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Yoshi's New Island (3DS)


Detective Shadzter

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The review scores from the latest issue of ONM are in, and even this usually-more-lenient publication hasn't been kind to ol' Yoshi...

 

ONM - 67%

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Here are all of the secret levels

 

 

Secret 1: is relatively easy

 

Secret 2: with all those Tetris-like blocks is more puzzle-oriented. Still, not that hard

 

Secret 3: Like 2, this level needs the player to make quick decisions

 

Secret 4: a really fast Poochy, instant death spikes, no checkpoints... This is hard!

 

Secret 5: requires precise jumps on bullet bills and birds, has vanishing platform, and no room for error if you want to catch the stars. Nintendo Hard at its best

 

Secret 6: it's like Run For It! from NSMBU, only harder

 

You know, I'm starting to like the graphic, and some of the soundtrack (but I still hate the kazoo)

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I've been away, and have used that time to 100% the game in six days, a world per day.  And yes, by 100%, I mean all collectables in all levels, including the secret levels.  This is my story.

 

Review synopsis: A good game, but only a good game.  Yoshi's New Island is a workmanlike sequel with no ambition whatsoever, packed with wasted potential, and which could have been great if it only tried to go its own way.  It probably didn't deserve review scores of 4 or 5, but 6 or 7 is about right.

 

Graphics:

 

The graphics are beautiful, if only they'd let you

see it.  There's this painterly effect on just about everything - the enemies, the lands aren't just made up of bland 3D models.  You can make out individual brushstrokes and crosshatching.  The metal on Bullet Bills and the Metal Mega Shy Guys has this great pencil-scratch effect.  It's gorgeous... and thoroughly unostentatious.  You have to look quite hard to be able to make out a lot of these effects, and so the stylisation is by and large lost to the casual viewer.  There's clear work there on the enemies, but that work doesn't stand out.  In other words, the best of the style has been sacrificed for the sake of the dull clarity of a standard 2.5D platformer.  This could've been a stunning game if only they'd let the graphics actually look as good as they are.  It's a real "stop and smell the roses" scenario.

 

Oh, also, the thing about different worlds being in different art styles is a total lie, as I saw the same background recycled between worlds.  If they were going to use different art styles for different backgrounds, why didn't they extend it to the foreground as well?  The answer is as above - for whatever bizarre reason, they didn't want to show their work.  As a result, it will go largely unappreciated.

 

Also, I miss having little pictures from within each level visible on the world map.  In fact, the world map is pretty dull in general and needs sprucing up, although I like the fact that they did have a map, and that it starts to go a bit crazy in World 6.

 

Difficulty:

 

Firstly, the game is a lot easier than previous Yoshi's Island games.  There are two ways in which it is easier.  The first is that the collectable system has had the 100% aspect sacrificed; you now no longer have a number associated with each level, and each collectable is totted up on its own and saved if you get all of a particular collectable in each level.  Thus you can get 100% in three separate runs - stars, coins, and flowers - and don't have to get them all at once.  This gives you a lot more breathing room.  I'm kind of aesthetically sad about the loss of that official 100% statistic, but the game is just so much more playable that I can't really regret it.

 

However, it's also true that the game is just plain easier.  Levels are shorter and challenges are far less arduous.  On balance, I'm inclined to say that this is largely a good thing.  The previous two games were at times too long and exhausting for their own good, and I know I never even finished some of the extra levels in past games, let alone got 100% on them.  I do think the uniformity of the easiness is a problem, though.  I would have liked some longer levels, just for contrast, and would've been happy for the last bonus level to be the kind of intensely challenging labyrinth that I'd have hated in a game full of them.  So I'm okay with the game being easier, but too much of it is easier.  The difficulty curve is also nonsense - the second half of World 5 zips by in contrast to the first half, but 5-S is also probably the hardest level in the game, and it's hard in a stupid, fun-killing way, too.

 

Level design:

 

There are exactly three new ideas in this game, and one of them appears twice in a single level and then never, ever again.  RIP weird Yoshi clone mechanic; you were the best new idea this game had, and then you vanished forever.  It's another example of Yoshi's

New Island being ashamed to be in any way new.  Mega Eggdozers are pretty much just cinematic fluff, but you rarely use them to do anything cinematically interesting, so they're another wasted opportunity.  Metal Eggdozers are by and large done well, though, so... one out of three is, uh, better than zero out of three?

