Yoshi's New Island

I should begin by admitting to a certain level of rose-tinted bias when reviewing this game. Yoshi's Island on the Super Nintendo was, and continues to be, my favorite platformer game of all time. In 1995 it was the first video game I ever played to completion, at the very formative age of three. As the first game I completed, Yoshi's Island set a lot of standards for what I looked for in future video games. Hearing that a sequel was in the works for 3DS immediately aroused my anticipation. Surely Nintendo would be giving this game some special attention, as the sequel to one of their most famous titles ever.

Well... Here we go.

So green, like broccoli. I don't like broccoli.

The new game, for Nintendo's 3DS, clearly drew inspiration from the previously successful Yoshi games, but that inspiration falls short of homage and ends up in the realm of plagiarism. A curious pattern emerged while playing this game where I was able to predict what the next level would be about before I even played it. This was more than just knowing where bosses would be. Predictions such as "3-6 is the hedgehog cave." or "4-1 has balloons I can ride" were so accurate because I played these exact same levels on Super Nintendo. Only, these weren't exactly the same. New Island's levels are hastily trimmed down to be as short as two or three small rooms. The impression I felt from playing these levels was that Arzest, the company responsible for living up to the legacy of Yoshi's Island, looked at its predecessor and viewed the levels in that game as a blueprint, a road map for success.

World 4-1, "the balloon level".

Unfortunately there are no road maps for success in game design. The thing that made those levels great, back in 1995, was that they were uncharted territory. The environments, the puzzles, the enemies, were all products of new ideas and imagination at work. Seeing it all re-done 20 years later can't instill any reaction more powerful than "Eh." I had hoped for some creative use of the 3DS's technologies, such as 3D, dual-screen, and the gyroscopic controls. The gyroscopic control was implemented, but in a way that was borderline unplayable. The vehicle sections from the SNES, seamlessly integrated into levels without feeling like minigames, are now instanced rooms where players must use gyroscopic controls to control the vehicles. This sounds like a painful challenge to overcome, but there really isn't a challenge, since failing the vehicle rooms still lets you move on to the next part of the level. If there's no punishment for failing to complete a part of the level, why are the vehicle rooms even a feature?

A lot of the child-like charm of the original wasn't in the painted backgrounds,
it was in the 2D cartoon sprites.

A little of that charm gets lost when half the game is suddenly 3D and "artistic".

The developers at Arzest were clearly pulling their design blueprint from past installments of the Yoshi series in their level design. I hoped I would be able to at least enjoy the game's art, and find some redemption in the fleetingly short levels that whisked by. Yoshi games are known for their unique and distinct artistic choices. Yoshi's Island made use of watercolor backgrounds and ragged crayon-like borders. Yoshi's Story was a colorful patchwork of cloth and cardboard. Yoshi's New Island seems to have not made up its mind about what kind of art style it wanted to portray, drawing from all sorts of color schemes, materials, and artists. The characters themselves are mostly just 3D models placed into 2D space, textured to appear painted. There's nothing wrong with this single choice, but the artistic mess becomes apparent when those painted characters are juxtaposed on environments that are drastically different. Some backgrounds were also 3D models like the characters themselves, trees flattened into the background. Others were just paintings with no depth to them. One background was a black-and-white pencil forest so poorly drawn I was convinced until going back a second time to inspect it that it was a pre-production concept sketch that somehow made it into the final product. In fact, the color of the game overall was very washed-out for a Yoshi game, usually colorful and vivid.

Whether these mountains are shrouded in mist or just unfinished
depends on how badly you want to like this game.

The poor distinction between game objects and background objects also became hindering to gameplay. I recall one experience where I wasn't able to tell where to jump next because the platforms were so similar to the background that I thought there were no platforms. This wasn't an intelligent gameplay choice, a "leap of faith" test. It was confusion that arose from lack of artistic direction. If we look at the past Yoshi titles, art was confined to a single style, but the use of that style was creative and inspired. Yoshi's Story separated foreground from background by cutting out a road in the cardboard ground. Yoshi's Island's characters and objects were separated from the artistic backgrounds by using lush sprite art instead of crayon and watercolor. In Yoshi's New Island, the art is so varied that it just comes across as messy. One particular level involved swirly paint around moons in the sky, like Van Gogh's Starry Night. I remembered seeing something similar in Yoshi's Island, and was disappointed to see that 20 years ago, this SNES title referenced Van Gogh the same way in a background image better than the 3DS title attempted to do now.

