Yoshi's Island on Switch performs just like the original with the effect perfectly intact. It would have been hard to justify excluding Star Fox and Yoshi’s Island, thus they had to finally. Sep 30, 2012  The magic of Yoshi's Island has proven hard to recapture. I'll never forget the feeling of disappointment I felt when I bought Yoshi's Story on the N64 only to realize it was a pale, simplified.

Which Yoshi's Island levels are the most annoying to get 100% or just complete?

The Top Ten Hardest Yoshi's Island Levels

1Kamek's Revenge

Is this the level after the bowser castle?

A variety of challenges to get 100. I recommend using a pow or similar power up at the helicopter section.

This level was pretty short but had one of the hardest skiing segments in Yoshi's Island history particularly that sudden change into the helicopter near the end. Never 100%ed it.

2A Light in the Dark

Again the skiing section is the icing on an unusually long and treacherous level.

3Superhard Acrobatics

It surely is super-hard particularly at the beginning with the pinwheel platform and the potted ghosts.

4Rompin' Stompin' Chomps

Side scrolling levels are never easy on the difficulty but this one can be highly irritating due to all of the things landing on your head

5Poochy Ain't Stupid

The fact that this is an auto-scroller, you have to rely on Poochy for most of it, AND a single mess-up means you die, means this level was a complete nightmare to get 100% on. Honestly, this should be #1.

So impossible to beat

You Need to Ride on Poochy for the Entire Level, if you get off of him, you'll die in the lava, staying on poochy would be simple, if not you're going for 100% and the Fact Poochy Controls Awkward

6Quit it Already Tap-Tap!

An unnecessary Tap-Tap themed level. The rising wind section leaves absolutely no room for error just like the mine cart segment later.

8Items are Fun!

Items may be fun but trying to get 100% in this level isn't.

9KEEP MOVING!

Another long level that is hard to 100%. Though the biggest problem for me was always near the beginning with the rotating platforms.

The Contenders

11King Bowser's Castle (Door 3)

The Tap-Tap chase is the worst part of this level for me, no matter how many tries I just can't find all of the collectibles AND keep all my stars.

12Fight Toadies with Toadies

Surprisingly I've never had a problem with The Impossible Maze but this one has cost me many lives particularly the... Auto-scrolling section.

13Frustration

Which level even is this? I don't recall any level ever called Frustration, unless this is a ROM hack.

All melons on this was rly hard

14All Aboard the Terrain Train

Of corse, I spent 4 flat legit hours trying to beat it and FINALLY I beat it! I did not collect everything at once, I first collected smiley flowers. Next red coins, took me 2 hours. And finally star man to 30 took me an hour and a half!
I’m relieved

Particularly, this level was hard for me, but it was just to get me prepped up for the WHITE HOT HARD SNOW GO MOUNTAIN LEVEL! It’s difficult to get a 100% on this level, but if your a hardcore gamer, someone who’s played hard games like Contra and Ghosts n’ Goblins, then this is your secret level!

15The Fort of Moltz the Very Goonie

This level has very tight platforming with the face statues while making very precise jumps between spikes. This is possibly the hardest level in the main game (not Secret or Extra).

16Snow Go Mountain

And I though the previous 4 secret levels were bad enough, Snow Go Mountain has you jumping on Bullet Bills and Goonies to get to the warp pipe leading to the area to leave the level! Did Panga make this level, as well as the other 5 secret levels? Hopefully the sixth secret level isn't as bad.

17Leapin' Lava Meltdown

Well, I was right, Leapin' Lava Meltdown was hard for me, but it didn't cost me 1 million lives like Snow Go Mountain did. But the part that angered me the most was the rising lava part of the second and final area. But still, if you're a daredevil, I'd recommend this to you if you're looking for a challenge.

18Watch Out for Lakitu

I've been playing the game for a while, and I can't beat this particular level. Ironically, Lakitu is barely something that you have to watch out for. Overall, this was a difficult level.