 

In all other respects the game has not even one new idea.  Numerous levels are directly ripped off from conceits in previous Yoshi's Island games - like the Chomps burrowing through the landscape, except now they only knock out the destructible blocks rather than destroying the landscape itself and as such are a lot more predictable and boring, and like Fort Key Catastrophe, in the original of which you needed four keys (a concept reused in turn in 6-8).  In general, the gameplay of Yoshi's New Island can be described as "like Yoshi's Island and Yoshi's Island DS, but less fun and less interesting."  And this is a game that actually has more levels than Yoshi's Island DS!  And yet it feels like it has far fewer ideas and does far less with them, which is one problem with making the levels so much shorter.  It's sometimes hard to get to grips with what the designer's actual idea was.

 

Also, all six of the -S secret levels are basically the same.  They're about forced movement - making you move on as quickly as possible with very little time or room to pause and take stock and find hidden items.  Autoscrolling without the scrolling, basically.  Like I said above, I wouldn't have minded another labyrinth if it was at least in a bonus level.  So that's another area where the game lacks invention; the -S levels are basically the same idea done six ways.

 

Bosses:

 

I like that they wanted to give Kamek increased prominence in the game, but nobody wanted six Kamek minibosses, and especially not as the most tepid fights in the entire game.  Let me draw you a comparison.  Recall 6-4 of the original Yoshi's Island, a fortress which culminates in a battle against an indestructible giant Tap-Tap on destructible blocks above lava.  You're fighting one of the most dangerous enemies in the game, made more dangerous, in an insta-kill environment - the stakes are high and it feels tense.  Now compare 6-4 of Yoshi's New Island, the last miniboss and the easiest in the entire game.  It's basically a boring sewer in which you have generic blocks dropped on yourself.  What's the point?  So that was not so much a waste of potential as a waste of time, and it feels like they cooked them up to avoid having to think up more actually interesting bosses.

 

As for the actual bosses, though, the -8 bosses - well, the first five are pretty great!  One thing I really disliked about Yoshi's Island DS is that a lot of the bosses weren't giant enemies, they were magical platforms or an antlion that showed up out of nowhere.  The bosses in Worlds 2 through 5 are giant enemies that weren't gigantified in previous Yoshi's Island games (I guess Pokeys weren't properly in previous games but I'll give them a pass), and while they invented a new enemy for the World 1 boss, they had the courtesy to make it a regular enemy for that castle, too.  I'm really pleased that they caught on about this.  They may not have been the most epic bosses, and I think that Furious Fred De Fillet's armour didn't really look right on it, but the designers' hearts were, for once, in the right place.

 

Then they go and waste it all on the final boss.  First they rip off every single aspect of the original Baby Bowser fight, right down to framing and dialogue.  They gave Baby Bowser a few new tricks and you defeat him differently - good on them!  But nothing about how you encounter the boss is new.

 

Then they have yet another lamer variation on the original Giant Baby Bowser boss fight that's mostly, I think, derived from Yoshi's Island DS

 

Then suddenly, Bowser for no reason, and we have a workmanlike Bowser boss fight.  It's nothing special, but they did an okay job, so fair enough, that gets a pass too.

 

Then they rip off their own Giant Baby Bowser fight from five minutes before for a Giant Bowser boss battle.  Why?!  What happened, what were they thinking?  It sums the game up, really.  The art on the Bowsers is really quite nice, there's an almost fabric quality to his hair, but the fight itself is an unoriginal, uninteresting waste.  Moments like this are why the game got 4/10 scores.

 

So, overall, the bosses are hit and miss.  I don't mean that they're mediocre; simply that some are exactly what I wanted and others are exactly what I didn't want.

