Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island (SNES Review)

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released August 5, 1995
Directed by Takashi Tezuka
and Hideki Konno
and Shigefumi Hino
AND Toshihiko Nakago
Jeez, anyone else? No? Okay then.
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing on Mario Wiki

The phrase “oh baby” has more than one meaning with Yoshi’s Island, though for the purposes of this review, you can safely assume my “oh baby!” is in reference to how overjoyed I am to have changed my mind about reviewing this because OH BABY! What a masterpiece! By the way, like Super Mario 3, my first experience with Yoshi’s Island was on the Game Boy Advance, which has significant changes. Consider this review MOSTLY for the SNES version since I didn’t want to 100% it twice for this review. This is NOT a game you breeze through.

There’s an urban legend that Big Shiggy Style and Takashi Tezuka were ordered to make Yoshi’s Island look like the recently released “hi-tech” Donkey Kong Country, and in a fit of rebellion, they instead told their team to lean extra-extra hard into the crayon look, which got approved by Nintendo. According to the legend, Miyamoto also said Donkey Kong Country was a mediocre game in an interview he did side-by-side with Rare Ltd. founders Chris & Tim Stamper and was generally butt hurt by Donkey Kong Country’s success because it meant that all gamers cared about was pretty graphics. I’d read it myself in a book, but people I trust on the subject say it never happened. Well, the interview didn’t happen at least. As far as the graphics go, to me it sounds like someone higher-up at Nintendo merely floated the question “could you make this look more like Donkey Kong Country?” in the same way you might ask a cop if there’s any way out of a speeding ticket. In other words, they knew it was a long shot but felt they had to ask because it’d make the game more commercial or trendy. Nothing wrong with asking, but Yoshi’s Island was so far into development that it was too late to turn around.

Probably the best animation frames for any 16-bit platformer. Yoshi’s Island isn’t entirely just fun because of personality and charm, but it sure helps.

What it wasn’t too late for was to exaggerate the hand-drawn look. Talk about lucky timing. I don’t know how well the Donkey Kong Country games have aged from a gameplay perspective. I guess I should find out, hint hint. In the looks department, there’s no denying those games have a waxy appearance that doesn’t necessarily feel timeless. Yoshi’s Island is still a damn pretty game to look at even thirty years later. And it DID have a few technical achievements to marvel at. This is especially true of the bosses thanks to the Super FX 2 chip. Instead of doing the traditional “it’s really the background done in a way to make it feel like a sprite” trick, the tech had reached the point where you could do very large enemy sprites, or in the case of Mario World 2, make it appear normal-sized enemies were being transformed into gigantic ones. The twelve big-bosses of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island are some of the best in ANY game that wears the Mario label. The best boss fights shouldn’t just be challenging, but so fun that they feel like rewards for reaching progress benchmarks, and Yoshi’s Island NAILS IT!

I’m f*cked. Want to know the really embarrassing part? This is a rematch of a fight I already won because I didn’t get a red coin at some point.

But the bosses are hardly the only highlight. Yoshi’s Island features forty-eight stages spread over six worlds, plus each world has an additional level if you finish all eight of its levels with a 100% completion. To do this, you have to get five flowers and twenty red coins in each stage and then cross the finish line (or beat the boss) with all thirty stars still intact. By the way, this is a lot tougher than most modern games because all three extra goals have to be done at once, since the 100% completion is done as an end-of-level score and not as a checklist to finish whenever. If you take even a single tick of damage fighting a boss, you’ll either have to charge-up an egg so that it drops stars or start the fight over.

While exploring the levels and making progress is much slower than most Mario games, the tempo of action happenings is downright frantic and requires quick reflexes.

Finding the flowers/coins isn’t just a formality, either. They require a full exploration of the level, and some are VERY cleverly hidden. Even early in the game, I had to replay some levels to find stuff I missed. They’re not all just laying around like modern Mario games tend to do, and the hunt for them actually enhanced the game in a way that 100%ing other games in this Mario marathon I’ve been on has been. It’s certainly easier to find the red coins on the original console version of Yoshi’s Island. I was startled when I found out that, when you play the SNES version, you can actually see which coins are the red coins. They have a subtle but noticeable tint to them that wasn’t present on the Game Boy Advance port, where you have to use a magnifying glass item to make them pop out. That item is still in the SNES game, but it’s mostly useful for not having to look too hard, and for revealing hidden question mark clouds. In the two screenshots below, there’s two red coins. In the heat of battle, it can be tough to spot.

