MARIO REVIEWED – Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island (SNES)

In this series of posts that I'm doing because I literally cannot contain my excitement for Super Mario Galaxy 2, I'll be looking back at the games in the Mario franchise. I'm primarily going to be concentrating on games in the main series, but there might be a couple of detours along the way, too.

"Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good." – Shigeru Miyamoto, 1995.

It takes some serious cajones to say something like that about a franchise that your own company is producing, that was making a lot of money at the time, and is based off of characters that you, yourself created. Miyamoto did exactly that, and in the process of basically giving Rare and Nintendo's joint a gigantic middle finger, created a serious, serious cult classic that in many ways, actually does put the DKC games to shame (even if I enjoyed the first two immensely).

SMW2:YI is Nintendo stretching their considerable talent into crazy new directions. No one would have faulted them for crafting an actual sequel to Super Mario World. That game was fantastic and didn't really need much in the way of changes. But change they did, and all for the better.

The Super Mario World moniker was almost certainly a marketing ploy, as this has almost nothing in common with that game besides having Yoshi and Mario. First of all, you play as Yoshi. He (she?) has some new powers that we didn't get to see in Super Mario World, including the ability to eat enemies, turn them into eggs, and throw them. Yes, it's that kind of game – it's the SNES's Super Mario Bros. 2.

I'd never played Yoshi's Island before yesterday. For some reason, it went completely under my radar for all of these years, and only when I started doing research for this feature did I realize that Yoshi's Island is actually considered to be part of Mario canon, and I've known for years about the players who evangelize it as the best platformer of all time.

And after playing it for a few hours last night and today, I've come to the conclusion that, like almost all Mario games – it is one of the best platformers of all time. And unlike Super Mario Bros. 2, it changes things up in a weird way, but in a way that makes the gameplay even more satisfying.

First off, the standard pacing of a Mario game is completely changed in this game. Gone are secret warp tubes – this game forces you to explore every level in the game, which makes the game feel quite a lot more epic than it has any right to be. As well, I was surprised to see how Metroid-y the game is. While it doesn't have an overarching world that's fully connected, the game kind of plays like My First Metroid game, in that in each level there are several different branching paths, some puzzles to figure out, and in general, a more exploratory nature. The lack of a countdown timer doesn't hurt either, and I found myself spending quite a bit more time on each level than I would have normally in a Mario game.

Probably the biggest change-up from Super Mario World to this game (and in reality, from this game to basically any other) is its ridiculously amazing art style. Kudos to Mr. Miyamoto for sticking his ground and not going down the Donkey Kong Country route, as those games already look really dated. There's no waxy, weird 3D/2D renderings of Mario and Co., as Miyamoto must have known that true 3D was right around the corner. Instead, what you get is a game that looks incredible by any standard. The combination of fluid animation and a hand-drawn, crayon-coloured aesthetic gives the game a sweet whimsy that is perfectly suited to Yoshi's adventure.

Nintendo is better than almost any other developer at making games that can appeal to everyone (or almost everyone, save for those self-proclaimed "hardcore" douches who have started popping up in the last few years). This is a game that I wasn't aware of, or hadn't considered, probably because it appeared too kiddy (although that hasn't been a problem for me in the past – I think I must just have missed it because of marathon rounds of NHL '96 or something), but in reality, it's both a game for kids and for people who just want a really, really well crafted game. And it's the first game in the Mario series to basically make drug hallucinations a real thing, instead of just something that stoned teenagers claim to be in the series all along ("dude, why do you think he gets so big when he takes mushrooms?" etc., etc.).

It's hard for me to love this game as much as other games in the series, simply because all of our perceptions of what constitutes greatness is almost always influenced by nostalgia, and I have no nostalgia for this game… yet. But even at this point, it's pointless to try to deny that Miyamoto crafted a brilliant, brilliant game, and it's a shame that it's not on the Virtual Console yet, as it's quite hard to find at this point. Play it any way you can, though.