Yoshi’s Island is a great game with one terrible mechanic.

I am not a very nostalgia-focused person. Considering the way I have spent my whole life surrounding myself with old games, it would be easy to think this was not the case. However, I think that precisely because I have spent my whole life surrounding myself with old games, they never seemed old. I played Super Mario Bros. for the first time when I was 2, and have held onto and replayed every game I’ve gotten since then. Since my memories of Donkey Kong Country and Sonic the Hedgehog go back to when I played them last week and not the summer I spent at my cousin’s house playing them and learning what it means to love a woman thanks to his poster of Tiffany Amber Thiessen, I don’t really have the impulse to go make YouTube comments on songs from video game soundtracks to the tune of “I LISTENED TO THIS SONG AND CRIED BECUZ I MISS MY CHILDHOOD SO PLZ UPVOTE AND THEN LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE TO MY CHANNEL I DO GROCERY UNBOXINGS”.

So while I’m not overcome with nostalgia for games in most cases, there are a few games that I never owned, but fondly remember from specific times in my life, and as a result I do hold some nostalgic feelings for them. Most of these are late-era SNES and early-era N64 games; stuff like Mega Man X3, Mortal Kombat 3, Pilotwings 64, Wave Race 64, and others. One that always stands out, though, is Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island. It was billed as the sequel to Super Mario World, maybe the first game to ever completely blow my mind, so I pretty much liked it by default, but I never ended up getting it as a kid (I got Chrono Trigger, Earthworm Jim 2, and Earthbound that Christmas though, so it ended up being pretty solid anyway). As a result, it invokes strong memories of my preteens (a great time in my life), so I always had a fondness for it.

I had a weird problem with it though. As much as I loved looking at Yoshi’s Island, anytime I picked it up, I’d play two to three levels of it and not touch it again for a year. I could never figure out why, since I ostensibly really enjoyed the game; so, I buckled down and really made myself play through it, and earned 100% completion on every level. In doing so, I figured out why it took 20 years to finish a platformer I ostensibly loved.

It turns out, Yoshi’s Island is an absurdly long, tedious game. It isn’t a bad game, as a surprisingly large contingent of people have been saying recently (most notably Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb), but it has some glaring problems, and as the follow-up (or direct sequel, according to the US marketing) to a game that was basically flawless, that makes those problems a lot harder to get past.

The big issue that a lot of people seem to have is with the way the game controls, specifically the egg throwing mechanics. This has always been my biggest point in defending the game, though; I’ve found that the more people use that mechanic as their primary attack, the less they enjoy the game, but throwing eggs just really isn’t all that important to the way the game is played. Just like in Super Mario World, Yoshi’s tongue is his most useful offense, since it allows you to defeat most of the enemies in the game without wasting your limited egg ammo, and most of the enemies that can’t be eaten can’t be hurt by eggs either. The eggs are put to much better use solving puzzles and collecting unreachable items.

The real problem that hurts the game, though, is its emphasis on collectables. While earlier games experimented with the idea of having secret, optional pickups scattered throughout the world that unlocked bonus content (such as the Chaos Emeralds in the Sonic games), Yoshi’s Island is the first major game I can think of that made the kind of tedious trinket-hunting that would become infamous in the years to come a major part of the gameplay. While its predecessor featured secret exits to discover and even displayed a completion percentage on the save/load screen, Yoshi’s Island puts collectibles front and center, forcing those who want to see the all the levels to abandon any hope of enjoying the game and instead carefully explore every nook and cranny of every level looking for red coins and flowers that offer no value to the player but making their completion score go up.

Yoshi’s Island was the first Mario game to use this style of gameplay, but when Super Mario 64 used it the following year, it became the template for all platformers, to the extent that it’s still being used as the foundation for a lot of games now (hell, Ubisoft games would be 45 minutes long without that mechanic). Why criticize Yoshi’s Island for this when hundreds of games have come out, and continue to come out, that do the same thing?

