Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island Review

This review originally appeared in E26, November 1995.

A Mario game without Mario? What could Shigeru Miyamoto have been thinking of? What he usually thinks of, of course, namely creating a game that’s as enjoyable as it is innovative, as compelling as it is charming.

Designed to take advantage of the Super FX cartridge chip which allows large scale object scaling and rotating, Yoshi’s Island is an example of what every good videogame should be – a fusion of technology and creativity, each enhancing the other.

The essential elements of the Super Mario gameplay, that has sold 117 million cartridges to date, remain unchanged in Yoshi’s Island. The two-button run ‘n’ jump control mechanics with which Super Mario Bros. defined the platform genre are intact. There are still coins to collect to gain extra lives, enemies can still be destroyed by a quick jump on the head, and the goal of the game is still to reach the end of the increasingly tortuous levels.

But it’s what’s been added to Yoshi’s Island that raises it above other platform games. The discovery of these new features is a major part of the pleasure of playing.

First, there’s Yoshi himself. Second billing in Super Mario World has given way to a starring role in the sequel, and his abilities are the starting point for the whole game. Most important is Yoshi’s egg-laying power. Using his tongue, he can grab an enemy character and, by means of a pull down on the joypad, swallow them. He then lays an egg which he can fire to take out other enemies or hit out-of-reach bonuses. Yoshi’s other skills include limited flying and a ground dive used to drive objects into the ground and burrow through ‘soft’ blocks.

After eating a watermelon, Yoshi is temporarily able to spit out seeds like a machine gun and, after swallowing a fiery monster, he acts like a flamethrower. Then there are special transformation bubbles which turn him into a helicopter, a motorised mole, a submarine or a car, all of which are used to access new areas. Even Baby Mario can get in on the action – a star turns him into Super Baby Mario which makes him invulnerable for a while and allows him to speed through a level.

Touches like this are major additions to the Mario canon, comparable with the suits of Super Mario Bros 3 and the introduction of Yoshi in Super Mario World. The innovations in Yoshi’s Island allow far greater variety in terms of both gameplay and level design.

And, thanks to the Super FX chip, the levels reach new heights of fantastical experimentation here. There are simple polygon effects like drawbridges dropping out of the background, spinning platforms shaped like giant hexagonal tombolas, and see-saws teetering over lava pits. Characters are also scaled and rotated: instead of using individual frames of animation, enemies now roll backwards if Yoshi spits them out, and level bosses are giant-sized versions of standard enemy characters enlarged, before your very eyes, by the game’s villain, the wizard Kamek.

But most impressive of all the Super FX-inspired tricks are the special levels. On one forest level, strange fluffy fungi float across the screen and if Yoshi touches one everything goes psychedelic: Yoshi’s eyes widen, he starts to stagger around and the entire level wobbles from side to side in parallax, with the background wobbling in a different direction. Another level sees Yoshi swallowed by a frog and fighting inside the amphibian’s stomach – a stretchy-walled single screen. One fight with an end-of-world boss even takes place on a tiny moon – as Yoshi and the boss race around it, the moon and the whole background behind it rotate spectacularly.

Yoshi’s Island boasts such a huge collection of special effects, tricks and creative flourishes that you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s a bit empty on the gameplay front. Simplicity was always the key to the success of the Super Mario games, and surely overdosing on extras would kill the heart of the game? Well, the Mario series has never been short of spectacular moments and Yoshi’s Island merely takes things about as far as is possible on the Super Nintendo. What’s far more important is the way all the effects are integrated into the gameplay and how challenging yet approachable the game is.

The task of transporting Baby Mario across each level is straightforward enough and cleverly handled. Should Yoshi be hit by one of the enemy characters, the tot is knocked off his back and floats off in a balloon. A timer counts down and if Yoshi doesn’t get him back before it reaches zero, Kamek’s minions take Mario away. To boost the timer to a maximum of 30 seconds, Yoshi can collect small walking stars stored in bonus clouds.

The tiny stars also serve another purpose: if Yoshi finishes a level with the maximum number of 30 stars and collects every flower and red coin on the level, his level score reaches 100. Finish all eight levels on a world with this ‘perfect’ score and two hidden levels appear. And so the game can be played in two ways – as a ‘simple’ romp through every level, or as a far harder quest for the hidden worlds. Trying to perfect every level is a major challenge, and there’s a host of surprises lying in wait for players willing to explore.

Everything in Yoshi’s Island – from the placement of platforms to the endearing rough-edged graphical style – reveals an attention to detail that few games can match. After mastering the new controls, it’s all down to the player’s own ability, a thorough search of each level and a bit of lateral thinking. Only the linear design will disappoint Mario veterans. After the genuine exploration aspect of Super Mario World, the rather basic set-up in Yoshi’s Island – level one leads to level two and so on – is something of a step backwards.

That aside, Yoshi’s Island is a welcome addition to the series – as playable, challenging and entertaining as the best of the other Mario games. Thanks to the Super FX chip, there are some wonderfully inventive touches which make each new level a reward to the player and act as an incentive to play on. Inevitably, Yoshi’s Island will have less impact than the SNES debut game Super Mario World, but all the qualities of the Mario games are present in Yoshi’s Island, and it safely leaves every other platformer in its wake. Let’s hope Miyamoto and his team can be as creative with the technology at their disposal in N64 Mario.