Subtitles provided by Julius Kulla and delivered by a whole herd of tiny Yoshis. It's pretty adorable. (Arlo intro) Hello my egg pooping friends. Wait, no, that's terrible. Hello, my egg throwing friends (I ain't getting demonetized today) It's your buddy Arlo here and today we're reviewing Yoshi's crafted world. It's Yoshi's first big game on the Switch And the question is has Nintendo crafted a masterpiece that cuts out its own place in the system's library and keeps your eyes glued to the screen or Have they cobbled together a disappointment with a paper-thin concept and tacked on mechanics. I am particularly proud of that one (WHOOSH) I didn't feel particularly compelled to play a lot of the Wii U's library and now that the switch is a thing I'm a game reviewer. So surprise surprise. I didn't play Yoshi's wooly world. In fact beyond renting Yoshi's Story like once when I was a kid and messing around with Yoshi's new island on the 3ds kiosk at Best Buy Yikes, that game does not look good. The only Yoshi game I've really played is the original Yoshi's Island and I gotta tell you that is one of the finest 2D platformers out there. It's gorgeous. The music is great. Its mechanics are still really unique. Its levels are awesomely designed and it's bursting with creativity So naturally I was eager to see how Yoshi's changed after all these years and if this new entry could hold a candle to that very fine original adventure Might as well talk about the most obvious stuff first Yoshi's been wool. He's been crayons. He's been well, whatever this is supposed to be(ugh). But this time around everything is made of crafts paper cardboard tape glitter cups and plates clips and twist ties anything and everything that a kindergarten class might use to make art and I must say rarely have I seen such a style so fully and expertly realized everything in this game looks like it's made of crafts eeevverything. When you look closely enough even the sparkle effect on the gems is made of sequins! The effect is pretty darn astonishing. Whether it's the world map or the levels themselves everything is richly detailed and authentically rendered I have no doubt in my mind that the team spent a lot of time making actual real crafts and creating the game's assets directly from them because these things look like they jumped right out of real life and into the game. And not only do they look real but they're also cleverly and adorably designed the world is filled with the most precious papercraft baddies and animals often animated by being held up on sticks and the like and the little tricks that the dev team used to bring all this stuff to life never failed to put a smile on my face. Especially when they were utilizing designs and baddies from Yoshi's Island a nice hefty scope, and nostalgia is always a good thing. In many ways They even went above and beyond what I would expect from a project like this. The map is constantly changing based on what you accomplish and these multi-layered dioramas are animated in luxurious almost over-the-top detail and before each boss You're treated to a cutscene where you can watch them being crafted piece by piece fold by fold These are relatively short, but I found the effect to be downright breathtaking. The end result is a game that quite literally feels like a craft project come to life and it's endlessly delightful. I love playing a game and feeling like I'm being spoiled in the visual department and that's exactly how I feel playing Yoshi's crafted world I constantly shake my head and go "I can't believe they took the time to animate that one little thing that's over in two seconds". "I can't believe they accomplished even that with nothing but craft materials". The game is absolutely stuffed with humor and charm I'm a humongous fan of visual humor and crafted world just delights in hitting you with sight-gags. Sometimes even just seeing how they used certain craft materials is funny in itself. But there are other silly visual elements sprinkled throughout the levels. Shy Guys are the main baddies as usual and some of the different types had me laughing out loud, especially the further the game progressed. And while the cutscenes don't tell much of a story they're decently entertaining, thanks, of course to the endless bickering between Baby Bowser and Kamek also I absolutely must mention that there was one thing near the end of the game that really surprised me It wasn't necessarily funny but I will put it under the delightful category and I won't spoil it but I will say that it was really, really awesome and was something that I wished Nintendo would do more often. While we're talking about the game's visual elements, I would be remiss not to mention that they are dragged down a fair amount by the game's performance. I understand that the dev team was trying their hardest to get things running at a smooth 60fps, but when the game often dips down into sub HD numbers I feel like maybe the overall graphical fidelity could have been scaled back a little. I like how beautifully rendered the game is. Obviously. But I would have gladly sacrificed a little of the lighting quality or maybe a few frames to get even a slightly higher resolution. When done right, it is possible to get a good balance through this kind of scaling and in this case, I think they came close to getting a good balance, but they just took it a smidge too far. Background objects especially are scaled down to pretty ridiculous levels The naturally handheld mode is even worse I can shoulder through and get used to that too But it takes a lot more work and I often feel like I'm not getting the full experience and that's never something I want to feel playing handheld. I want to feel comfortable using both modes. Other smaller gripes about the visuals the objects and environments all look great But Yoshi and some of the baddies and characters don't. I'm not completely