There's a nebulous concept I've struggled to pinpoint about certain games that's completely intangible to the usual scale that's often used to weigh them of their quality. It's not really unique entirely to Yoshi's Story, but to me it's probably among the strongest in it's field. It's that magical ability to have your emotions be naturally struck and never fail to bring a smile across your face. I really don't want to just call it "nostalgia", because it implies that it's only associated with me in particular, and no one else can really experience that same sudden wave of warmness. As I slipped more into pessimistic adulthood though, I started doubting this magic really existing.

"It's just an easy platformer with some high score mechanics, nothing more, nothing less. It's nothing special."

Everyone was right, it really was just my nostalgia overtaking my childish feelings. I'm just overly emotional. Yoshi's Story isn't special. Despite this, throughout all the troubles...the frequent moves to different homes, the friends permanently borrowing games, the trips to GameStop to sacrifice others in hopes of getting something new outside of Christmas or my birthday.....even the near-complete extinction of my childhood N64 cartridges due to my own dwindling interest in the system.....you're still here. That's why I sit here on my notepad document struggling to write about you, and I ask myself that ever so important question:

"What makes you so special?"

It's all too much. My hope to secure my reasoning beyond my own overactive imagination continues to falter. It can't be just because of Shy Guy Limbo and singing Yoshis, there has to be something. I start to believe that the so-called magic that I conjured in my own head is just that, only in my head. Just close the damn document and get back to work on that concept art you're supposed to be doing for a friend. Stop wasting your time. It's hopeless.

but...

Once in a while, I feel that spark of hope once more, and my fire burns again. Those rare times I meet someone who utters "I loved that game", or even "yeah, that music cheers me up too". My childhood optimism returns, perhaps...it isn't just me. The magic does exist. That quality that transcends anything else, something so powerful that it negates any terrible feelings. To remind oneself of simple and innocent times, to give some much needed emotional relief in times of hardship. For me, that right there is the strongest quality any form of media could possibly have.

Thank you, Yoshi.

I might be willing to disrespect Yoshi's Island, but you will not see me speak one ill-word of Yoshi's Story. This is a safe space for Yoshi's Story fans, and I will sic Poochy on any and all haters who try to invade this webzone.

Since purchasing a cart several years ago, it's become a bit of a tradition to wake up at the crack of dawn on my birthday, drive to a nearby donut shop that sells the fattest, freshest, glaziest bear claws I've ever seen, and take home a few to pig out on while playing Yoshi's Story. The sickening sweetness pairs perfectly with Yoshi's Story's adorable aesthetic, and the calming gameplay puts me at ease for what is otherwise a depressing event. I don't like getting older. It reminds me of how little I've accomplished and how undesirable I am. At least flutter-jumping around and eating fruit - the streets outside cold and empty, gentle rays of blue light piercing the blinds - helps center me in a warm and relaxed place.

I guess this is what you'd call a "comfort game." It is so charming and undemanding, and it never fails to put me in a positive state of mind. I think it's important to have media like that. You don't always need to be challenged by what you consume. However, there's definitely an argument to be made that Yoshi's Story is a little too bare, that it boils out all the flavor of Yoshi's Island and reduces the game to its most basic elements. At the time of its release, it was even maligned for not being long enough, making it one of the first instances I can recall where a game's length was a detriment to its critical reception. None of these criticisms resonate with me. Yes, Yoshi's Story is simple, you're not solving puzzles or making your way through overly complex levels, and you'll rarely find yourself short of Yoshis, but I found Yoshi's Island to have a lot of dead weight and I believe the formula is better for being made more trim. It's also a game which is meant to be replayed by design, something I feel is glossed over a bit too much.

Despite all the feelings this game conjures up, it's not one I'm very nostalgic for. I have one memory of playing this game when it came out, and it was at a sleep over where the real showstoppers were Lego Island and checking out all the After Dark screensavers. But when building my catalog of Nintendo 64 games, Yoshi's Story seemed like a given. Naturally, it also went on my bucket list - as the penultimate game, no less - and I'm glad it did, because Yoshi's Story has cemented itself as one of my favorite titles in the N64's library.

I mean, obviously. I am playing it annually, it's my "Birthday Game," happy birthday to me (do not wish me happy birthday i will fucking end you, i am dead serious about this.) Look, man, I don't hate Yoshi. I have a very cute tank top with multiple Yoshi's on it, I love that little freak! I just want them to stop putting Yoshi in bad games! Yoshi's Story should be the template, but noooo, they're still trying to capture the "magic" of Yoshi's Island. I saw a magic show once, it was Criss Angel and it sucked shit! He didn't even freak my mind, he just talked about his motorcycles. That dipshit-- nobody paid to look at your sick hogs!! They came to see women get chopped in half, but your woman-chopping Contraption is using animatronics that look like they've been repurposed from a Chuck-E-Cheese, THOSE ARE FAKE LEGS, I'm all the way in the back and I can tell!!