 

Story and presentation:

 

Uniformly terrible.  First off, the written style is patronising in the extreme; as I've said before, the original game was baby-

themed, but not babyish, and Yoshi's New Island falls on the wrong side of the line.  Then there's the fact that the plot stopped bothering to even try and make sense.  Firstly, why exactly is Kamek kidnapping babies again?  I can't remember if the original game provided a reason, but Yoshi's Island DS at least tried to, even if it was a terrible reason.  All it needed was one line - "Those bothersome babies have thwarted me one time too many!" - but nope, now Kamek's just harassing them for no reason.  Then suddenly, time travelling Bowser for no reason!  Well, the real reason is that they'd developed a too-lacklustre plot and boss fight and needed a twist to pad things out a bit.  And it was a terrible twist - and a stolen twist, too, once again from their own game, Yoshi's Island DS.  So that was another trainwreck.

 

Is it really that hard to come up with an original Yoshi's Island plotline?  They had the beginnings of it, with the claim that Baby Bowser wanted to turn the island into a holiday resort, but then they never, ever did anything with it.  That line literally has nothing to do with the rest of the game.  There aren't even any tropical level themes... which I'm pretty sure at least one of the previous games did have, funnily enough.

 

So yeah, that bit's terrible and a waste of space.

 

So once again we have a mainline Nintendo Mario-franchise game designed to be as utterly safe, conservative, unoriginal, and boring as possible, owing to a bafflingly stupid executive decision to create only safe, conservative, unoriginal, and boring games lest the casuals feel remotely threatened.  Predictably, the result is bad, and that's not all Arzest's fault.  After all, some of the NSMB level designers were on board, too, and Nintendo was overseeing the whole project from start to finish, including the original Yoshi's Island director.  What we have here is a tragedy of executive oversight where the potential for a great game is screwed up and thrown in the trash can, passed over in favour of doing exactly what we've seen before, twice.  Even though the game has some good points, boy do I understand those 4/10s.  The game may deserve better, but Nintendo badly needs that wake-up call.

 

But hey, when all's said and done, at least there's a fitting reward for getting 100% on all fifty-four levels, right?  Of course there is!  And by golly, what a reward!  What could it be?  Gasp - it's - it's - IT IS!!!

 

Nothing.

 

Why.

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I'll say one thing about the Chomps that did change. They're instant kill now, because they're on fire.

 

I really liked that they're fired out of volcanoes now.  It doesn't affect the gameplay one jot - they were always more or less insta-kill, in my opinion, because if you were stuck under one when it fell then you would be very lucky not to be smashed down into a pit - but presentationally it's a neat touch.  One of those glimmers of invention you get from the game now and then, where you can see an actual good idea lurking beneath the surface.  But then you also have Bowser's castle built entirely out of pre-existing elements and with no new graphical touches to help build the tension.  For instance, in the original Yoshi's Island, the door to the final boss's chamber was extra-size, but in YNI it's a regular-size door.  It's the little things like that which give the whole game a kind of "level pack" feel.

 

I don't regret 100%ing it - I liked the fact that I actually could, that it was reasonable to do so ('cept maybe 5-S).  But I wouldn't tell anyone that it's worth it to do so.

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So I usually like to take time to beat a game. A few days ago I finished world 1. What Ive been doing since is going back to the levels for replay in world 1 . Slowly but sure Ive collected the items I missed the first time around or playing them cuz I like them. I like the new boss and how they created a newish character. I already know before hand all the bosses of the game and i kind of wish that kamek was used in every other

Fortress and have more enemies or more specifically new enemies. Sonce they went out of their way to create big beanie. I'm just really glad that I have a yoshi game. To play

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I found it easier to 100% a level as soon as possible, before I moved onto a new level.  That way I already had much of the level learned, and when I did get to move onto a new level it was a pleasant breather after the hard work of getting all the collectables.  (Though even late-game it was sometimes possible to get 100% on a first run.)

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  • 4 weeks later...

A little while ago, I wrote in the "What game are you playing right now?" thread that I was attempting a 100% run of Yoshi's Island DS, because I wanted to be able to fully compare it to Yoshi's New Island, the two having been made by the same group - Artoon, now called Arzest.  Well, I succeeded.  I 100%ed Yoshi's Island DS, by which I mean getting a 5000% score (1000 per world, 100 in all ten levels of each world), and also all Baby Coins and a complete Enemy Museum.  Now, I never, ever have to play Yoshi's Island DS again.  Incidentally, I still have my original YIDS file, and I only managed 3784 in that.  I will confess to occasionally using walkthroughs to save time when re-exploring levels for all collectables, but I still had to get the darn things, so I think it's legitimate.

