[Throughout this project, I will be handing over to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. For this one I’m delighted to welcome for the first time Ryo Miyauchi, a fellow writer at The Singles Jukebox who has his own excellent sequential blogging project at Morning Coffee]
Yoshi’s Story doubles down on the childlike innocence of the still-nascent Yoshi franchise, first introduced by Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island for the SNES. It’s highlighted quite literally through the back story: Yoshi’s Island is now flattened into a pop-up storybook due to Baby Bowser stealing the island’s main source of joy, the Super Happy Tree. Each stage is a page flip into a new chapter, and the player gets a read-through of the adventure that happened in the chapter after each completion, like a happily-ever-after conclusion of a bedtime story.
But that naive perspective also feeds into the approach to gameplay, too. Yoshi’s Story is not exactly the linear adventure familiar to the Super Mario series. The goal is even easier than reaching a finish line: you explore its world in a loop until you finish collecting 30 fruits scattered across the stage.
Yoshi’s Story can be a more challenging game if you let it. Melons take more of an effort to find in the game than the basic assortment of apples, bananas, grapes and watermelons. It’s possible to complete your 30-fruit run by collecting only melons — and there are gameplay runs dedicated to this rule — but you need to know all the hidden steps like the bonus stages, mystery boxes, and time trial mini games that reward you with the extra fruit.
There’s also the smiling hearts scattered in every stage. Not grabbing them doesn’t hinder you from advancing through the game, but the amount you collect does determine how many stages get unlocked as you flip to the next world. Find all three, and you can play all of the four available ones the next round.
If you’re not much of a completist or not so interested in spicing up the rules, Yoshi’s Story will be a breeze. “Geez no wonder I beat this game in 10 minutes the day I got it,” writes a user on their own forum thread asking about how to unlock all of the game levels. It’s not so obvious what the hearts exactly do or that there are more levels to uncover. If you’re used to just keeping moving forward, the game will be too easy.
The hidden collectibles encourage the more curious players to see what else is out there, not just the melons and hearts but also all of the colorful details that make up Yoshi’s Story’s pop-up book universe. The worlds wholly reside in a place of imagination, like the lava-filled stage of World 2 or the land above the skies in World 3, which a species of flying caterpillars help you navigate through its clouds. A time limit doesn’t exist in the game, and without an end point to its world, one has the luxury to check out every spec of the stage as long as they like.
The added incentive to collect those smiling hearts in preparation for World 3 are the different bosses unique to the stages. Sticking to its childlike perspective, the creatures are too adorable to see them as a legitimate threat. Like its name suggests, Cloud N. Candy is a big, cotton-candy-looking blob of a boss character who cannot cause damage to Yoshi; in fact, licking it gives you more health. A few more exist, though they also resemble a toddler’s doodle of a monster, like the chubby dinosaur Don Bongo or Inviso, another blobby ghost with a big-toothed smile.
Like a lot of the Mario series, the characters have stuck around in my memory, like the dog sidekick Poochy or the annoying elephant guard Pak E. Derm. For Yoshi’s Story, they’ve endured more than the gameplay itself. There’s not too much to remember strictly on the concept: you just keep eating fruits until you get to the last stage, where you fight Baby Bowser. Nothing is stopping you from taking a good look at what’s around as you do your fruit-collecting. It’s better if you do, but it’s OK if you don’t.