sure what material Yoshi is supposed to be but it's got such a fine texture that coupled with the low resolution it just looks bad. I feel like yarn or papier mache or something would have looked a lot better This is just a messy gross kind of look but it's also kind of confusing because some of the baddies don't look like they're made Out of any material at all They're just kind of 3d guys like in all the other games and they seem a little out of place. Got to wonder what the thought process was there. I've also got some issues with the music the game uses some fairly rough sounding instruments to elicit a childlike feel but it's really not executed very well all the time. And even when the instrumentation is ok, the music just isn't particularly good the songs are mostly fine you know, pleasant sometimes bordering on annoying. Nintendo and Mario especially has a long legacy of exceptional music so I really don't know why Yoshi keeps getting the short end of the stick in this regard. The music here isn't anywhere near as offensive as that in Yoshi's New Island (Yoshi's New Island music plays). Who approved this??? But I have to wonder why it couldn't have been better. I mean the original Yoshi's Island had some stellar tunes, and again, this is basically a Mario universe series. So I don't know, but it's a disappointment for sure. Before we go any further, we should probably cover how the game actually, you know, plays. Gameplay-wise Yoshi's core controls have for the most part unsurprisingly remained unchanged since the old days you can jump ground pound eat guys and turn them into eggs and then shoot those eggs. I'm happy to see that manually aiming eggs is now the standard though I will say it was an interesting choice to let us flutter jump indefinitely when you time it right. I'm not even sure if you lose any altitude you can just kind of flutter forever (You do lose a bit of altitude.) so that does remove an enormous amount of challenge from the game right there and feels pretty weird in basically any platformer the controls feel good for the most part so Yoshi's left and right controls are very responsive with minimal slipping and he's got a good fall speed which is all especially refreshing coming off of other certain games(ahem) the flutter jump does make bouncing off of enemies a little awkward and there's sometimes confusion surrounding when I can hold the button to flutter and when I have to press it again But the overall easier nature of the game and its lesser emphasis on jumping on enemies makes this a pretty minor problem. Probably even more so than in Yoshi's Island, Crafted World has you using eggs to interact with the world. You can shoot things in the fore, middle and background and I was really surprised by how easy and most importantly fun this is to pull off. Thanks to an outline accompanied by a sound and a controller shake you always know if what you're aiming at can be interacted with. The game even changes its focus based on what you're aiming at which looks great (besides the downscaling) and can make background items a little trickier to find when they're not in focus. Shooting eggs all over the place and just seeing what happens is a ton of fun most often items in the background will just give you some coins. But there are loads of little wingy question mark clouds and pieces of the level that make all sorts of things happen once shot. Sometimes it'll be revealing collectibles. Sometimes it'll be opening up a new way to go. But whatever the case I try my best to make sure that nothing in any level goes un-shot and it usually takes a lot to make me care that much about uncovering absolutely everything in a game. Particularly tricky and fun are when you're standing on something that's moving and you've got to shoot things before you lose sight of them. It's always pretty thrilling to pull off a great shot right at the edge of the screen when you only have like half a second to aim and that of course brings us back around to the levels and how they're designed. The fact that everything is made out of craft materials does more than just make the game look nice. The materials play logically into the level design itself. Paper paths can't be walked on until you've unrolled them from the right angle. Cardboard flaps allow you to jump up through a platform from below but then they shut so you can't fall through again the classic platforms that fall away if you stand on them long enough that we've seen in basically every platformer ever are made of rolls of wrapping paper that unroll and drop you. And very few things in this game float in midair on their own when climbing vertically it's usually through large structures and even floating platforms usually seem to be attached somehow to the background this all of course gives the game an awesome sort of reality and heightens that feeling that it's all a big craft project come to life. But the thing that really impresses me about Yoshi's crafted world is how it constantly introduces new ideas many similar games will have somewhere between five and eight worlds each of which has a theme and iterates on the same ideas a number of times. This game though has a much higher number of mini worlds each of which is comprised of two or three levels You're never exposed to a theme for long before schwoop You're off doing something else and even within a world the level design varies, hugely There are of course mechanics that run through the whole game But there are tons and tons more that show up exactly one time in one level and when you reach the goal you leave them behind any game with this kind of design philosophy of course does run the risk of providing something of an empty experience if it fails to explore its ideas fully and indeed there are plenty of times when a mechanic is so interesting in this game that I am sad to see it goes so quickly but I can also really appreciate how