Related Lists

Best Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island SongsTop 10 Yoshi's Island Boss BattlesTop Ten Best Things About Yoshi's New IslandTop 10 Reasons Why Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island Is the Best Mario Game EverTop 10 Hardest Mario Party 1 Mini Games to Clear on Mini-Game Island

List Stats

Top Remixes

Error Reporting

Trying to improve on the original Yoshi's Island is, in some ways, a fool's errand. When the original game came out in 1995, it both redefined what a Mario game could be and set a new definition for inventive, original, and entertaining platform games. Some might be more partial to Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World, but for my money, Yoshi's Island is the pinnacle of the 2D Mario games (and I have spent a fair bit of time thinking and writing about Mario games to reach that conclusion).

Nintendo has tried to follow up on the perfection of Yoshi's Island a few times in the past. I had high hopes for Yoshi's Story on the Nintendo 64, but that spiritual sequel took a hard turn toward overly simplistic level designs, sloppy controls, and a presentation that turned the cuteness dial well past cloying (oh god, that level-ending music). Yoshi's Island DS was a bit better at capturing the essence of the original, but it felt a bit gimmicky in its use of new character powers and just a bit off in the control department. The best follow-up so far may actually be Super Mario Advance 3, a Game Boy Advance port which added six excellent new secret levels on top of those already hidden in the original game.

Yoshi's New Island is Nintendo's latest attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle, and it does a solid if imperfect job of doing just that. Familiar without being overly familiar and faithful without being a mere carbon copy, Yoshi's New Island doesn't quite live up to its namesake, but it doesn't really mess too much with what isn't broken, either.

A remixed expansion pack

This means, of course, that those looking for something completely new won't find much of what they're looking for in Yoshi's New Island. The game does nearly the opposite of reinventing the wheel, instead seeming to take familiar pieces of the first game and reassembling them into new patterns, to the point where an attentive player can start picking out the tropes and design elements they expect to resurface.

Oh look, here's a few levels with those annoying monkeys jumping among the trees, just like in Yoshi's Island. And here's one with those floating penguins that Yoshi can bounce off harmlessly. Here are those overly flappy goonie birds that you can ride like a floating platform. Here's a level where a giant chain chomp chases Yoshi down a series of floating platforms. Here's another extremely long and slow auto-scrolling level in a lava-filled cave (thankfully there's only one of these, and it's not nearly as annoying as in the first game).

Just because the overall design and the individual set pieces are familiar, though, doesn't mean the game is just directly copying levels from the title that inspired it. Much like New Super Mario Bros. before it, the levels in Yoshi's New Island feel like modern remixes of familiar patterns and arrangements that were proven timeless decades ago. Platforms and enemies are placed with a certain care and deliberation, and nothing feels thrown together haphazardly just to fill space. There's a natural flow to each level, and the game never dwells too long on any one type of enemy or design theme.

In short, it feels like the expansion pack that Yoshi's Island never got, full of new levels that iterate on the same great old themes established in the original game. It might feel a bit too familiar to some, but there are much worse games to evoke the memory of.

Like the original Yoshi's Island, the challenge in Yoshi's New Island isn't simply in getting to the end of the levels. There wasn't a single area in the game that cost me more than three or four lives to get through, in stark contrast to a game like Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze, where I could lose four lives on a single jump.

Instead, the challenge is in finding the 20 red coins and five giant flowers hidden within each level (not to mention finishing the stage with a perfect health meter of 30 stars). Some of these items practically smack you in the face with obvious placement, but plenty are squirreled away in out-of-the-way or hidden areas. Collecting these items constantly requires going outside the run-left-to-right comfort zone in terms of both platforming and puzzle solving.