Alright, alright, I just... I need to calm myself.

Not sure what got into me. I just get so angry when I think about aging and Yoshi's Island and Criss Angel.

existe algo de muito doce em Yoshi's Story. algo q vai além da sua estética bonitinha, da sua reputação como um "jogo conforto" ou um joguinho pra bebês. digo, meio q é pra bebês, mas é mais q isso tbm!

eu genuinamente amo a trilha sonora do Kazumi Totaka. ela consegue transmitir um adorável espiríto de aventura, com um leve e melancólico toquezinho de canção de ninar. ela n se sustenta tanto divorciada de seu jogo, mas se encaixa tão bem com toda a sua apresentação de livrinho de dobraduras e de todo resto do trabalho de som de Yoshi's Story. os barulhinhos dos Yoshies foi meio q um trabalho de mestre do Totaka, e hj em dia é muito difícil n imaginar a voz dele com o pitch no talo saindo de um desses carinhas no meio de um pulão. meio q arte!

eu gosto de como esse jogo é curtinho, incentivando o jogador a experimentar rotas diferentes e explorar os mapas ao máximo. muitas críticas da época apontavam a curta duração como um defeito, no comecinho da época em q críticos começaram a se preocupar demais com o "valor-hora" de um jogo. tenho opiniões bem fortes sobre esse tipo de coisa, mas é meio q óbvio pra mim q atender esse tipo de demanda nunca foi o objetivo aqui. Yoshi's Story é quase um livrinho de cabeceira, curtinho e acessível pra sempre q vc quiser tirar a cabeça do mundo por uns instantes antes de dormir. uma páginazinha pra uma noite um pouco mais feliz.

é um jogo doce, mas n completamente inofensivo. vc vai perder alguns Yoshies pelo caminho. criaturas do mal vão te descer o sarrafo. as frutas vão estar em lugares bem mais difíceis de alcançar do q vc imaginava.

mas o Yoshies vão viver felizes para sempre no final. e talvez vc tbm, um dia.

The strongest aspect of Yoshi’s Story is how much control it gives the player over how much they want to do, and rewards them appropriately. It’s a very short game, there are only really 6 levels you can play through, but each level is represented by a “page”, and each page has 4 possible levels, making a total of 24, so you’d need a minimum of 4 playthroughs to play them all. The thing is, other than page 1 which has all 4 unlocked at once, you need to earn levels 2-4 on every other page by collecting hearts in levels. 1 heart found in page 1 = 1 level unlocked in page 2. This means the amount of theoretical content you can get is directly proportionate to how much exploration you do. Want to rush through the game and only play level 1 one each page? That’s an option. Want to play all 24 levels? Then you have to go out of your way to find every heart in whatever level of the prior page you’re doing. And if you want something in-between, like 2 playthroughs with different levels in each, that’s available too by some very light exploration.

This also acts as a subtle difficulty mode, as the difficulty of the levels seems to increase the higher the number (so level 1 in page 1 is easier than level 4 in page 1).

Exploration rewards don’t just stop at hearts though. The game technically has 4 endings, and although the only real difference is that the words in the final cutscene are changed a bit, it’s still nice to have score milestones to shoot for rather than just existing for trying to beat your own score. Getting this maximum score basically requires you to get only melons, which is the highest scoring fruit. These are of course usually harder to get than all the regular fruit, being hidden, in hard to reach places, or even require minigames. Unfortunately it also requires my least favourite mechanic which is “sniffing”. Press R to sniff the ground, and sometimes you’ll find a hidden item. There’s rarely any tell when a good time to try and sniff is, so if you want to find these hidden items it tends to just be a lot of stopping your progress to press R, which is the kind of mechanic I dislike in games. Luckily it’s ignorable if you’re not going for that top score.

A melon-only run also adds extra difficulty since gaining health is harder as your fruit options are limited.

Like most Yoshi games it chose an art style that lets it age gracefully.

I thought the lives system working with the in-universe reasoning was neat (1 life = 1 actual Yoshi, all of different colours). As a side note, I’m not sure why this game gets a reputation of being baby easy. Like it’s far from the hardest game, but there’s quite a lot of things that can one shot you (bottomless pits, being crushed, enemies like the giant fish that can swallow you whole). If you only wanna play through all the first levels of each page, collecting only the easy fruit, then I guess it’s easy, but the game has difficulty options that aren’t tied to just a simple menu choice. The bosses are all piss easy though, even the last boss.