distilled and stimulating the style is I played too many games that pad themselves out by making you do the same basic things again and again and again throughout several levels with only minor changes each time. In Crafted World, when I move on to a new world I feel juuusst on the edge of disappointment, but then I think hard about it and I'm usually like, yeah they really did plenty with that idea any more would have just been padding and because of this constant shifting of ideas the game provides an exquisite amount of variety. I love me some variety you probably know that and moving forward always came with this little rush of excitement because each new idea the game introduced was just so cute and clever I couldn't wait to see what was next. You've got your regular levels. You've got your chase sequences. Sometimes you're using a tool many of the levels contain some light puzzling some have you riding on a moving object like a train. Some of my favorites are like little mini games where you try to get a high enough score to get all the flowers and Unlike a lot of games that do the same thing. Every one of these is fun! I frequently found myself eagerly wondering when the next minigame level would come up. I'd look forward to them so much. I think one of the reasons I placed so much value on Variety is that it stimulates the different parts of my brain? Or maybe it just works better to keep me interested. If the goal is always just to get right and not much changes throughout I get bored I start to zone out but this constant Shift in gameplay keeps me interested in keeps me wanting to move forward and on top of the overall variety and clever design I would say that I also find crafted world a lot more engaging because of your ability to move freely along paths in pseudo-3D It's not the most revolutionary mechanic and it doesn't end up accomplishing a ton for you, but I still like it so so much more than just moving in too deep I don't know why it's just sort of how my brain works. Even this small thing is so much more stimulating to me. It gives me a much stronger sense of freedom while all the levels are ultimately linear some of them give you little areas to explore while you solve a puzzle or collect pieces of some broken thing and even that small bit of exploration means the world to me my one gripe in this department is that the very first level in the whole game probably gives you the biggest area to explore which kind of set my expectations a little too high, you know as nothing beyond that point ever really matched the scope of that area. Not a huge problem, though I still very much enjoy having the mechanic at all. Speaking of missed opportunities in addition to the crafting and the pseudo-3D thing Another mechanic is how the world sometimes flips around completely when the game was first shown off I got the impression that the mechanic would be more integral to the gameplay similar to how you could flip from 2D to 3D in Super Paper Mario That's not really the case though. The only time a level will flip when you're in the middle of it is when you hit certain wingy floaty timer clouds. You'll have a limited amount of time to earn a flower by shooting whatever you need to shoot in the background. When it's done in this way, it's actually really clever. These time challenges are great fun beyond that you can enter any level and play on the flipside, but besides looking for souvenir items in the background, which we'll talk about in a minute Your only goal is to find all the Poochy Pups in the level. I kind of thought that's seeing everything from the flip side would reveal all sorts of extra visual gags and maybe even change how a level is played. But nah you see a little extra stuff and you'll see the unfinished backs of some objects, which is cute. But that's really it and in fact, these are extremely simplified versions of the original levels. I can sort of see why they did it this way seeing as it would be pretty darn hard to make a level that was just as cleverly designed front to back and back to front, but I was hoping for at least a little something extra to justify the mechanic and make it feel like a part of the game's identity. As it is, it's just a tiny little extra something to make things slightly different when you're hunting pups. But hey, I can at least be glad that they didn't take an underdeveloped mechanic and force it on us just to do it because that was the idea they had for the game and they were sticking to it no matter what(AHEM) This segues nicely into the games collecting aspect and I tell you Yoshi's crafted world provides a lot of things to collect. I mean, this is a Yoshi game. Technically, you're mostly just collecting flowers, several of which can be found in every level hiding in a great number of different places But on top of the grabbable ones There are tons of things that aren't flowers that grant you more flowers hitting the goal with full health will get you a flower as will collecting all of a levels 20 special coins which can be particularly tricky when you feel like you've looked everywhere and you still can't find those last two or three. On the flip side each of the Poochy Pups you find will give you a flower and you'll get an extra one for bringing home all three in one go within a time limit. Then there are these robot guys who ask you to find souvenirs for them within levels each of which is a unique little craft item that looks like something specific sometimes this is one item sometimes several of the same one It's definitely fun to move through a level scouring the background for these souvenirs and it's just another thing to do which is nice. Though I will say it's annoying that the robots won't just tell you everything they want all at once. You've got to go through a level once for each separate souvenir or a souvenir set and if that's supposed to be another method of padding out the