What are you playing? c'mon, tell me punk!

[Kriven]

Well, I just finished Yoshi's New Island (100%). Overall my experience was a good one, and if there weren't some weird decisions and game quirks (and that shitty story. "Save the Princess Again" is better than something this contrived), I'd say it was an awesome game. It doesn't come close to the charm of the original Yoshi's Island, but it's still a nice game to have exist. The giant and metal eggs are fun to use, even though there could have been more done to make the few instances where they appear more of a puzzle. Unfortunately they're pretty straight forward moments. The vehicle transformation segments are nowhere near as clever as they have been in the past, but I enjoyed them for what they were. It sucks that they're in distinct rooms, because I really enjoyed exploring the same portion of a stage as different forms of Yoshi. Having them separate also really disrupts the flow of a level, particularly when, because of how slow-paced the vehicles are and how quickly that timer counts down, you spend more time restarting the vehicle room to get everything than you do actually progressing in the level.

The music has drawn a lot of criticism, but there's actually some decent tunes once the game gets rolling. Nothing as brilliant as in the first Yoshi's Island, but plenty of good stuff that you'll probably catch yourself humming later on. Visually, the game is a departure from the previous games. I think of it as being "What if Miyamoto had gone along with what his supervisors asked and made Yoshi's Island with pre-rendered visuals?" Some people have complained that by taking this exact visual approach, YNI somehow takes the piss out of Miyamoto's defiance two decades ago... but those people are wrong. I'd always wanted to see how Yoshi's Island could have looked if it had gone that way (I always wonder about what-ifs), and I'm glad Artoon attempted to answer that question. Of course the game is still too influenced by the crayon scribble aesthetic to really represent what YI may have been, but it's close enough. The hybridized art style also looks good, in my opinion. I never found myself getting bored by the visuals, like can happen with the NSMB games, and there were moments where I found myself simply admiring the coloring and shading on an object for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, not everything is in style. Nintendo's efforts to homogenize the Mario franchise reach deep into this game, and multiple enemies have models pulled directly from the NSMB franchise. Sure, they're slightly edited to fit the theme more closely, but it doesn't really work out. They stand out like a sore thumb and come across as somewhat dull in comparison to the livelier world around them. Also, it would have been nice if the Koopa Troopas would pop out of their shells and run around in their boxer shorts again, but it wasn't meant to be...

The bosses are easy and fairly uninspired. Okay, fight this Giant Generic Enemy. It's the exception when a boss plays with the enemy's appearance in any form other than "Be Giant". Honestly, I can't even remember all of the bosses, and I just played the game, so... I mean, there's a giant Clawdaddy (Crawdaddy?), one of the bats becomes a Dracula-type character, there's an annoying Pokey... Uh... Whatever, none of them have half the personality of Naval Piranha, Bashful Burt, Raphael the Raven, or even flippin' Tap-Tap the Red Nosed. Fortunately, there's a hidden room where Salvo the Slime tries to get his revenge, and the final castle has a room where Yoshi has to handle his old nemesis, the invincible Tap-Tap the Golden. Unlike previous games, the mid-boss for each world is Kamek (whereas in the previous titles, each world had two unique characters as bosses). I think this is probably why it seems as though YNI is lacking in bosses and memorable characters: with Kamek occupying six boss roles, there's simply fewer new characters to meet and five fewer unique bosses in general. Now, each encounter with Kamek has a different gimmick, so at least they didn't give us six repeat bosses... Unfortunately, the Kamek battles are more annoying than they are fun. Oddly, I found them to be more challenging than the actual end-world bosses.

