Topic: RetroActive #14: Yoshi's Story -- Official Discussion Thread

[Stratos]

I remember that if you got the heart power-ups in the right spots letters would appear and create a secret phrase if you wrote them all down from all of the levels. I even had the players guide (back then I collected them for the fun of it) and it had a page where you could fill in what the letters were. My sister has it now so I'll have to go look at it to see what the phrase was but that was always an interesting hidden feature.

[Killer_Man_Jaro]

Completed my straight run-through of the game. I'm tempted to go back and try a few 30 Melon runs, since everyone says it opens up the intricacies of the levels and actually provides a challenge(!).

I will give the game credit for the later Castle stages, which are probably the closest to old Yoshi's Island levels in terms of having sprawling areas to explore and backtrack through with a key to move on. The late levels also made it clear to me that Nintendo themselves recommended going for all the melons to get the most out of Yoshi's Story - some of the rooms in the castles were little self-contained sections that were there only to hide a few melons. I definitely want to try playing the game this way, although my feeling is that certain levels would be a pain to collect every melon on, like the Jelly Cave.

Overall, I'm glad I was able to experience this game, as it was generally enjoyable. I understand why people might be disappointed -- several aspects of the gameplay were not executed as well as they could have been, some of which I described in my first post. And where were the awesome bosses that its spiritual predecessor was full of? Perhaps the cumbersome controls kept bosses out of the game; the ability to move while aiming eggs was excised to allow the player to aim manually, which would be fine except there is never a pressing need to do that.

[LittleIrves]

This is one of those games I got really excited for upon its announcement, then bypassed for no great reason when it released.  I fear I let the naysayers dissuade me, as I was 17 and impressionable.  Now that I'm 29 and confident that liking a cutesy pop-up book done in primary colors will not render me impotent, I'm able to give the game an honest look.  And more importantly, play the darn thing and have fun doing so. 

I only just downloaded it and have played through the first two levels.  Just enough to scratch the surface and see what the basics entail.  But already I love the graphical style and opening theme music.  I'm curious to see how the gameplay holds up over multiple play-throughs, which seems necessary in order to see the whole game (an idea I'm not opposed to).  In fact, I sort of love the idea that I can "beat" the game with a minimal amount of effort if I so choose.  Eat any fruit, play through the 6 pages once, and boom -- Game Over.  I hate that so many games make simply completing the main quest such an arduous task.  I love the satisfaction of "winning" a game, but when I was younger I could count on two hands the number of times I'd done just that.  I'm a bit more willing to dig my heels in nowadays, but the idea itself, of offering up an Easy Mode without making it an option on a menu screen, is a creative solution to the problem of game difficulty for a wide-ranging crowd of players.  Such flexibility-by-design is rarely seen.  Too bad the kiddy aesthetic doomed this game to be ignored by so many macho teens like myself back in 1998.

More impressions as I get further into the fruit-eating action...

[Jonnyboy117]

At this point, I'm mainly looking to play new stages as I replay the game. When I get to a "page" without any blue boxes, it's hard to force myself through an old stage just to keep going.

Also, the castle levels are ridiculously unbalanced with the rest of the game. I can get there without any trouble, then lose three Yoshis in five minutes before finally reaching Bowser Jr. One castle level in particular has egregious design problems like bottomless pits located above other parts of the level. I haven't seen that since Zelda 2.

[LittleIrves]

I just found out the Castle's unbalanced difficulty first-hand....   Somehow I got there with only 3 Yoshi's remaining (this is my first play-through of the game, so I'm experimenting a bit and, thus, losing).  I quickly lose 2 more.  I need only a dozen or so fruit. As something of a manual difficulty adjustment, I've been trying to limit myself to the melons and my "lucky" fruit (in this case, the apples).  My last Yoshi, Ol' Red, is jumping and licking away.  Finally I need a single, solitary fruit.  By this point I'll take anything: banana, berries, anything.  Suddenly I enter one of those Question Box challenges--here, a gauntlet of buzz saws and swords.  I evade what I think is the last of the blades before I jump and land just barely on the edge of a spinning saw, and Pow -- The Shy Guys take me away.  Game Over.  I have to start again from Page 1.

Feeling a little ashamed...

