby Mario). A lot of the enemies are shy guy variants, but those variants feel distinct and do not blend together, as many of the modern Mario enemy variants tend to do. The bosses are all bigger versions of normal enemies, but each boss interacts with the player differently from the normal variant, making this not an issue.
Yoshi's controls are solid. Throwing eggs feels good once you enable to releasing to throw. Hitting targets is some fun dopamine. The flutter jump was useful, but the slowing of movement while fluttering contributed to overall slower pace of the game. The lack of a run button also points towards the slower pace.
When Yoshi takes damage, Baby Mario falls off and you have to grab him before your stars run out. The whining is god awful annoying, so I turned it off half-way through my playthrough via cheats. Dying results in losing all the collectibles you gathered since the last checkpoint, but if you take your time through the levels, you won't die. I did not take my time, so I died too many times and lost a lot of progress due to impatience.

I believe Yoshi's Island is meant to be played at a slower pace, carefully scouring the stages for all the collectibles. If you prefer platformers to be semi-fast or faster paced and emphasize tight platforming rather than exploration, this game may not be "ideal" for you. It's still a lovely game that I certainly enjoyed my time playing, but I think a casual gamer would find it more fun than I did.

I will be going back to complete more of Symphony of the Night, but I particularly enjoyed the later two thirds of this initial playthrough.
The PS1 had enough power to produce pixel art with few limitations, which made the choice to use pixel art feel like a fleshed out artistic decision rather than a result of hardware limitations. I liked the moments the game featured 3D models or more advanced visual effects such as the save icosahedron and coffin and clouds in the background. They were cool uses of the PS1's more advanced hardware, akin to what Yoshi's Island did on the SNES's mode 7. The parallax scrolling gave the detailed and varied backgrounds a good sense of depth. I particularly recall the outdoor areas, the underground catacombs, and the library. Alucard's walk cycle and trail effect mesmerized me and were certainly my favorite part of the game's visuals.
Symphony of the Night was a blessing to my ears. All the parts of the castle had a unique track to them, and with CD quality audio, these tracks have nothing holding them back from their true sound. I appreciate the variety of styles each location had. The coliseum had a cool beat. My favorite would probably be the main castle theme since I heard it the most and will recognize it anywhere now.
The first 1-3 hours didn't quite hook me so hard. I got a lot of upgrades for my stats, which did lead to some feeling of progression, but not as well as other games of this style. Once I reached the rightmost side of the castle though, the game really began providing new abilities which would enable access to more parts of the castle. That Super Metroid style of progression is what made me love the final two thirds my playthrough, since it seemed like I was a cool vampire exploring Dracula's Castle with fitting music. There were a few bits about the gameplay throughout the whole journey that bugged me. After having played Hollow Knight, the sword combat felt clunky at first, with the inability to swing above or below. The movement didn't have much speed to it aside from the dodge, which I spammed throughout my whole journey. Having to reacquire items after dying got annoying, although this is an issue that many games from this era feature, including Super Metroid. Lastly the classic Castlevania items were each fun to use, but I would've much preferred having them as permanent upgrades to your moveset. I dislike having access to only one of these combat abilities, since it made me fall back exclusively on the sword over all else.
Despite all my nitpicks though, this was still a good execution of Zelda-like progression in a 2D space. The RPG and classic Castlevania elements may not have been my favorite, but I still had a ton of moments I loved in this game and I'm glad I played this classic. I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoyed any other Metroidvania. I don't think it's an essential play if you haven't played a Metroidvania, but if you have and know you enjoy item-gated progression, then this game has that but with it's own spin that you may enjoy

There were only four times I experienced pure BS old NES game design and had to look up a guide or abuse save states in an emulator. The rest of the time was a surprisingly fun NES action platformer. Half the weapons were really fun to use, and the other half were fairly lame. The bosses were fair enough and it felt real good to kill some of them in 2-5 shots during the boss rush at the end. I didn't know the ending and actually had a bit of a laugh during it. The soundtrack is a bunch of catchy 8-bit tunes, and I loved it. I still can't rate this any higher than a 3.5/5 though because Wily's fortress stage 4 boss is currently one of the worst designed things I have ever experienced in a video game.