Review #749: Yoshi's New Island

 Can we get back to the old one?

 I am a HUGE Yoshi Island fan, after I got to play that game on the Gameboy Advance I absolutely fell in love with it. I've fond memories of waking up before highschool and always managing to play a few stages before having to leave. That said, every subsequent Yoshi game I've played afterwards never managed to capture that spark again. Sadly, Yoshi's New Island is no exception.

 The story is basically a good ending override for Yoshi's Island, turns out the Stork messed up and brought the babies to the wrong couple... and then it loses the babies again, so the Yoshi's set out to get the babies to Stork, while defeating baby Bowser, again. It's lazy, it's just your every day Nintendo plot shenanigans. The game is made up of 6 worlds, with 8 stages each as well as a hidden stage on each world. A ton of levels borrow ideas or concepts from the original game, which is both cute and somewhat lazy. On the other hand, while the game is a 2-D platforming game, it uses beautiful 3-D graphics that are textured to look as if they were painted by pencils, it's very pretty... except for the fact that the Yoshis have no legs. That's right, their shoes just float over their torsos, which looks very weird and wasn't a very good artistic choice. It worked on the SNES, but it doesn't work quite as well in 3-D.

 The Yoshis keep the same moves they've had since their initial outing: A jump that ends with a flutter for extra air, a butt-stomp, eating enemies to turn them into eggs(Or spit them back out) and shooting said eggs. It's a moveset that works and has worked for years and years. The game can be played with either the digital pad or the analog stick, but it's my recommendation to stick with the DPad, since using the analog stick made me perform a butt-stomp many times I didn't really want to, sometimes costing me a life. New to the game are Giant Shyguys that, when eaten, turn into Giant Eggs that demolish everything on their path, as well as Giant Metal Shyguys that turn into tougher, heavier Giant Metal Eggs that have the added benefit of sinking Yoshi below water, as long as you don't shoot them that is. It's tough to consider it a new game mechanic, since Giant Shyguys are pretty rare. They also added an unnecessarily large amount of vehicle sections, and these are pretty bland because they use gyroscopic controls exclusively.

 Game progression is pretty much exactly like the original Yoshi's Island, each level having 5 hidden Flowers, 20 hidden Red Coins and 30 mini stars to collect. Your objective on each level is to take Baby Mario from beginning to end, and getting hit makes Baby Mario float on a bubble, and you must touch the bubble before 10 seconds pass, else he gets taken away and you lose a life. Recovering Baby Mario is pretty easy most of the time, so your deaths will come from falling down bottomless pits. Stage design is decent most of the time, obstacles don't feel unfair and while it borrows a lot of ideas from the original game, it has a few original things of its own, like a giant Chomp-Chomp chasing you. That said, getting all Red Coins and Flowers does feel unfair sometimes, as either might be hidden behind tricks and puzzles that require previous knowledge of them being there, as a single 'error' progressing through the stage might lock them behind walls or the such, requiring a stage restart. Heck, some coins will only spawn if you land on a specific platform. It feels a bit unfair, y'know?

 Yoshi's New Island is an alright sequel to a timeless classic, it had a lot to live up to, and it failed to hit some marks. I think that trying to rely so much on nostalgia hit them in the back as it ends up feeling like a pale imitation of something that was great. The few new mechanics they added either went underused, like giant eggs, or were cumbersome and too prevalent, namely the gyroscopic sections. Regardless, the basic gameplay remains strong, and level design is pretty decent, so it's not a bad game by any means, it simply couldn't measure up to the original, while doing little to stand out from it. Thunder God Lakitu is pretty epic though.
 7.0 out of 10