game, it's pretty cheap. It is great to have so much to collect though, and even more opens up to find and unlock after you beat the game. The main campaign is a fairly decent length so it's nice to have so much more to do after the credits roll if you so choose. I don't often like hunting down so many collectibles but the gameplay is so much fun. And the levels are so clever and pleasant that in this case I really enjoy it and I frequently had to force myself to move forward, so I could get on with this review, when all I wanted to do was go back and hunt for pups and souvenirs. If hoarding flowers doesn't sound like a good time to you, You might not think the game is quite long enough for the price. If it does though, then you're looking at a whole lot of content to enjoy. The vast majority of collectibles are pretty easy to find, but there are plenty of trickier secrets and even the easy ones are just plain fun to get. Moving on to bosses Yoshi's Crafted World has got some good ones. The low difficulty does bring down the experience somewhat design-wise though, they're terrific. They're really creative utilizing all sorts of fun craft items to make some really interesting visual designs and they're all mechanically unique. They're so much fun that I only wish the battles were longer. The phases are all so short that the three hits it takes to beat them happen all too soon I won't show it here naturally, but I would like to give a shout out to the final boss, which was super fun and actually took me a good handful of tries to beat and that segues even more nicerly into what I just mentioned-the difficulty. Yes, this is a pretty darn easy game. Yes, that does affect my enjoyment of it Yes, I do wish that it had a harder difficulty setting. Unlike a lot of too easy games though, this is easier to swallow because of two things first like I've said the game is delightful and engaging it uses enough of my brain and requires enough thinking that even when an obstacle is easy to overcome it's still a lot of fun. Secondly, there is a harder mode of sorts. See, another collectible that I haven't mentioned yet is costumes. You can spend coins in these prize machines and collect all sorts of cute costumes based on the different worlds and their denizens. A small note. These all have a rarity, but you can't get doubles and you just get them randomly until you've collected an entire set, meaning that the whole rarity system is literally nothing like it means nothing and rarity seems to have no bearing on what you get. You just get them all randomly until you have them all. But anyway, these costumes can absorb absurd amounts of damage on top of your health bar making it next to impossible to die. Normally, I don't like altering a game's difficulty by imposing my own limitations, But in this case, it's so easy to just not head into the costume menu and put one on. The way I see it avoiding costumes is your harder mode. It doesn't make the game hard by any means, but you might die a few times and that's something it means that at the very least you have to try to avoid damage. You can't always just rush through everything or have your allies do all the fighting for you(AAAHHEEM). So yeah, it does help a good amount and I'm very thankful for the option. Final thing, the game of course has a co-op mode though as usual I didn't really try it out much as I'm not particularly interested in such a thing. It works. It's fine It's two people playing the game if you're into that and if you're playing with a wee one There is a super duper easy can't die mode, which is a nice option to have I'm sure. Yeah, that's all I have to say about that. Going in, I fully expected to give Yoshi's crafted world a 5 out of 7. I figured it would be cute and decently fun, But held back a little too much by its low difficulty. A good solid time if nothing extraordinary, but you know what? I enjoyed this game a heck of a lot more than I expected to! I was consistently impressed by its mechanics, charmed by its style, and engaged by the variety it offered. Sometimes I can get a better feel for how to score a game when I just look at how much I want to keep playing it. And right now I am pretty darn eager to jump back in and collect as much as I can. It actually reminds me a lot of a certain game(ahem) But, you know GOOD ahem seriously though, it's a lot like Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze the constantly shifting mechanics the grounded world design and the unnecessary though very much appreciated effort that went into its visuals. It feels like a game that a team of people really really cared about and to me that means a whole lot. I am pleasantly surprised to give Yoshi's crafted world a 6 out of 7. Thank you for watching, my beautiful friends. You have yourselves a wonderful day. I will see you next time and oh, what is that that I hear? Could it be could it be could it be? PATREON SHOUTOUTS? This video was brought to you in part by my patreon patrons and in largest part by my top patrons who you can see scrolling up the screen there in front of you. I cannot thank these wonderful people enough. I really can't. I've tried I can even throw a times a million in there and it still doesn't seem like I am thanking them enough if you would like to get behind-the-scenes updates on what I'm working on and chat with me and your fellow Arlo fans you can do all of that over on patreon for as little as $1 a month. I love you and goodbye!
Quite an interesting review that has some good takes that helped me decide on the game even if I didn't necessarily come to the same conclusion as Arlo.
At 12-14 mins Arlo covers stage size and how the flipside mechanic not really used for anything interesting which I feel like is a pretty big deal. But I guess how much you enjoy this comes down to how much you like setpiece design and novelty rather than a game built on a strong core mechanic.