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.
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.