Yoshi's Story

"What - in the world - is - this…"

It is really hard for me to write this review, I have no words, and that is because words can’t describe how I feel after having played this game, and I am sure everyone that has played Yoshi’s Island feels the same, this game is the most infamous insults to Yoshi and even to Mario that Nintendo has ever done, then it is also an insult to the classic 2D platform genre, and finally, it is an insult to all of us fools that bought this, this, but, wait a sec, what in the heck is this?

Graphics (10/10):
Let’s begin with the good part of this unnamable mess, the graphics, aside from bring insanely beautiful (Yoshi’s Story is possibly the best looking game for the N64), they are perfect for one reason, they are a good example about how good new generation games could have been, when I first heard about the PlayStation and N64 I innocently thought about how amazing the new games were going to be, I used to think: if Donkey Kong Country had such incredible graphics with only 32 megabytes, I just can’t imagine how beautiful the new Donkey Kong games are going to be with the hundreds of megabytes a compact disk or a N64 cartridge can hold. Ah!, fool little brat… Anyway, Yoshi’s Story is a good example of what I had in mind, sadly the gameplay is not, and man if it is not.

Of course, all of that is only about their quality, because graphically this game is not near as nice as it should have been, it lacks the variety and beauty Yoshi’s Island had, not to mention the originally and the overall unique feel the previous game had.

Music (5/10):
The music is not bad, but it is far from the amazingly nice and catchy tunes from the previous games, a prove of it is that cannot remember a single tunes from this game, while I can start singing all the tunes from Yoshi’s Island in no time. And like if that weren’t enough, there is not enough music, bah!

The voices are extremely silly but very cute, could have been good if the rest of the game weren’t so unbelievably disappointing.

Gameplay (2/10):
To put it simply, the gameplay is terrible, terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE, and terrible too, boring as hell, stupid as hell, to sum up, terrible as never before. Yoshi’s movements are more or less the same ones from Yoshi’s Island (throw and make eggs, float for a while after jumping, etc), but that is not enough save this game as I will try to explain now.

The game is divided in six worlds, six worlds whose the stages are junk, and when compared with the ones of Yoshi’s Island they are much more than junk, THOSE were stages, incredibly imaginative and perfectly designed, but not this time, the stages here are incredibly simple, there is nothing, absolutely anything interesting about them, they are all the way the same, they basically end in the same way they start. Now, let me explain something, I said end, but I should have said the “last part of each stage is the same as the beginning of it”, because the stages are like structured in parts, and the last part of each scenario leads to beginning of it again, this is more or less like in any other 3D platformer where the stages never end because they are like little worlds, only that in 2D, and this is because our objective is to gather fruit, not beating the stage.

Ok, so the main objective in the game is to eat fruits?, yes, once we eat thirty of them the scenario will suddenly end, and that is it, if you have collected some special items (Hearts) more stages are going to be available in that world.

Also, Yoshi’s Story is one of the shortest games in existence, you can beat in more less half an hour, and I am not joking, of course that is skipping most of the stages, because to gain access to all of them we have to find certain items in the first stages, but even with that it is a very, very short game, and also, there is no point on playing them because they are all too similar as I said before. And then we have the difficulty, man, Yoshi’s Island, while not a hard game by any means, had a nice challenge as well as tons and tons of secrets to discover, something that Yoshi’s Story lacks AT ALL, there are some secrets, secrets that when compared with the ones of Yoshi’s Island are nothing less than the most putrid and uninteresting secrets ever.

The naked truth:
This “game” has some other things I haven’t talked about, in fact, there is a plot and everything, but I will skip that because I don’t want to waste more time in this shameful “thing”, Yoshi’s Story was the game in which I had all my hopes, all my faith, and everything because it seemed a traditional side scroller in the vein of the ancient Nintendo masterpieces, but, at least for now, I can’t remember having played a more disappointing game in my whole life.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 03/25/04