(And I've beaten Bit.Trip BEAT, CORE, and RUNNER!)

So the fault lies where?  Loose controls?  My own sloppy play?  Or unbalanced level design?  Hard to say.  But that adorable theme music just became a whole lot more grating on my nerves.

[Goldenlink18]

Yey Yoshi Story I remeber when I used to play it as a kid it so much. I can't wait hear you talk about it.

[Retro Deckades]

There is one thing in particular that I will never forgive this game for: giving Yoshi a voice. His "Yoshi" grunt used to be one of my favourite things about him. It was a cool, odd little sound that personified him perfectly. When he actually says "Yoshi" in that wussy little voice, I just can't stand it. I just think of it as totally unfitting for the character. I could see it fitting within the context of Yoshi's Story, but every Yoshi game since has adopted this terrible decision. Whereas Yoshi used to be a character I would select in the Mario Kart or Mario Party series, I now find myself often avoiding him for this reason. They changed an iconic Nintendo character for the worse, attributing to him the characteristic of a Pokemon -- he once was distinct, but now he only says his own name. Therefore, I was not surprised to hear you guys talk about the subsequent unsuccessful games following Yoshi's Story.

[anand]

Y'all hatin'.

Good discussion (even if my beloved Yoshi got quite the drubbing). I'd argue a few points, though.

1) I think you can tell the melons are the 'right' way to play the game when you try to get all (or almost all) of the melons on a level. Most of them are linked to fun little challenges, which accounts for most of the actual 'gameplay' in the game. It seems pretty obvious that eating the first 30 fruit you see and skipping 95% of the content is the 'wrong' way to play. And the weight of the melons in the scoring also strongly indicates their importance (although not explicitly).

2) Speaking of which, I don't think the scoring system is necessarily broken. The melons are most of the score, true. But that's just the base of the score. The 'expert' score would be 30 Melons + your non-melon mastery of the level. I'm not going to pretend like I've pushed the scoring system to it's boundaries and can testify as to how rigorous it is, but I don't see anything wrong with the concept.

3) THE CONTROLS. They are slippery and squirelly. But not laggy or unresponsive. I will never believe that Nintendo just programmed them poorly or sloppily. I have to think they were intentional. And they ARE strange, but certainly manageable. Plus, they give the game just a bit more of its own identity. It's interesting that you brought up Sonic in the same episode, because I think the YS controls have some similarities with Sonic controls, in terms of the slipperiness and its divisive effect on the audience. I mean, did Yoshi really control so much different than Luigi in SMB2?

Oh, and the music is undeniably undeniable. It's like a litmus test to check who has a soul. As for the mysterious lyrics, some folks believe that what Yoshi is really singing in the main theme is something along the lines of "Ballz, look at mah ballz."

[Jonnyboy117]

anand:


1) That's circuitous logic. Why would you try to get all melons unless you already knew it was the "right" way to play? My point was simply that the game is opaque, a point that someone earlier in the thread made as well.


3) It is quite possible that the specific feel of the game's controls was intentional. But I don't care, because the end result doesn't feel good when I play it. It's frustrating to complete even simple jumps, and it was a major turn-off for me.

[pyrokamileon]

in the song I always thought they said "the apple".. not that it makes any sense..

[Stratos]

in the song I always thought they said "the apple".. not that it makes any sense..

Until you realize that the Yoshi island is actually MANHATTAN ISLAND TURNED INTO A STORY BOOK!

[anand]

Jonny:

I would never argue that the game is not opaque. I'm not saying people playing it would immediately KNOW it was the right way to play. I just thought some of the guys on the podcast disputed that 30 melons WAS the 'correct' path, but maybe I misheard.

That's fair about the controls. They're strange. I didn't enjoy Littlebigplanet for similar reasons. And I'm not really enamored of the physics in Super Meat Boy, either.

[yoshi1001]

At the time of its release I wrote an article comparing it to Wario Land 2 (the two games came out somewhat near the same time). Wario Land 2 just felt a lot more innovative, whereas this seemed a bit uninspired (or perhaps underinspired).

By the way, the music for this game was composed by Kazumi Totaka, and his famous song is present in one of the menus if you let the game sit for a while.