If I'm ever looking for the type of game that's guaranteed to satisfy me on just about every aspect, I know I'm looking for a kind of platformer where every single level is at least 2 to 4 new mechanics relentlessly shoved down my throat, paired up with some of the most refined, godlike controls. Donkey Kong Country 2, Rayman Legends, maybe even the Spyro trilogy. All these, and Yoshi's Island too, fall under the same boat of games with such enormous confidence and passion put behind them, that I don't have to think twice about booting them up the moment I think about them.
On a side note, how many people actually call this game "Mario World 2?" Because I just use the "Yoshi's Island" subtitle to refer to it, and I do so because this thing is so far removed from the actual Mario World, that at times I don't really know whether it counts as a mainline Mario game, or a very elaborate spinoff of it, with the World moniker used to give it some marketing push. And I mean, starting from Yoshi's Story onward, all the way to the kinda middling Yoshi's Crafted World, it then really did become a spinoff franchise. Mario's just a guest character here, the run button is absent in favor of an automatic windup run, and stomping is a mere side ability in favor of the considerably more complex loop of creating egg ammunition out of enemies, aiming your shots, ricocheting them across walls, and skipping them across lakes of water.
With a little practice, it takes astoundingly quick to get used to these mechanics, not to mention how little of your time they actually waste. Being able to move around while aiming prevents the flow of gameplay from stopping, alongside the ability to instantly aim above you by holding up before readying the egg shot. The design rejects constraining its gameplay to a janky "stop 'n go" set of movements, and must've spent years being refined to ensure every action you perform can be done while on the move. Which is such a huge thing to appreciate, considering how most developers would've likely bungled this sort of thing on their first try, yet released it anyway. But Miyamoto's team had already perfected it here.
Aside from the variety of mechanics present at each stage, something else I adore is the huge amount of stages present in itself. While ultimately less than the 96 stages of the first Mario World, Yoshi's Island's 48 stages manage to still feel bigger by abandoning Mario World 1's more arcadey setup. Gone is the time limit, and gone is the conventional high score on the top left of the screen. Yoshi Island's HUD is by comparison a lot more minimalistic, and this was done to encourage playing levels thoroughly, not quickly.
Exploration is the main dish of the game, and by god there's so much shit to find. Secrets galore, things that are just there for fun and not to actually serve any purpose. There are entire mechanics locked away behind secret pathways which you'll otherwise never see if you're speedrunning the thing. Every 4 levels you run into a new boss, and it's not like the previous games where it's a bunch of the same boring Koopaling fights, no! Every boss is different, every boss is fought differently. You get swallowed by a giant frog, you fight a crow on the moon, you destroy platforms to send an invincible monster down a lava pit, and none of these are ever repeated. Which is more than what I can say for even something as creative as Mario Wonder - which is still a fantastic game, mind you - but nothing has yet to match the unbridled creativity of Yoshi's Island, a delicious pot of hundreds of ideas that has no end to it at all until the moment you see the credits.
So, I guess this is where I talk about my rating being a 4.5 instead of a 5/5, right? Well, believe it or not, the Baby Mario cry is not the reason. Actually, I've always been confused about that, is it really THAT bad to people? I mean, one thing for sure is that it fulfills its point. It serves to make you frantically scramble to get Baby Mario back as soon as you can, before that timer reaches 0. But, like, it being "annoying/ear grating" though? Eh, it's fine, really. Maybe I have a higher tolerance for this stuff or something.
The flaw of Yoshi's Island I really want to talk about is the difference between casual exploration, and obsessive completionism. So, just to catch up newcomers, every level can be 100%ed, right? There are three conditions for this. Collect all 20 Red Coins, all 5 Flowers, and reach the end goal with 30 Stars. First things first, part of what makes the Red Coins suck is that they're only just SLIGHTLY red, but otherwise, blend in with all the other yellow coins. I have partial color blindness, so being able to tell apart the color falls out of the question. While the solution to this would be "well, just grab all the coins then, they give you extra lifes anyway, it's a win-win" but sometimes, the game will put you into a situation where you only have one shot to grab the coins, whether it's when you're falling down, or moving across an autoscrolling sequence. I'm aware there's an item you can use that makes red coins much more obvious to see, but... that's assuming you're lucky to actually get it in one of the minigames, and why obtuse it like that anyway? What would've been the harm in making the red coins look more obvious by default?