 

(Also, funnily enough, when I finally took the game out of my 3DS to put it away in its box, the plastic on the game case's spine shattered and came away in pieces in my hand.  Yes, you read that right.  I literally broke this game's back in defeating it.)

 

So, how do the two games stack up?  I'll go through and compare them according to the same criteria as used in my YNI review higher up the page.  I'll just flag up the level count, though:

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island: 54 levels (six worlds of nine levels)

Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island (GBA remake): 60 levels (six worlds of ten levels)

Yoshi's Island DS: 50 levels (five worlds of ten levels)

Yoshi's New Island: 54 levels (six worlds of nine levels)

So Yoshi's Island DS has the lowest level count, but it's more or less comparable to its predecessor and successor, especially when you consider that YNI has quite short levels.  Anyway, let's begin.

 

Graphics:

I thought that this was where Yoshi's New Island would excel, and I was right.  YIDS has graphics that are workmanlike and often charmless, with Blargg/Nep-Enut particularly amateurish.  The game also has what has to be the worst Bowser sprite in all of Mario; it's surprisingly shoddy and rough-edged.  Sometimes, though, the backgrounds manage to pull off the crayon aesthetic; willingness to stylise is a high point.  Secret 3, A Light In The Dark, also managed to create a surprisingly atmoshperic look to its ski slope section by putting it in dim light interspersed with blazing torches; it was a great use of existing resources to create a totally new look.

 

Difficulty:

One thing that I'd forgotten was in this game, and which makes getting 100% actually tolerable, is that Middle Rings save your stars, meaning that you don't have to do the entire level in one shot if it's a star-limited level.  Why is this remarkable?  Well, while the original Yoshi's Island also saved stars, Yoshi's New Island doesn't - if you die and go back to a Middle Ring, your stars are reset to 10, but of course, YNI has shorter levels and you don't have to get everything in a single run.

 

In other respects, though, Yoshi's Island DS is often quite challenging, with tricky platforming, hails of enemies, chase sequences, and so on.  It's also made more difficult by the fact that some levels can be quite long, which is a problem, as there are those which frankly go on too long - but I feel it's nice to have an option, as Yoshi's New Island was sorely lacking in particularly developed levels.  There's a lot of death-based difficulty, also; ski slope sequences and Secret 1 (Welcome To Yoshi Tower!) are all about dying over and over 'til you learn the level.  For the most part, though, I think it was difficult in the right places.  The problem is that the difficulty isn't actually fun, and levels can drag on long past their welcome.  This is an issue which is hard to disentangle from the way Yoshi's Island works as a stage-based exploration platformer, though.  I think I actually found it vaguely more satisfying than Yoshi's New Island, partly as some levels were longer, partly as Middle Rings saved stars, but I don't know if I'd say it was all that much better as a game.  But I felt there was more breadth to YIDS.

 

I'll come back to level design, as what I'd want to say for that mostly comes under the category of "Newness."  But since the remark doesn't fit anywhere else, I'll say here that YIDS has an absolutely dreadful camera.  In a 2D platformer!  It's always scrolling too high or too low or too right or too left, and never looking where you actually want to see things.  Just centre the wretched thing!

 

Bosses:

Better than I remembered!  I never liked the fact that some of the bosses in this game were random weird things rather than giant regular enemies, but on a replay, it's actually only two out of ten, which is... still stupid, but not as bad as I remembered.  Both original bosses are unnecessary, though.  Priscilla the Peckish, a weird antlion thing, is actually stupidly easy - just jump over it to get its attention - but there's no reason why it shouldn't have been a Ptooie Piranha of some kind; likewise, Six-Face Sal, who is actually fought in a really interesting way, should've been replaced by a Lakitu or, well, again a Ptooie Piranha.  So on a conceptual level, I disagree with those.  Also with Hector the Reflector Spectre or whatever it was called, but you only need to reskin it as a Boo or claim that it was controlling all the psychic furniture throughout the level.