Acing every level also unlocks unlimited cracks at the end of level bonus rounds, which allows you to stockpile items. I don’t know why they did it THAT way when it makes way more sense to unlock the bonus rounds when you 100% the extra stages since those tend to be really hard. It’s also worth noting that the SNES and GBA games have different extra stages. You’ll forgive me for going off memory on the GBA versions because I figured I’d play Yoshi’s Island for a day and instead I needed three days and in the ballpark of a one hundred lives to get 100% without cheating. Some of the flowers and red coins are pains in the ass to get, but for what it’s worth, both versions have really fun bonus stages. It’s certainly worth the effort.

Before starting this review, I could have sworn that I 100%ed this on the GBA, but now I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Either way, I just 100%ed without cheating. You know, I never 100%ed Super Mario Sunshine either. Oh, and I use control scheme #2, which is where you hold the fire button to begin the aiming cursor and release to fire. I think it’s better for jumping shots.

There’s two major things that stand out to me about Yoshi’s Island. The first is that this game sort of proves the point I made when I reviewed Super Mario Bros. Wonder: you don’t need a busy-work map for a platformer if it comes at the cost of difficulty scaling. Yoshi’s Island has a relatively bland level select screen with linear progression and no branching paths. The extra stages are just that: extras. You can also replay beaten stages as many times as you want if you miss any coins or flowers, but otherwise, it’s a straight line from level 1 – 1 to level 6 – 8. Remarkably, Yoshi’s Island does a REALLY good job of scaling, to the point that I think that it’s worthy of study by would-be platform game designers. Weirdly, the only stand-out scaling problems were with the extra stages. Extra 1 and Extra 2 were far and away harder than the extra stages that followed, especially the second. Meanwhile, I beat the sixth and final extra stage with a 100 score on my first try.

YOU SON OF A BITCH!!

The second thing is that Nintendo clearly went all-in on the idea that each stage has to have its own unique vibe and personality, with plenty of set pieces that are either limited or even one-off. Even late into the game, new enemies are introduced and sometimes get entire levels built around them. You might be racing a gigantic chain chomp, inflating a gigantic balloon that you then ride, or pushing a boulder through a large portion of the map, and even if you’ve seen those mechanics before, they almost always figured out a way to make them fresh again for the next encounter.

I normally hate snow/ice levels, but they’re really well done in Yoshi’s Island. There’s a memorable skiing segment, and even the ski-lifts themselves feature some of the best moving platform design I’ve seen in 16-bits.

The game also tested the limits of its own mechanics many times by using enemy attack formations or their raw physics to introduce new gameplay concepts. Here’s an example late in the game: there’s a flower walled-off in a way where you can’t reach it, and a bandit inside the chamber with it. In order to get the flower, you have to lure the bandit over to the flippers to open them, then time it so you shoot an egg (or watermelon seed) when they open. It’s such a small thing, but there’s PLENTY of examples of how they used the enemies fourth-dimensionally for a lack of a better term.

Now, unlike Mario 3, these are not bite-sized levels. Yoshi’s Island’s stages are pretty damn big, at least relative to other games in the series up to the point this came out. The “bag of potato chips” rule is out because, if a level doesn’t work for you, you’re not seconds away from a new experience. You’re a few minutes, or more since the game actually is pretty difficult. Yoshi’s Island certainly has a slower pace than Mario 3, World, or Wonder, and in fact, I’d say they probably could have cut the level count from eight per world to six. Not that there’s two stinkers per world, because I’d dare to say there’s no “bad” levels in Yoshi’s Island. It’s because the level “types” tend to be stretched thin. In particular, the castle levels, at times, come dangerously close to feeling interchangeable. Okay, so that’s not a big deal, right? The airships were the same way in Mario 3 but there’s still unique and memorable moments in them. Sure, but when a developer is close to perfection, I kind of wish they’d go for it. Perfection is so rare, and Yoshi was within sniffing distance of it.

Yes, yes, we all laughed when Yoshi got stoned. But for all we know, that poor red Yoshi then had to spend 28 days in rehab and several months in a sober living home. #FuzziesAreGatewayDrugs

Not that Yoshi’s Island would be perfect without the vague sense of padding. The physics with Mario’s bubble can be a little unpredictable at times. At one point I shorted a jump over the big blue mouth monster, but even though I was well above the water, SOMEHOW Mario ended up under the platform I was on and in the water, like he flew the opposite direction I was hit from. Then the water monster blocked me from all directions and I didn’t have an egg. Then on top of all that, I screwed up the last-second rescue when I took damage again. I tried to rewind to get a clip of it (I laid that life down afterward so it doesn’t count as cheating) and I wasn’t able to recreate it when I tried from every angle. While experimenting after I finished the game, I realized that I might have shot Mario with an egg at the very moment I lost him while trying to shoot the monster. The egg would knock the bubble low immediately and would combine with the normal knocked-off physics to send him well out of reach. There were several “WTF” instances with the physics. The only reason I didn’t lose more lives is because I used the star items at the last second if I was on death’s door.