The next problem are the "Stars" collectibles. Stars are your health, and you can cap'em out at 30. Of course, as you take damage, your Stars decrease. Now, the thing is, to 100% a level, the more sensible thing would be to punish you if, say, you took damage 3 times across the stage. Instead, what Yoshi's Island decides is that you can collect as many Stars as you want throughout the level, but if you so much as take one sliver of damage at the very tail end of it, then that's it for the 100% run, you're gonna have to do the stage all over again.
What makes this worse is that you can't 100% this stage by, for example, doing one run where you collect all the Red Coins and Flowers, then another run just to do the 30 Stars. You gotta do everything, all at once. Collect all the shit, find all the secrets, AND make it to the end of the level without taking damage, and only then will the game consider that level fully completed. To me, that's an insane set of conditions considering the larger scope of each stage, and ultimately, I've only ever done a 100% run once because of this. Which is enough for a lifetime.
"So, 100%ing sucks, why do it at all then?" Good question. The point of this entire tattletale is me saying it's not worth it. Instead, it's much better to play it as if you're attempting to 100% for the sake of discovering all the cool little secrets the game has to offer, BUT if you miss something, then you should just live with it, and move on. The only real big shame about this is that 100%ing unlocks an extra set of neat stages for you to play through, and I wish I could unlock these stages without it being this massive chore. As a whole, Yoshi's Island is some of the best platforming you'll ever get, contrasted against some of the most painful completionism that there is. Thus, play it casually for the best possible experience.
Oh yeah, I got a hot take too. The overworld theme is admittingly very memorable, but I'm really not a big fan of that harmonica. If we're talking "ear grating noises", then this is the closest thing I can point at, I just don't like it. In general, I feel like there's not enough music in this game to match the amount of varied content present in it, which in itself makes the overworld theme get worse over time. Anyway, it's not that big of a deal, I mean, the athletic theme is fantastic, and so is the castle theme, the boss theme, the final boss theme... there's still really good stuff in here, even if there's not much of it.
And that's that for my review! Good night.
On a side note, how many people actually call this game "Mario World 2?" Because I just use the "Yoshi's Island" subtitle to refer to it, and I do so because this thing is so far removed from the actual Mario World, that at times I don't really know whether it counts as a mainline Mario game, or a very elaborate spinoff of it, with the World moniker used to give it some marketing push. And I mean, starting from Yoshi's Story onward, all the way to the kinda middling Yoshi's Crafted World, it then really did become a spinoff franchise. Mario's just a guest character here, the run button is absent in favor of an automatic windup run, and stomping is a mere side ability in favor of the considerably more complex loop of creating egg ammunition out of enemies, aiming your shots, ricocheting them across walls, and skipping them across lakes of water.
With a little practice, it takes astoundingly quick to get used to these mechanics, not to mention how little of your time they actually waste. Being able to move around while aiming prevents the flow of gameplay from stopping, alongside the ability to instantly aim above you by holding up before readying the egg shot. The design rejects constraining its gameplay to a janky "stop 'n go" set of movements, and must've spent years being refined to ensure every action you perform can be done while on the move. Which is such a huge thing to appreciate, considering how most developers would've likely bungled this sort of thing on their first try, yet released it anyway. But Miyamoto's team had already perfected it here.
Aside from the variety of mechanics present at each stage, something else I adore is the huge amount of stages present in itself. While ultimately less than the 96 stages of the first Mario World, Yoshi's Island's 48 stages manage to still feel bigger by abandoning Mario World 1's more arcadey setup. Gone is the time limit, and gone is the conventional high score on the top left of the screen. Yoshi Island's HUD is by comparison a lot more minimalistic, and this was done to encourage playing levels thoroughly, not quickly.