 

As for the rest, on a conceptual level, I was pleasantly surprised.  They made interesting bosses out of a lot of regular enemies, like the new Bungee Piranha, and I thought that Moltz the Very Goonie was both a pretty good, cute boss and an amusing riff on Raphael Raven.  I thought it was actually clever that the first boss of the game is two Burt Bros., where the first boss of the original Yoshi's Island was just one - of an enemy only encountered in pairs.  So that made a lot of sense.

 

Difficulty is totally variable, though.  The Burt Bros. seem to have wonky hitboxes, as I'm sure I got hit multiple times in fighting them while not actually touching them.  Conversely, the mecha Stilt Guy who was I think the penultimate world boss was ridiculously easy if you only had eggs or were using Baby Bowser.  But I liked the idea of both of them.  Well, that's the general theme of YIDS, in my opinion...

 

Story and Presentation:

The story is terrible and introduces the random time-travel element revisited, bafflingly, in YNI.  I'm not going to dwell on it, as it's stupid, but at least they tried and actually came up with a reason for babies to be kidnapped in this game.  Likewise, the presentation of the story is deficient.  Cutscenes are way slower than they need to be, and the narration does a lot of telling where we'd be perfectly fine being shown in the corresponding graphics.  Also, the text size on the narration is absurdly small for the screen it's on.

 

But!  There are occasional moments where the narration actually stands out as funny, or at least vaguely mischievous - like when Baby Bowser is sent blasting off again and the narrator asks "Do you think we'll ever see him again?  Eh, who cares."  In addition, the narration doesn't talk down to the player, which it absolutely does in YNI.  So let's call it a draw.

 

Newness:

Yoshi's Island DS wins, hands-down.  Yoshi's New Island was very conspicuously trying to win players over by being a nostalgia trip, a new lick of paint on old ideas, but YIDS actually has loads of new ideas.  Criticise the execution all you want - it's not a very fun game.  But it actually

tried, and I respect that a lot.  Multiple babies with different powers was a logical way for the game to go, and playing as Baby Wario waving a giant magnet around to grab coins was great, even if it was coded weirdly (it only seems to work when you're facing away from something, and you have to be jumping or in the air...).  The Enemy Museum to showcase all the enemies in the game was great.  Then there are quite a few new enemies - new kinds of Shy Guy, Bungee Piranha, the use of Super Big Tap-Tap to have chase sequences that go up and down hills and even up a vertical shaft.  There are also new terrain types - western deserts, boats, I'm not sure if the original Yoshi's Island had the tropical tileset.  There are new gameplay devices, like the numbered balls you have to cart around and throw into the right receptacle, and of course there's all the stuff only the babies can do.  There's that giant kangaroo thing - again, useless, and they didn't do enough with it, but it's there and it's not just a rip-off of Poochie.  Yoshi's Island DS actually set out to include lots of new ideas and new material.  It had ambition, and while it didn't have the talent to realise that ambition as something good, it tried.  Yoshi's New Island didn't.

 

YIDS also gets bonus points for at least putting stars on the menu screen for every world I 1000%, whereas Yoshi's New Island gave me nothing.

 

So, in closing.  Both Yoshi's Island DS and Yoshi's New Island are unfun games with level design which is rarely interesting and sometimes unfair.  Yoshi's New Island is a much prettier game, too.  But YNI is also fatally derivative and unambitious, aspiring to nothing more than to be a prettier version of the original game with some superficial bits of style tacked on.  It wishes it could be Kirby Triple Deluxe, in other words, but even with a delayed release date, there was nothing to be done.  Yoshi's Island DS looks a lot better for being played in retrospect of YNI; it looks different, it plays differently, it has new ideas and isn't ashamed of them.  P4RGaming's skewering of YNI in "We Wanted to Make a Worse Version of Yoshi's Island" is spot-on, but Arzest also managed to make a worse version of Yoshi's Island DS.  Being pretty is all YNI has going for it.  Whereas for Yoshi's Island DS, while I wouldn't say it's worth getting 5000%, I'm genuinely glad I replayed it.

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