The game probably would have benefited from having only one encounter with Kamek, which would have been a more climactic moment. At long last, Yoshi gets to take the black-magic blowin' beak-faced blowhard down for the count. Fighting him so many times, and right off the bat, just kind of hurts the potential that battle could have had. On the topic of Kamek, he serves as more than just a boss: like in the previous games, he enhances the boss enemies, although in this game he does so by flattening them with a hammer... Which probably would have been a great gag had they only used it once. Using it for every boss gets a little tired. Honestly, that's the best word to describe the story, the gags, and even the dialog. Tired. The final battle with Baby Bowser is a watered down iteration of his confrontation from the first game (complete with the dark hallway where Kamek attempts to blast you before you reach Bowser's throne room). They even used the same "gween donkey" joke, and Baby Bowser flattening Kamek for disturbing his nap. It's an unfortunate case of deja vu. Don't even get me started on the out-of-left-field battle with a time-traveling adult Bowser--a gimmick they ripped right out of Yoshi's Island DS! YIDS did the time-travel gimmick much better, I might add, making it pivotal to the plot from the very beginning instead of shoehorning it in at the last second. I shit you not, you beat Baby Bowser and then a message pops up saying "Warping through time and space, it's the adult King Bowser!" Like... whaat.

Blindsiding the player is an issue the game has throughout, and not just with its narrative. Borrowing again from NSMB, there are far too many instances of coins appearing out of thin air if you walk on the exact right spot... of course, there's never any indication of where that spot is or even if there really is an invisible coin trigger nearby. This is problematic when so many of the flowers and red coins needed for 100% completion are hidden by these overly specific triggers. I won't lie: I had to turn to FAQs several times because I had explored every pixel of the stage but the fucking one with an invisible object on it. It's ridiculous, and not fun, and brought back memories of how stupidly cryptic NES games could be. Fortunately, the collectibles system is actually improved other than that one detractor. This time around the game will remember if you found all the red coins or all the flowers or kept all thirty stars when clearing a stage, so you can go back and find the other items without having to recollect all of the other. In other words, you can find all the flowers, beat the level, go back and find all the coins and not have to worry about the flowers at all. This is definitely better than forcing the player to perform a perfect stage run, particularly in a game that actively works against you the entire time.

Oh, I'm not talking about challenging level design or enemy placement. I'm talking about the fact that Yoshi will ground pound whenever he damn well pleases (he's particularly fond of death pits) and moves about as fast as Big the Cat. It's important to remember, when playing this game, that you're going to have to commit to every single action you want to perform. Taking out an egg kills your momentum, jumping kills your momentum, fluttering stabs momentum in the throat. Putting an egg away, eating an enemy, tossing an egg, each of these actions will kill all of your forward moment and require at least two seconds of animation before Yoshi will accept any other commands. There is no action cancelling, once Yoshi is doing something, he's fucking doing that thing. This makes it more difficult to retrieve Baby Mario should you be attacked while performing an animation (because good job, now he has to finish his first animation and finish the hurt animation before he'll listen to you again, and oh, if you press a button before the game is ready to accept it, you're going to lose another second while Yoshi stands there doing nothing). Whatever rhythm you had in the previous Yoshi's Island game is going to get you 100% dead in this one. Rhythm just does not apply here. More than half of everything in this game is luck.

Which is another major strike against it. Unlocking the vehicle challenge for each world, that's like. You can influence that luck by collecting all the flowers, but it's still based on luck. The Chomp Shark enemy returns, but it doesn't have a set pattern... sometimes he'll stay behind and let you take your time exploring his path, and other times he'll blaze by, and when he does that you don't stand a chance. None. You're going to die. You're going to be lucky if you get through a stage without a stray ground pound, and you know what else? You're lucky if you manage to bounce off an enemy's head and not fall to your death, because more often than not Yoshi will simply decide bouncing isn't what he wants to do, and now you're dead because the game has far too many vertical climbs to be fucking up this bad.

Maybe I'm making this game sound bad. It's really not... most of the game is good... It's just unfortunate that its negative aspects are REALLY negative, while it's good aspects are only.. good. I liked the game, I generally had an awesome time when it worked... but ti didn't do that frequently enough for me to say this is anything more than a "Good" game (and there's a few levels above that).

Essentially, six or seven out of ten stars with an "I Liked It" and "I Had Fun" GamExplain emoji.

Okay, now to finish up the games I've left sitting around for months... Guess I'll start with Banjo-Tooie...