Yoshi's Island - I sat down yesterday and beat the back half of the game Worlds 4-6.
A lot of it was a not fun experience. There were parts in worlds 4/5 where I was asking myself "I thought I'd reached the point in my life where if a game is not fun, I would shelve it?" I wasn't hate playing it, it's not that bad, but it just wasn't fun to play and felt like work. But I figured I'd come this far and I'm playing Wooly World and Crafted World and I want a better frame of reference for the series, so I'm going to stick with it and get it done.
Because about 50% of my issues with YI were stemming from the controls being kinda bad, and in my 3 hour session I got a blister on my right thumb from having to push the jump button down so hard repeatedly to get the right jump and flutter and almost one on my left thumb from having to hit down super hard just to get the butt stomp (which is a regular essential move) to come out, not to mention having it move left or right a bit from where I want to stomp, I thought it's possible the game doesn't have shit controls compared to SMW and every other platformer, maybe this 8bitdo wireless SNES classic is just a bad controller, so I played the last few stages in World 6 with the default wired controllers and discovered...yeah, the 8bitdo controller is kinda bad. I immediately noticed 2 things going back to the wired controller. One was the d-pad was nice as soft and I could butt slam easily by just pressing down (on 8bitdo pressing down would never butt stomp, I had to hold it down for a second strongly) and I also would butt slam straight down where I wanted, as it turns out that the 8bitdo controller would read down hold presses as diagonal down/left or down/right and move me off where I wanted to slam by a few spots. Also the default controller buttons were much softer and I didn't have to press anywhere near as hard to get the level of jump I wanted. The 8bitdo buttons are more like an arcade stick raised and clicky and take more pressure to push down for maximum jump power.
I'm sure the 8bitdo controller is fine for 90% of SNES/NES games where you're slashing a sword or doing a dodge and punch. But it turns out that for one of the most tight precision required platformers ever made that is Yoshi's Island...it's not up to snuff and definitely made YI a much harder game experience than it should've been.
So after I beat World 6, I replayed the stages in World 1 where I didn't have 100s and got them all and did the secret stage for that world.
Still, if the controller was part of my issue with Yoshi's Island, at most it'd be 50% of my problems with the game. The other 50% is pure gameplay/level design issues. In my opinion, Yoshi's Island is the Dark Souls of the Mario Franchise, and I'm not even saying that because it's hard. YI's level design comes from the same thread of design that Dark Souls comes from and Castlevania/Megaman to a degree.
I continually found in Yoshi's Island that if there was a pit in front of you that required a jump, an off-screen enemy in front would be positioned and timed perfectly so when you jump forward and scroll the screen to make them appear, you'll be hit directly in the face with a projectile making you lose the baby and also giving you a slight knockback aka medusa heads in CV. This sometimes also knocked you back just enough to fall into a pit and insta-death. This happens all of the time in Yoshi's Island. If you don't play like Dark Souls where you move very slowly and carefully through the level's you're constantly hit by cheap hits making you lose the baby. This is especially true in the exploration stages. Like Dark Souls, when you know where the enemies are, it's much easier on the 2nd time around, but the first time in a new area the game is cheap as hell. It feels like they want you to pace the game slowly exploring and punish you for playing like a normal platformer.
Most of my favorite stages in the game are the auto-scrolling stages. Because I found these stages don't have a lot or any cheap shit and the pacing, which is controlled by the scrolling, is actually good.
Because man does this game have pacing issues. There was one mid-castle in the last few worlds that is like THIRTY MINUTES long. At some point I just wanted the damn stage to be over already. The vehicles sections are also all really bad. Especially the slow mole tank with crappy controls. Helicopter is more ok but still lame. Super baby bits are all super scripted and boring. Like for all the "YI is great!" praise, there's some legit not good gameplay stuff in here.
I also have problems with the music. Wait, you say YI has the best classic tracks out there and every Yoshi game after has been compared and found lacking in music! Yeah, the songs themselves are great! But I have an issue that there's like 4 songs the entire game. I'm not even exaggerating, I would be very surprised if there's more than 4-6 tracks for the stage music for the entire game. There's like the standard field song, the underground song, uhhh a couple more songs? I dunno, I feel like the entire game is listening to a couple songs that are 30 seconds long repeat for hours at a time and that's kinda...bad. I don't play a lot of retro gaming, but could they just not afford larger soundtracks back then? Or ran out of cartridge size? Idk.
Now that being said, I wanna talk about all the positives of Yoshi's Island and what it does right.
First of all, the boss fights are all GREAT. Fuck everything else being compared to YI in later games, this is the real standard later Yoshi/Mario platformers should all be compared on. Every boss fight is unique and creatively designed. They're also all designed to be doable without taking any damage since you need that for a 100 score. Pretty fair and fun fights. Challenging too. On the stretchy blob boss you have to keep shooting inward towards its heart while being pushed back to a platform that ends, I cleared that final hit like a half millimeter from falling to my doom. Good fights. The bird guy on the moon was cool and the Arkanoid color tiles spike guy boss was great.
The game also has moments of brilliance in level design. Every level or two they're always trying new stuff and sometimes it's just great and everything works. The art style is great, tons of variety in environments, lots of great sprites, cool effects.
Yoshi's Island as a whole feels like playing a game with equal moments of brilliant design sections and baffling crap sections. Especially if you're going for 100% on stages. Take whatever the amount of normal bullshit at times and then multiply it by a factor of 5 if going for 100%, in a lot of ways YI feels like a 10 hour game made to last kids months in the 90s by making a lot of trial and error and having to redo long stages all over to get perfect runs of everything. Thankfully today, save states make this a hell of a lot easier, but there's still enough bs in there that if I got 100 on a stage, great. But if I didn't I had no interest in redoing it to get 100 and just moved on. While it was mildly fun getting all the 100% clears on world 1 and doing the secret stage, I don't have any motivation to do that on the rest of the worlds because some of the levels are not that fun and long, very long.
In the end, I didn't really hate Yoshi's Island, but I definitely didn't love it either. I probably tried playing this game a few times back in the 90s since I must've owned it, but I must've not liked it then either because this was definitely my first time seeing a lot of the stages. I started playing Crafted World and while it's a different kind of game and not really even a platformer, in apples to apples comparison, I've simply had more fun with my time in the crafted world levels than I did in any of these YI levels. YI's fun is the masochist kind of fun to me. I love Dark Souls, but I don't like getting ganked parts of dark souls, I like all the rest of the stuff in dark souls like the boss fights and exploration. I also enjoy CV, but I don't enjoy medusa-head type stuff knocking me into pits. YI is too much bullshit to make it a consistently fun game.
Surprisingly though I liked the final world, world 6, the most of all the worlds and had the least issues with it because forget all the collectibles, World 6 is just a good platformer. The rest of the worlds in Yoshi's Island can't decide whether they are trying to be a platformer stage or an exploration collectibles stages and the middleground they sit between doesn't really satisfy either imo.