This level begins in the forest and escalates up to give you this
starry background at the end of the level. Beautiful.

The inspiration is still clear, but there's no stars.

Music was integral to my enjoyment of the SNES title. The fast-paced tunes from the platforming levels and boss fights, as well as the infamous "Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy" melody still ring in my mind. The music of New Island continues to play in my head too. Not because I enjoyed the tone-deaf arrangement of kazoos and xylophones, but because the same song was used in every single level. It was almost as if the composer was on a one-day contract and Arzest was in a mad hurry to pull as much raw sound as they could from the composer. I continued to pray, every level, that a new tune would play. By the end of the game I couldn't erase the song from my head. I've attached a link so that you can share my frustration:

THE MUSIC.

As a sequel, I expected New Island to carry with it some continuity from the original title, and perhaps expand the story. The origins of Mario and Luigi, their rivalry with Bowser and the Koopas, and Yoshi's role in the story, were all told 20 years ago. I hoped I would get to see what happened after Yoshi and Mario defeated Bowser, and perhaps raise the stakes. Baby Princess Peach seemed like a candidate for kidnapping. What I was treated to instead was an almost word-for-word copy of the original narrative. The stork at the end of Yoshi's Island finishes its delivery of the Mario bros., only to be told that he came to the wrong house. Racing now to the correct destination, which is somehow back over the ocean where Yoshi's Island resides, the stork is again ambushed by the wizard Kamek and Luigi is kidnapped while Mario plummets to the island, where Yoshi finds him and the journey begins.

You had ONE JOB!!

Right off the bat, Arzest managed to infuriate me as someone coming from the SNES game. This beginning cutscene completely invalidated my accomplishments from the previous title. Worse, it demonstrated how little time the writers must have spent on story. They took the story of Yoshi's Island, repeated it, and used it as motive to get people to play the game. The quest isn't motivated so much by Yoshi's desire to help Mario as it is the stork's incompetence as a deliverer of babies. Nonetheless, I played the game out of respect for its heritage. At least the battle with Bowser would be something to look forward to.

:)

The road to Bowser was riddled with other bosses, mostly giant versions of enemies I encountered in the levels. Yoshi's Island had a healthy host of bosses as well, all memorable for their art design, encounter design, and the castles they hid in. Naval Piranha's castle, for instance, was a giant sewer system filled with hungry Piranha Plants. Tap-tap's castle was a maze of pipes, some locked by corks that needed keys. Understand that this is a game I last played maybe 3 years ago. New Island is fresh in my mind from 3 weeks ago, and I can't say I remember the names of any bosses, let alone what their castles looked like, except for Kamek. Kamek himself is the mid-boss of every world, which unfortunately leaves out a lot of room for cleverer, more inspired bosses. For the most part I remember seeing lava and spikes in each castle, perhaps arranged a little thematically to suit the current world. The bosses, however, were never thematically arranged. I recall world 3 of Yoshi's Island, the jungle world, having a frog boss and a Piranha Plant boss. Those are jungly creatures that are well-suited bosses for a jungle world. The bosses of New Island were arbitrarily placed. World 4, the mountain world, had a fiery fish as its final boss. Again, it didn't make any clear sense why I was fighting these bosses.

This boss, despite not having fangs, is named "Count Fang".