In the greatest Mario tradition, it always feels like there's something just beyond the surface waiting to be discovered if you look hard enough. I wasn't scouring levels with a fine-toothed comb or anything, but despite looking in the most obvious likely hiding spots, I still finished my first playthrough missing a few items in almost every level. Finding the rest will be an enjoyable reason to go back and really explore the well-designed levels once more.

Nitpicks and changes

That's not to say nothing has changed since 1995. Nintendo has thrown some new game mechanics into the mix, seemingly out of a sense of duty to satisfy an 'innovation' checkbox. The most notable new feature is the gargantuan, screen-filling eggs that can take out solid concrete blocks as they fly. It's a promising idea, but it's used exclusively in extremely contrived situations, where the game gives you as many giant eggs as you need to easily clear a roadblock and move on.

Yoshi's New Island also makes a slight modification to the sections where Yoshi transforms into a number of different machines (a submarine, a jackhammer, a bobsled etc.) These sections are now somewhat annoyingly controlled by tilting the entire 3DS to change Yoshi's direction, with occasional button taps to slow or advance his progress. Overall, these sections aren't integrated very well into the rest of the game, and they feel like distractions from the platforming and puzzle solving it does best.

Most of the things I didn't like about Yoshi's New Island were primarily disappointments when compared to the near perfection of the original game. (Have I mentioned how much I liked the original Yoshi's Island recently? In case it was unclear, I liked it a lot). The new game's bosses, for instance, alternate between battles with the Magikoopa Kamek and fights against giant-sized versions of familiar enemies from recent levels.

Each battle requires a unique strategy, and some show off especially clever design, like a battlefield littered with arrow-clouds that redirect both your projectile eggs and the incoming blasts of the boss in hard-to-follow patterns. Still, the bad guys seem a little less animated than those in the first Yoshi's Island, and they don't show the same level of inventiveness in the strategies needed for their defeat (throwing an egg at the right place/time is pretty much always the way to go).

It also feels like the developers are trying a little too hard to emulate the unique, hand-drawn art style and animation that made Yoshi's Island so distinctive. It's as if the artists took basic 3D models of all the characters and layered a crude 'paintbrush stroke effect' filter on top to imbue them with a slightly uncanny facsimile of a human touch. Everything animates a bit too perfectly as well, like the morphing shapes and stiff movements of the early days of Flash animation. It doesn't look bad, exactly, just a little overdone and lifeless compared to the effortless verve and charm of the original game, or even Yoshi's Island DS.

Since we're still in nitpicking territory, I feel I have to mention the slight changes to the tight, pitch-perfect controls found in the original Yoshi's Island. When Yoshi starts aiming an egg, for instance, there's now a half-second or so of animation before the targeting reticle is fully extended and ready to fire. It's not the end of the world, but it's a distracting alteration that messes with any muscle memory left over from the original game. The same goes for Yoshi's now-familiar mid-air flutter, which is now just a little harder to execute multiple times on a single jump.

These are minor issues, though, compared to the relative failure of the game's music. Compared to the vibrant, catchy tunes of the original, the new background songs are overproduced, meandering ditties, often featuring a sort of high-pitched kazoo effect that comes across like nails on a chalkboard to my ears. At least the sound effects are comfortingly familiar.

If it feels like I'm being hard on a game I enjoyed, it's only because it shares most of its name with a game that I feel sets the standard for its genre. Even judged on that lofty scale, Yoshi's New Island holds its own quite well, serving as a solid alteration and extension of a true classic, with a minimal amount of changes to screw things up.

The Good

• Largely captures everything that made Yoshi's Island brilliant
• Level design that shows care and deliberation
• Plenty of well-hidden items that encourage exploration and discovery

The Bad

• General design and set pieces may be too familiar for some players
• New game mechanics seem thrown together and unecessary
• Controls are off ever so slightly from Yoshi's Island's perfection

The Ugly

• The background music—load up the original game's soundtrack on your phone instead

Verdict: Buy it, but don't expect another flawless masterpiece like its predecessor (which I loved).