YMMV / Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Oddly, the strategy guide to Yoshi's Island states that Sluggy the Unshaven is just trying to give Yoshi a friendly hug in his boss battle. Which explains why in order to defeat him you have to break his heart.
• Awesome Bosses:
  • While Naval Piranha can easily be skipped via an Easter Egg, it's almost more worth it to not skip over it, as it's an excellent test of reflexes and trick shots.
  • The fight against Raphael the Raven has a unique setpiece of taking place on the moon, and the feeling of claustrophobia while trying to hit him from the other side makes for a tense, grandiose battle.
  • The final boss fight with Baby Bowser in the original. It can really get one's adrenaline going while they throw giant eggs at the advancing boss.
• Breather Level: Despite being the final Extra level, Castles - Masterpiece Set/Ultimate Castle Challenge is fairly easy compared to the others, all of which are listed in That One Level. It does have a tricky section where you have to navigate platforms that spell out YOSHI while avoiding spikes, but that's merely a speed bump for anyone who already persisted through the other Extra levels. To emphasize its status as a Breather Level, halfway through the stage, the music changes from the Castle music to the upbeat Athletic theme, and then ends with the Super Star theme, making it feel like a reward for surviving every other challenge the game threw at you.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Older gamers are more accustomed to the SNES version's music and sound effects. Those who've played the GBA version prefer the audio of that version which includes Yoshi's voice samples (first used in Yoshi's Story).
• Demonic Spiders: Hot Lips are similar enemies to Spray Fish, but pose a much more significant threat. Instead of shooting water, they will shoot streams of lava which will One-Hit Kill Yoshi if he touches it. They are only defeated with POW Blocks. The best strategy is to move quickly and avoid their lava streams.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Raphael the Raven, the fifth world boss of the original Yoshi's Island, proved popular enough to reappear in Paper Mario 64 doing a Heel–Face Turn.
• First Installment Wins: The original is much better regarded than any of its platforming sequels which are mostly contested to various degrees.
• Franchise Original Sin: This game could be seen as a prototype for the Collect-a-Thon Platformer genre, because most of the game's challenge comes from finding all the Red Coins and Flowers. Here, this was offset by it being optional and balanced out by the Extra levels being a suitable reward for those who would be interested in going for 100% anyway. However, later games in the genre would make similar collectables mandatory for progression, often to excessive levels. This excess was also a common criticism of its direct sequel, Yoshi's Island DS, which had bigger levels and required plenty of backtracking to get them due to the baby-switching mechanic.
• Genius Bonus: Do the stars and moon from the second scene of 6-7 look familiar? They're from Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night".
• Goddamned Bats: Wild Ptooie Piranhas spit three Needlenoses at Yoshi, and it's easy to get hit by their attacks. The first two Needlenoses are on a wide arc, while the third comes at a more narrow arc. They take three hits to defeat, making them rather annoying to get rid of normally.
• Goddamned Boss: A couple of examples if you're aiming for a perfect score, mainly because you can't use power-ups during boss battles.
  • Burt the Bashful, being the game's first mini-boss, is ridiculously easy and you'd have to purposefully try to lose to him. However, his fast knockback from damage and sheer size makes it very easy for Yoshi to accidentally buffet Burt directly into himself, knocking Baby Mario off his back and robbing you of a perfect score for the level.
  • Roger the Potted Ghost, the boss of 2-8, is not a hard fight at all since he only has one method of directly attacking you, but he can become annoying to beat on a 100% run since you're constantly trying to get him and the Shy Guys pushing him knocked into the pit, and this can make you an easy target for Roger's flame attacks and make you lose valuable timer points if you get careless.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The one-way gates can be opened from the wrong side by throwing an egg into them while standing as close as possible.
  • Red Coins held by stationary Fly Guys (i.e., the ones that don't fly away) can be duplicated. Cause the coin to drop (without picking it up), have the Fly Guy respawn by walking away so their spawn point is offscreen, and come back to find a new Fly Guy carrying another coin. You can get 2-3 coins per Fly Guy if you're quick. Sadly, this was fixed for the GBA version.
  • Jumping at the same time as entering a pipe will skip the animation that's supposed to play, saving a bit of time if you're speedrunning.
  • Entering pipes or secret entrances in unintended ways (too high on the y-axis due to standing on an enemy, coming from the wrong end of certain pipes or unintended angles that you're not supposed to reach, etc.) will cause the game to send you back to World 1-1. Beating the level like this will count as beating whatever level you came from when activating the glitch.
  • Killing Hookbill the Koopa while he's still in his "falling over" animation will cause his shell to fly offscreen and fling Yoshi to into the air during the death animation.
  • A programming oddity causes one of the introductions screens right when starting a level (that shows the level number and name) to stay on the screen longer than it usually does. Fittingly enough, it's The Very Loooooooong Cave. However, the GBA version fixed this, so it's only in the original version.
  • It's possible, with incredibly good timing, not only to keep on flutter jumping forever, but to gain height with each flutter. This makes it possible to skip the auto-scrolling on some stages, making it possible to go much faster than the game otherwise anticipates.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "The best form of birth control ever invented."^ExplanationSince Baby Mario's cry is annoying, many people have joked that it's led players to not want children in real-life and to practice safe sex.