Exploration is the main dish of the game, and by god there's so much shit to find. Secrets galore, things that are just there for fun and not to actually serve any purpose. There are entire mechanics locked away behind secret pathways which you'll otherwise never see if you're speedrunning the thing. Every 4 levels you run into a new boss, and it's not like the previous games where it's a bunch of the same boring Koopaling fights, no! Every boss is different, every boss is fought differently. You get swallowed by a giant frog, you fight a crow on the moon, you destroy platforms to send an invincible monster down a lava pit, and none of these are ever repeated. Which is more than what I can say for even something as creative as Mario Wonder - which is still a fantastic game, mind you - but nothing has yet to match the unbridled creativity of Yoshi's Island, a delicious pot of hundreds of ideas that has no end to it at all until the moment you see the credits.
So, I guess this is where I talk about my rating being a 4.5 instead of a 5/5, right? Well, believe it or not, the Baby Mario cry is not the reason. Actually, I've always been confused about that, is it really THAT bad to people? I mean, one thing for sure is that it fulfills its point. It serves to make you frantically scramble to get Baby Mario back as soon as you can, before that timer reaches 0. But, like, it being "annoying/ear grating" though? Eh, it's fine, really. Maybe I have a higher tolerance for this stuff or something.
The flaw of Yoshi's Island I really want to talk about is the difference between casual exploration, and obsessive completionism. So, just to catch up newcomers, every level can be 100%ed, right? There are three conditions for this. Collect all 20 Red Coins, all 5 Flowers, and reach the end goal with 30 Stars. First things first, part of what makes the Red Coins suck is that they're only just SLIGHTLY red, but otherwise, blend in with all the other yellow coins. I have partial color blindness, so being able to tell apart the color falls out of the question. While the solution to this would be "well, just grab all the coins then, they give you extra lifes anyway, it's a win-win" but sometimes, the game will put you into a situation where you only have one shot to grab the coins, whether it's when you're falling down, or moving across an autoscrolling sequence. I'm aware there's an item you can use that makes red coins much more obvious to see, but... that's assuming you're lucky to actually get it in one of the minigames, and why obtuse it like that anyway? What would've been the harm in making the red coins look more obvious by default?
The next problem are the "Stars" collectibles. Stars are your health, and you can cap'em out at 30. Of course, as you take damage, your Stars decrease. Now, the thing is, to 100% a level, the more sensible thing would be to punish you if, say, you took damage 3 times across the stage. Instead, what Yoshi's Island decides is that you can collect as many Stars as you want throughout the level, but if you so much as take one sliver of damage at the very tail end of it, then that's it for the 100% run, you're gonna have to do the stage all over again.
What makes this worse is that you can't 100% this stage by, for example, doing one run where you collect all the Red Coins and Flowers, then another run just to do the 30 Stars. You gotta do everything, all at once. Collect all the shit, find all the secrets, AND make it to the end of the level without taking damage, and only then will the game consider that level fully completed. To me, that's an insane set of conditions considering the larger scope of each stage, and ultimately, I've only ever done a 100% run once because of this. Which is enough for a lifetime.
"So, 100%ing sucks, why do it at all then?" Good question. The point of this entire tattletale is me saying it's not worth it. Instead, it's much better to play it as if you're attempting to 100% for the sake of discovering all the cool little secrets the game has to offer, BUT if you miss something, then you should just live with it, and move on. The only real big shame about this is that 100%ing unlocks an extra set of neat stages for you to play through, and I wish I could unlock these stages without it being this massive chore. As a whole, Yoshi's Island is some of the best platforming you'll ever get, contrasted against some of the most painful completionism that there is. Thus, play it casually for the best possible experience.
Oh yeah, I got a hot take too. The overworld theme is admittingly very memorable, but I'm really not a big fan of that harmonica. If we're talking "ear grating noises", then this is the closest thing I can point at, I just don't like it. In general, I feel like there's not enough music in this game to match the amount of varied content present in it, which in itself makes the overworld theme get worse over time. Anyway, it's not that big of a deal, I mean, the athletic theme is fantastic, and so is the castle theme, the boss theme, the final boss theme... there's still really good stuff in here, even if there's not much of it.
And that's that for my review! Good night.