MadCap's Game Review - "Yoshi's New Island"

Before we get into the review proper, you all get to learn a little bit of the history of MadCap. One of my first outings in gaming was a little Super Nintendo game known as Super Mario World 2:  Yoshi's Island.  When I was but a wee Munchkin, my mother and I (my mother more than I, as I had - as a youth - not quite developed the satisfying motor skills necessary to game with any sort of efficiency) would spend many an hour playing this game, taking the form of a dinosaur with a horrifically frightening digestive system trying to save an absurdly whiny infant from a witch with Bottles-eyes.

...video games are weird.

Unlike most of the then-previous Mario games, which focused on repeating the same "hero rescues princess" formula, this was the first entry in the series that did something different well.  Besides certain other endeavors before that point that were met with mixed success, this was one of the first major deviations from the formula...and it worked phenomenally well.  Yoshi provided a different angle to come at things as the player character, while still keeping the same platforming feel of the original games whilst playing as Mario.

But now, it seems, Yoshi's Island has been remade.  Now it's the Yoshi's NEW Island in spite of the fact that it follows the same basic plot as the original.  Mario and Luigi, being delivered to their parents in the Mushroom Kingdom (which is odd, didn't know the Mushroom Kingdom was in Italy), have their stork accosted and Mario falls from an impossible to survive height only to survive...and be worshiped by a tribe of Yoshis who decide to aid him on his quest to rescue Luigi and finally get home to their parents in order to begin the long tradition of recycling the exact same game over nine thousand times to date.

Getting to the game itself, it's very enjoyable.  Enough of a look back on what had come before without basically copy-pasting the same formula from the original game.  While the original made me rather frightened of the Yoshis with their odd ability to eat seemingly anything and poop it out as an egg-shaped death projectile, Yoshi's New Island (and yes, I will not be typing New in that context any other way) further has body horror with Yoshi being able to pass a specific type of enemy that is literally five or six times his size in order to produce a metallic egg, which is used to weigh Yoshi down for underwater sections or to break through barriers that are otherwise unbreakable through the use of conventional eggs.

In an item recycled from the previous game, we have the sections where Yoshi must polymorph into an object or vehicle in order to complete and objective.  While this meshed in with the previous game (more or less), it is brought through now as a mini-game section that is sometimes necessary in order to complete the level. These all incorporate the 3DS's (or 2DS, in my case) motion controls by forcing the player to rotate the device to the left and the right in order to control direction - such as maneuvering a submarine through a long, narrow corridor underwater.  While I'm all for advances in gaming, motion controls aren't one of them and Nintendo really should have gotten this by now.  However, failing that, it's really just something that breaks immersion and - especially considering I've not seen it used anywhere besides the mini-game sections- the transformations really could have just been regulated in the main game world as they were in the original game, used to navigate dangerous areas or to solve puzzles.

Did it make sense that Yoshi would turn into a helicopter in a jungle setting? Nope.

Did that even matter? Nope.

This minor issue considered, however, the game is playable and even enjoyable.  It homages the feeling of the old whilst trying something new.  Even if the new isn't great, it's at least an attempting.  Considering how Nintendo has had at least two of its franchises re-purposing everything and changing nothing but the aesthetics for nearly thirty years now, we should take what we can get.

Yoshi's New Island is now available from Arzest and Nintendo for Nintendo 3DS.

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