  • Videos of people/characters/animals crying or screaming being synced up with the harmonica 10 seconds into the music track "Flower Garden".
  • "BRING HA!"^ExplanationA video depicts Yoshi with one of his voice clips playing at a gradually lowering pitch. At the lowest pitch, Yoshi is now depicted as an unnaturally handsome version of himself with realistic teeth saying what sounds like "Bring Ha" in a deep voice.
  • Yoshi buys a New Panasonic Blu-Ray Player.^ExplanationA Voice Clip Song remix of the game's castle theme set to hhgregg's infamous "Christmas in July" ad, which exploded in popularity due to how high quality the editing is.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The game plays a very triumphant sound when you get 100 points on a level and especially when you perfect an entire world.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Many gameplay mechanics commonly assumed to have debuted in Super Mario 64 — such as the ground pound and red coins — actually first appeared in the SNES Yoshi's Island. On the other side of the coin, players could ground pound in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 a year before Yoshi's Island. Yoshi's Island simply made it a free action, rather than a Breakable Power-Up.
  • Yoshi's Island is also the first game to feature the extended version of the Starman theme, again better known in Super Mario 64.
• Polished Port: The Game Boy Advance port of the first game, while having a slight screen crunch due to the handheld's low resolution and a minor drop in sound quality, is an all around solid port. It fixes several glitches, adds new voice clips for the Yoshis (which were better regarded than the incorporation of voice clips in the other Super Mario Advance games), makes Baby Mario's crying much less annoying and makes the timer go down slower than before, and adds all new bonus levels to unlock for each world.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: For a game designed after a baby's coloring book, Yoshi's Island is a much tougher game than Super Mario World.^note Although not a sequel per se, the Super Mario World 2 is just a Market-Based Title by the Mario development team to capitalize on its popularity. There's no way to warp or skip levels, the stages are longer and more maze-like, stage hazards are more dangerous and the enemies are more aggressive. Thankfully there are plenty of ways to get extra lives.
• Signature Scene: The fight against giant Baby Bowser is by far the most iconic part of the game.
• Special Effect Failure: If you look closely during Hookbill the Koopa's dashing attack, you'll see that his head detaches from his body for a split second before he charges. This is due to how they sprited him; his head, limbs, shell and tail are all separate sprites stitched together and moving in unison, creating the illusion of motion that's more fluid than the SNES can handle; sort of like the Sprite/Polygon Mix of its day.
• That One Level:
  • "The Very Loooooong Cave". It isn't the length of the level that makes this one a pain, it's that it requires a steady sequence of very precise jumps, which due to the continuous auto-scroll, you have essentially no time to prepare. Going for hundred percent? Bet you're looking forward to that part about 5 minutes in where you have to ride a rolling boulder across a lava pit to reach an alternate exit door, while the screen is auto-scrolling. Slip and fall in the lava, and it's back to the very beginning of the level for you! The very end of the level autoscrolls especially fast and has a series of pillars that you need to Ground Pound to collect the last red coins. If you miss, you only have a fraction of a second to get yourself pinched between the pillars and the autoscrolling sides — otherwise, instead of dying and going back to the last checkpoint, you must complete the level and start it again.
  • World 5-7: Shifting Platforms Ahead deserves mention, as the need to time your jumps to avoid falling into the abyss while dealing with the moving platforms makes reaching the exit a frustrating ordeal, and completing it 100% a bigger nightmare.
• Tough Act to Follow: Because of its immense popularity, later entries of the Yoshi series (direct sequels or not) would be compared to it on every front regardless of reception. This includes any significant changes to the gameplay (Yoshi's Story, Yoshi's Woolly World, and Yoshi's Crafted World), additions and difficulty changes from the original (Yoshi's Island DS), and not enough that it feels like an Mission-Pack Sequel (Yoshi's New Island).
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Of all the vehicle transformations in the first game, the Car is easily the least used, only appearing in one level in the original version, "Lakitu's Wall". In the GBA version, it does make another appearance alongside all the other transformations in the third Secret level, "Go! Go! Morphing!".
  • Flashing eggs, which contain Red Coins, only appear in three levels in the entire game, two of which are in the first world. The even rarer flashing egg blocks only appear in the fourth Extra level, where two of them serve as the stage's final Red Coins.
• Vindicated by History: While Yoshi's Island has always been critically acclaimed since release, it was largely overshadowed by the more hyped-up Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest at the time. Yoshi's Island is now considered to be one of the greatest games of the 16-bit era.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: This game makes use of the second-generation Super FX enhancement chip to provide some stellar 2D effects, such as sprite scaling, rotation, stretching, transparency, and increased parallax scrolling effects for backgrounds and foregrounds. These effects, combined with the game's unique crayon-drawn art style, creates one of the best-looking games not only of the SNES-era, but of all time, that still looks and plays fantastically today, and that has aged infinitely better than the clunky early 3D games it went up against at the time of its release. In fact, a great deal of the game's four-year development cycle was spent incorporating as many of these Super FX-powered effects as possible, resulting in an unusually ambitious game tech-wise that brilliantly lives up to its goals.

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