While adding additional things to find may have been a forward-thinking bit of design (for better or worse), the rest of the game was very much created to function like its predecessors. While Miyamoto’s game design philosophy has always been about exploration (which is likely why rewarding players for finding collectibles seemed like a good idea), the 2D Mario games specifically were about linear exploration (as opposed to the more open-ended nature of the Zelda series), the joy of finding ways to get through the level as quickly, safely, and efficiently as possible, and once you picked a path, you couldn’t always go all the way back. Yoshi’s Island is more linear than most, though; if you miss a flower, you have to play through the level again. If you get hit in a level and lose stars, you have to play the level again. If you move over just enough to trigger a floating Shy Guy carrying a red coin, and he flies away with it, even if all of that happens off-screen and you never see it, you have to play the entire level again. This would be fine if the game played like Super Mario World, with momentum and speed, but it doesn’t; until you know where everything is, you have to move slowly and deliberately, being careful not to miss any secret paths. You also have to make sure you travel everywhere in the level, because you never know if flowers and red coins might be on a hidden path or the main route, so where in any other platformer you might get excited because you found a hidden shortcut or trick to bypass a bunch of enemies, you find yourself immediately turning around and going back to see what you missed. It kills the joy of exploration in a platformer; where in Super Mario World or Sonic the Hedgehog you’d be thrilled you found a secret section that leads you somewhere new, in Yoshi’s Island you just get anxious that you’ve gone the wrong way and won’t be able to go back, thus necessitating having to play the level again.

Of course, all of that would be fine if the levels were shorter. Unfortunately, stages in Yoshi’s Island take an average of 15–20 minutes apiece to complete, sometimes longer (particularly the mazes). This just amplifies the sinking feeling you start to get when you know you’re at the end of a level and are nowhere close to the total of flowers or coins required. I am not fond of speedruns, and I don’t think they make a good completion time metric (since so many of them are based on memory manipulation and glitches rather than actual gameplay), but even the world record 100% speedrun, for someone who knows where everything is and uses speedrun assistance tools, is just short of 2 hours. For someone who doesn’t know where to find everything, it feels like hours of replaying the same areas over and over looking for things that can be in very obscure places.

It would be easy to recommend that players just skip this entire part of the game, but the problem is that the levels that are unlocked through completion scores actually may be the best in the game. In particular, level 2’s bonus stage, Hit That Switch!!, is one of the best Mario levels I’ve ever played, period. It’s insane in a way that, were it not for the recent release of Super Mario Maker, I’d have nothing to compare it to, save for maybe some of the Special stages from Super Mario World, and extremely difficult, even once you know the “trick” to the level. Hit That Switch!! shows what Yoshi’s Island was capable of being: an innovative, challenging, fast-moving platformer that featured collectibles as an extra challenge, not as a tedious hunt. Sadly, there aren’t a lot of levels that share this design philosophy, and the game suffers.

Or, rather, it suffers for those who want to see everything it has to offer. For those who don’t care, it still manages to be a perfectly fun platformer, and one of the most aesthetically impressive 2D games ever made (both due to its Super FX 2 chip-powered scaling and rotating, which allowed for enormous, detailed sprites, and for the amazing design and color choices made by the art team). It has a lot of clever tricks to pull, and never feels stale when you’re running straight through the levels.

It’s a shame Nintendo decided to make such a large part of Yoshi’s Island a huge chore, but considering what a big influence the decision was on the later Mario games (to say nothing of platformers as a whole), it is at least interesting to look back at the genesis of that trope and how bad it could’ve been. It’s yet another thing that Super Mario 64 got completely, absurdly correct, just another bullet point in the long list of reasons it’s likely the most influential video game of the past 20 years. Yoshi’s Island is nowhere near the greatest platformer ever made (an assertion made at the time of its release and in the years since), nor is it an awful one, but its willingness to play with the Mario formula that had been established up to that point make it both innovative and frustrating. Either way, it’s better than its sequels. Now Yoshi’s Story, THERE’S a review waiting to happen.