The word “pissed” doesn’t really do it justice.

The word “pissed” doesn’t really do it justice.

The word “pissed” doesn’t really do it justice.

But the level padding and the bubble physics are VERY minor complaints. Yoshi’s Island really is a fantastic video game. The use of the eggs as projectiles is so well done, and it’s especially satisfying to treat the level layouts like a billiard table and hit off-the-wall shots. The level design is consistently clever throughout. Yoshi’s Island also has a very large, very memorable roster of basic enemies, most of which are squeezed for every drop of gameplay they could get, including gimmicks with the movement physics that you just know they didn’t intend at first. This feels like a game where the people making it were saying to each-other “hey, look what I found out you can do!” a lot. Like Mario Wonder, nearly every square inch of Yoshi’s Island feels like a labor of love. There’s NOTHING cynical about Yoshi’s Island. Which is funny because half of the four directors split for Mario 64 in the middle of development. From everything I’ve read about this game, it sure seems like Nintendo didn’t have high hopes for Yoshi’s Island. And it’s one of the best games Nintendo ever made, go figure.

“Baby Mario, I failed you.” “Well Cathy, maybe you’ll be reincarnated as SOMEONE WHO CAN SHOOT STRAIGHT!”

If Yoshi’s Island counts as a “Super Mario” game (it really shouldn’t) then it’s in the discussion for the 2D G.O.A.T. of the franchise. Win or lose, there’s a legitimate case to be made that it’s better than Mario Wonder. I’d even concede the action is better, and I like a LOT of action with my platforming, but it’s also no slouch in the “games as a unique experience” category. Finally, I’d say Yoshi’s Island probably offers players more flexibility to create their own strategies with the combat, and there’s plenty of situations where using your banked items is mighty tempting. It helps that the egg-aiming, which could have turned out complicated and unwieldy in the wrong developer’s hands, is actually intuitive and easy to get the hang of.

Besides the helicopter, I didn’t love any of the Yoshi vehicles. The train was my least favorite because there’s just no excitement to it, which hurt because Yoshi’s Island is a game that usually stays pretty exciting at all other times. I hated the sub too, especially the insane recovery time when you take damage with it, but at least there’s combat and a sense of urgency. The trains don’t even successfully pull that off even with a time limit.

I’m still leaning towards Mario Wonder, which controls better, cuts a better pace, and has far more big-scale stand-out moments. Yoshi’s Island makes the most with its base engine, but Mario Wonder practically lives off the beaten path and doesn’t have to obey its engine. Again, win or lose, we have to debate it even though it’s not really a Mario game. Yoshi’s Island is a game so good it forces the debate, and it forces itself into the Mario discussion whether it makes sense or not. You know, I think that should count for something! How many games can you honestly say force themselves into the GOAT debate for a franchise they don’t even really belong to? It’s maybe a one-off achievement. If you find that whole “is it or is it not a Mario game” debate silly, first off, (blows raspberry) and second, FINE. How about “Yoshi’s Island is in the debate for best overall SNES game” and it has a VERY strong case.

“Okay, NEW PLAN! Everyone gather around. You too, chain chomps! Okay, my plan is a bit out there, but hear me out: what if, in all future encounters with Yoshi, we just make the courses and mechanics he has to travel to save the day so uninspired and boring that nobody will bother to finish the games? CAN’T LOSE TO YOSHI IF THE PLAYERS GET BORED AND QUIT!”

There’s also a sadness to Yoshi’s Island, because it’s not a real Mario game. It’s only in the debate because of the “Super Mario World 2” part, but really this is the launching point of a franchise that, frankly, has not blown my socks off. My first Yoshi game was Yoshi’s Story, which was the first game I got after Ocarina of Time. Okay, that’s a tough act to follow, but Yoshi’s Story was a game that I did not like at all as a 9 to 10 year old child. It felt like a baby’s game, and was one of the first games that made me realize not every first party Nintendo game would be one I would enjoy. It’s like the gaming version of finding out Santa isn’t real. Later, the Nintendo DS and 3DS games were VERY bland, and the two console games, Wooly World and Crafted World were just sort of okay. Thirty years later and Yoshi’s Island is the one franchise-launcher in the Nintendo catalog that still stands tall as the best game in a franchise that’s had a lot of games. Maybe retro fans will celebrate that fact, but I won’t. I think celebrating a great game for being a great game is awesome. It’s what I love most about doing this blog. But I also hate the idea that a thirty year old game might never be topped. That’s not an achievement. That’s a tragedy.
Verdict: YES!