Honestly I just had a good time with the game. I will even say the horrible sin that I probably like this more than Yoshi’s Island. It only really loses out on being much shorter, even when all levels are taken in to account and having less memorable music. At least there’s no crying baby.

Yoshi's Story is without a doubt my favorite game of all time. I grew up playing it constantly on the family N64, over and over and over. The homemade storybook aesthetic of the game combined with cute little Yoshi's running around making the most adorable noises ever is just unmatched. The game still looks phenomenal all these years later, and is still so fun to play.

Since you can only choose one level every chapter of your playthrough, that makes replay ability great, and they get harder if you're feeling bold. The game itself isn't really difficult, but it is impossible not to have fun gathering fruit and running around stomping on shy guys and other creatures. The mechanics are solid and feel satisfying to use, and the levels all offer unique experiences to traverse. The music is also so iconic to me and is one of Nintendo's best soundtracks to date.

I could go on all day but please try Yoshi's Story at least once in your life because god DAMN it's just so super happy and fun!

Immensely sweet and charming game with a lot to love :) My favorite thing is how committed the the game is to the storybook aspect, not just in it's interesting aesthetic but in the flow of the game itself. Every playthrough feel like it's own unique story. Also, Yoshi is so cute in this game that it makes my heart melt, there is so much love and care put into all of his little mannerisms and quirks that it makes you feel extra horrible when you inevitably mess up and get one of them whisked away to Baby Bowser's castle. Everyone should experience their own Yoshi's story ❤️

the highest compliment i can award yoshi's story is the fact that it's so daring and against the grain of nintendo's plasticine image with which it has presented its 2d platformers over the last decade and a half that a game such as this simply couldn't have released under their watchful corporate eye anymore. i sat in a stream with some friends collectively slack jawed and mumbling to ourselves "THIS was how they followed up yoshi's island?", and i can award praise for the sheer audacity and surrealism of the experience alone.

problem is, that's basically all yoshi's story has going for it, outside of yoshi controlling quite well. i will say the new aiming reticle is arguably better than that of yoshi's island, and i found the characters themselves fine and easy to control. the aesthetics of yoshi's story are quite charming and you can already begin to see where later titles would draw their craftwork aesthetic design from. the music is a massive step down from yoshi's island, and thanks to the internet i grew up on, i'm never not going to hear the post-level theme as anything but "the ass world" being sputtered a rainbow-themed ensemble of shitfaced dinosaurs.

the level design and progression is fucking baffling. the idea that you need to play through the campaign a full four times just to experience each level in a world is nonsensical and i can't help but draw comparisons to knuckles chaotix as far as an attempt to mitigate rut-tracing falling so flat. there's an overbearing cutesy-ness that borders on unnerving (coming from a regular fan of kirby titles) and this alongside the often vertically-inclined, repetitive fall-and-get-back-up nature of the level design and the increasingly grating soundtrack create an experience that borders on torturous at its worst moments.

yoshi's island isn't an absolute travesty or anything, i mean, it plays competently enough and i can't outright call it a failure in all areas, but it stands as a boggling, confusing mess of a follow-up to one of the finest games ever made. at least my journey to "the ass world" now stands complete.

I've grown far too accustomed to Nintendo's hyper-polished first-party titles. The corporate-feeling slurry that is by design incapable of alienating because it does everything "right". Saccharine, inoffensive, the personality of a free cereal toy.

Yoshi's Story is a game from their repertoire that is instead... so genuinely baffling from top to bottom, riddled with curious imperfections large to small, each playing a part in reminding me that the people who make their games are human. The sensation that every member on the team contributed a few ideas into a lucky draw hat, only for every single one of the scraps of paper to be used instead, regardless of how fucked that'll make the game end up.

Yoshi controls like one of those jelly spike yoyo balls, heavily whipping around with a palpable sense of velocity in stages that often demand complete precision. The stages are sprawling, filled with one-time-only mechanics, enemies, hazards and puzzles, and the game is as excited to introduce you to them as it is to throw them out of the cot. Often elusive in the way you're supposed to approach them that they demand experimentation, luck, or just feel outright broken. I can see myself diving back in for a replay at some point just to explore! Weirdass music, cute paper craft look. Psychotic scoring and goal system that felt a lot of fun to wrap my head around, you essentially need to go against your Gamer instincts just to see everything a level has to offer. ("wait, I can just, finish a level whenever???") Yoshi's Story feels genuinely confused, it made ME genuinely confused, and I relish that! This game isn't great, but it's interesting, and that means somethin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G7AS50NAwM

Surprisingly looks like it was ahead of it's time the day it came out while I was still in diapers, but of course, playing it for the first time for real as an adult, it's not really doing anything to wow me the way Yoshi's do when they pop 3 bubbles in a row.

