Doing away with all that made his games so enjoyable, Yoshi is left insecure about why he's starring in this game.
User Rating: 6.3 | Yoshi Topsy-Turvy GBA
Doing away with all that made previous Yoshi games so unique and enjoyable, the multi-colored dino is left insecure about why he is starring in this average platformer. Yoshi started off his career as a videogame character back in 1991, where he debuted as Mario’s trusty steed in the SNES hit game Super Mario World. As of then his star would skyrocket into the expansiveness of videogame fame, to remain there for the rest of the generation. In laymen terms that translates into one other successful game, namely Yoshi’s Island, a colorful and seemingly hand drawn wonderland of great graphics, character design, humor and above all: gameplay. Sadly, that’s where his success story ends. His 1998 N64 outing, a 2D platformer that went by the name of Yoshi Story didn’t go down well by neither the market nor the press, and ever since he has returned to what he is best at: making cameo appearances and acting as roster filler in Mario games and their numerous spin-offs, hosting the odd game on both the GameBoy and its successor, the GameBoy Advance. Fast forward to the year 2005 and we see 2 innovative new platformers starring the green dino, one of which titled Topsy Turvy and appearing on the GBA, the other entitled Touch&Go! , released on the Nintendo DS. Topsy turvy’s core gameplay is built around the gyroscope embedded in the game cartridge. At the start of the game the Bookspirit Hondo entraps Bowser in a magical pop-up book, concealing the whole of Yoshi Island, along with all of its unfortunate inhabitants, within the book. Yoshi demands of Hondo to reverse the spell, but the spirit refuses to listen to his plea until an alternative way to safely imprison the Koopa King is found. Yoshi sets out to lock Bowser away, but before he even heads off he gets some help from a little mischievous spirit who inhabits the book, granting him the power to control gravitation, effectively tilting the world slightly in either direction. This power enables the green hero-slash-victim to control the flight of airborne items and animals, scale vertical walls, roll big boulders, and rock, swing, slide, tip platforms as he traverses the numerous levels. It is at this point though, the actual levels, that Topsy Turvy fails to deliver. Instead of focusing upon the potential of scaling vertical walls in order to create the clever level design typical of great 2D platformers, Artoon –the game’s developers- have chosen to create levels based upon the many different ways in which to travel, opened up by the ability to tilt your surroundings. As if Artoon themselves noticed how limited and unsatisfying this type of platformer they created is, a number of different bits of gameplay are included to break up the main game’s platforming sections. Yoshi will fall down multi-tracked rollercoasters in order to collect coins, change into a boat at mercy of a player controlled sea, a hot-air balloon that must be safely guided downwards, and an indestructible bouncing ball which must be guided to the goal by tilting your Gameboy Advance or Nintendo DS. With all this farfetched morphing going on, one is left to wonder whether Artoon wouldn’t have been better off by just including Yoshi’s signature egg-throw. The game’s graphics are a mix of computer rendered characters, basic settings made to look as if they were cut out of cardboard and simple backgrounds. Combining these elements results in an incohesive whole, something made even more painful by the knowledge that all past Yoshi games at least had a distinctive and great looking graphical style to them. As if Yasuhisu Nakagawa, the game’s lead artist hadn’t hurt the Yoshi legacy enough, the different ‘pages’ –Topsy Turvy’s equivalent of worlds- are tied together by some horrendous stills, only outshone by the even worse dialogue that accompanies them. The game’s sound doesn’t fare much better. The music, albeit being suitably light-hearted, isn’t very memorable and seems to lack the quality that can be expected to be outputted by the GBA. Special effects are satisfactory, yet nothing out of the ordinary and are occasionally borrowed from past Nintendo games. Topsy Turvy’s gameplay is broken apart into a number of short levels, divided into even shorter sub-levels, often resembling more of a puzzler then a platformer. Each page is the domain of a spirit that will demand you to get a number of medals in order for him or her to let you pass on to the next page. Medals are earned by completing levels while reaching certain goals set at the beginning of the level. These goals are based upon the most basic of elements found within the vocabulary of the platformer genre, ranging from collecting a set amount of coins or apples, traversing the level within a set amount of time, beating a set number of foes, or completing the level with under 4 enemies killed. There is, other then the niggles elaborated upon above, one other major hurdle embedded in the core mechanics of Topsy Turvy that severely increases the difficulty of the game’s platforming elements. Namely the fact that while all suspended elements can be precisely manipulated within a 45° angle from the vertical (adding up to a total of 90°), the actual surroundings and airborne elements (Yoshi and his jumps included) can only be tilted into 3 different stances. This can result into the gamer holding his GBA or Nintendo DS at a certain angle in order for a platform to be in the desired position, while the surroundings are stuck at a different degree, meaning that the trajectory Yoshi travels as he jumps won’t correspond with your screen’s angle but rather with that of the surroundings, making judging where you’ll land painstakingly hard especially in areas where no stationary settings can be viewed on screen. Add to this sudden death spikes and one can imagine how unfair losses of lives are not an oddity in Yoshi’s Topsy Turvy. While it certainly isn’t all bad news, the aforementioned design flaws rob the game of a lot of its charm and fun, leaving you wondering how Artoon, let alone Nintendo, could have been satisfied with the game in its current and definite form. While the core idea has a lot of potential, poor execution and flawed design choices ruin the experience for even the die-hard Nintendo fanatic.