Placement in the level progression aside, these bosses also all fought the same: shoot it three times with eggs, it dies. This was the constant all the way through to the final boss of the game. Something I've learned about intelligent boss design is this: Players should learn a skill in a level, then use that learned skill to beat the boss of that level. I learned how to make eggs and throw eggs in the very first level of the game. For all of Yoshi's skills, flutter-jumping, ground-pounding, swallowing, spitting up, making eggs, throwing eggs, I only saw one skill used to take down a boss, and that skill quickly grew stale. The bosses of Yoshi's Island gave the player opportunity to exercise every tool in Yoshi's arsenal, and in spectacular fashion. One boss transports Yoshi to the moon, which rotates like a treadmill as Yoshi runs around it, creating a dizzying gyroscopic battlefield that players have to ground-pound in order to damage the boss on the other side. None of that out-of-the-box thinking was present in these mind-numbingly simple eggfests.

Super Mario Galaxy and Angry Birds share a common ancestor in Raphael the Raven.

Fast-forward to Bowser's Castle, the final level of the game. Again, a fiery, spiky, generic castle. I was intrigued to see the automatic-scrolling hallway from Yoshi's Island before the final room. Perhaps this would live up to the epic fight I remember from 20 years ago. I begin the fight and quickly dispatch Baby Bowser's first form, and prepare to fight Big Bad Baby Bowser. This was the moment I had waited for. In the SNES, B4 would slowly walk toward you from the background, speeding up every time you hit him. After three hits, he begins constantly running. If he reaches the wall Yoshi is standing on, there's no timer to recover baby Mario, you simply die. It takes SEVEN well-placed shots to his noggin to defeat him. But this is Yoshi's New Island, where everything is shorter and less scary. Three eggs later, Baby Bowser was toast. It was as if I beat Bowser up when he was small, then had to keep beating him up to get his body out of the way so I could progress. The glowing eyes, the intimidating castle spires, the black sky, platforms shifting up and down into the lava, everything was there for this fight to be epic, but again, it fell short of even being fun.

What made him so scary on the SNES was that he was shrouded in shadow.
I couldn't make out his chubby little cheeks in a solid black silhouette.

But wait! A message appears on my screen, saying "From a rift in space-time, Bowser appears!".

You think I'm joking about the space-time rift. It's right behind him in this pic.

I had put up with this game up to this point. I had held on to my experience as a child exploring Yoshi's Island, and used those memories to press on. This was the point where I checked out. My investment in the game quickly diffused as I threw three eggs at Bowser and turned the 3DS off without even watching the end credits. For no reason at all, Bowser appears as the final boss of the game, overshadowing Baby Bowser, and the narrative justification for this is "A rift in space-time." Does this rift take me back 20 years so I can play the better version of this game and forget this horrible 2-day experience? If yes, then I'll bite.

Leave the stork tied up and let Yoshi deliver the babies.
At least he's consistent.

Yoshi's New Island was a promising title that could have lived up to its predecessor in much better fashion than the inspired minds at Arzest delivered. As soon as I put down my 3DS, an idea for how this game could have been better came to my mind. Instead of the stork returning to the sky and being robbed once again, Kamek magically imprisons the Yoshis in "?" blocks all over the island. One Yoshi makes it to Mario's house and takes him back to the island to rescue the other Yoshis. Mario's famous jumping ability is used to break open blocks as he and Yoshi venture across the island. This story serves as a continuation of Yoshi's Island, but also as further establishment of Mario's powers in his adult adventures, and it sets the stage for Super Mario World, where Mario continues to find Yoshis trapped in "?" blocks. This story came from my thoughts not even five minutes after completing Yoshi's New Island. What could have been accomplished by the team of professionals at Arzest, with a little more independence, and less reliance on the tried-and-true story of the past?

These vehicle sections would have been great as their own,
separate game. Yoshi doesn't even need to be in it.

After seeing this attempt to continue the story of a beloved classic fall so short of the mark, I wonder if Nintendo's efforts wouldn't have been better spent producing an HD remake of the original game, like Wind Waker, or the Metroid Prime trilogy for Wii. Of course, the next best response to this title, and the disappointment it has left me with, is to treat it not as an official sequel, but as a spinoff that didn't live up to its source material. I hope that game scholars continue to cherish Yoshi's Island for the innovative masterpiece of a game it was without allowing New Island to blemish its bright, colorful reputation.