But by god, sometimes when you're having a shitty week, you just want to cleanse your doom palette with some Yoshi's just trying to get by. The game is sweet, and it's short as Hell. There's no gloom here. There never was. Let the Yoshi's do that funny pose they make when you complete a level. Let them live their lives to the fullest, god damn it.

This ended up being pretty different from Yoshi's Island despite the surface similarities, which I was not expecting. Its a cute little game with some creative ideas and probably the nicest looking 2D visuals on the N64 (though you kinda need a CRT tv or a good CRT filter in an emulator for it to look its best, the raw pixels look kinda gross at times without it like most games that use prerendered sprites, whereas the CRT blending effect smooths that out and makes it look like an illustration). There's a cartoon elasticity to the animations, and all kinds of lively little touches, its really a cute and energetic game visually. The music is also really great with all kinds of strange songs, including some with like this weird beatboxing. Also the yoshis sing and it is heart meltingly-cute.

You get 6 yoshis that are gone permanently if they "die" which is kinda wild considering the storybook, kid's game aesthetic. Kids love permadeath! There are 6 worlds and you get to choose one level per world on each playthrough, meaning each playthrough can be a totally different sequence of levels. Each level is based around exploring enough to gather 20 fruits, and then it ends. Its a neat way to structure a platformer that I've never seen before.

Not as classic as Yoshi's Island but its a weird, creative offshoot with a lot of heart and I enjoyed playing it quite a bit.

Yoshi is a series I personally view as having two great games (Yoshi's Island and Wooly World) and the rest of the series is just average/mediocre. Yoshi's Story is a game I view as probably the best out of the mediocre entries with half of that reasoning coming from it being such a fascinating game to just take in.

Its one of the few 2D N64 games. The game plays alright, it looks and sounds extremely weird, it did the pre-rendered sprite route like DKC but also made it look fairly cheap for some reason despite the N64 having stronger hardware? I dunno man lmao.

To me its just an average game I can just sit through and beat in less than an hour. I'd rather have that than like waste a few hours on something that I'm not enjoying cough Yoshi's Island DS

You know that jungle level in Yoshi's Island where you touch those Fuzzy enemies and Yoshi goes on an acid trip? My headcanon is that Yoshi story is Yoshi's brain visionduring that moment.

Yoshi's Story staight up just confuses me.
Let's take everything people liked about Super Mario World 2 and turn it into a... weird arcade like experience, who combines elements of titles of classic platformers with features of games like Pacman or Star fox, all in the form of a story that keeps up in the form of a fairy tale.

You got a set of levels with different paths, where the objective is NOT to reach a finish line, but to go around and eats a bunch of fruits to proceed. Once you do that yoshi goes YYYYYYIIIIIHHHH and you proceed on the next world.
The speed and way you collect all the fruits will influence "Yoshi's Mood???" so basically your final score.

If you die, the yoshi you are controlling will be captured by the international police and you gotta choose another one to continue the adventure.
On paper this feels like a cool idea, and the first levels sells you the idea of this vast maze-like structure really well... but I feel the rest of the adventure doesn't reach the same highs, and leads to a level design that feels much more dispersive, with not a lot of things going on. A also kind find the movement a bit too clumsy (except in the water, funnily enough), and some of the few tougher platforming sessions the game puts you in can be a bit annoying to handle because of it.

Every "chapters" of the story is a world that you will visit once per run. The progression of the levels is similar to Star fox 64, so on paper this pushes you to go for multiple playthroughs.... but also it means that you will miss out on most part of the story and may not enjoy what the game has to offer: You chose to go for the second sky level instead of the first one? Too bad, you don't get to fight the cool genie; went for the second option in the sea world? Too bad for you, here's the Jellifish level, one of the worst in the game... and you don't get to meet the cool pirate shyguys. Add to this the fact that almost half of the leves are locked behind the Heart collectibles, and you get a title that the majority of players will not be able to experience to its fullest.

Like, I think in my first run I only fought two bosses, being the final boss and the Cloud that you literally gotta eat alive.

I also kinda... dislike how the game looks! FOllowing the timeless presentation of SMW2, the devs tried to recapture the same pastel magic in 3D... and I feel the transition didn't age as well as it's predecessor, leading to weird models for most of the enemies (especially the Snorkel Snake, what kind of minimalistic weirdo is that?)
It's not bad for the time, but I vastly prefer the artstyle of the rest of the series.

Overall Yoshi's Story is not a terrible game, it's just.... weird, at least for me. I get why people may like it, it does some interesting things with a formula that I think has not been replicated again.... but also I wish it could have done some things better: maybe a more compact level design or the ability to come back and replay skipped levels at your pace could have helped me appreciate more of this classic.

Also why the heck does this game has TWO stages in Smash Bros?