Yoshi's Crafted World Review

True to form, Yoshi’s Crafted World is exactly what I expected it to be. It’s a very enjoyable and delightfully charming Yoshi platformer that doesn’t really strive to be much more, like Breath of the Wild did for Zelda, nor does it hone the series’ ideas to a razor-sharp edge like Odyssey did for Mario. It’s formulaic, and at times that can make it feel as thin as its realistic-looking cardboard sets, but that didn’t stop me from having a ton of fun running around them.

Yoshi’s Crafted World isn’t a tough platformer, so that fun wasn’t usually from a sense of overcoming a challenge. In fact, apart from the four levels that unlock at the end of its campaign, most of its 40+ stages pose little threat to complete at all. Enemies are mostly passive, Yoshi’s adorable new costumes offer a huge amount of damage protection, and his signature mid-air hover can be chained almost indefinitely, allowing for some extremely forgiving platforming.

But nail-biting difficulty isn’t really the point of a Yoshi game, and getting to the finish line isn’t the only thing to do in Crafted World. Its levels are filled to the brim with collectibles to find, many of which require either the technical skill to aim and hit them with eggs, the prowess to hunt for hidden secrets, or the resource management to make sure you have the eggs you need at the right moment.

Even in the simpler moments, Yoshi’s adorable sounds and animations as he hops and hovers around a course make every action entertaining. His movement mechanics make him satisfying to control, and eating enemies to turn them into his egg-based ammo is just as amusing as it was in Yoshi’s Island 24 years ago. This time around you can actually aim eggs directly at your target, as opposed to having to time your throws with a swinging reticle, which deepened my options for how to use the classic move while simultaneously making it more accessible to do so.

Its 40-plus levels are grouped into loosely themed worlds with two or three courses apiece, and everything leans into Crafted World’s adorable and somewhat photorealistic arts-n-crafts aesthetic. Obstacles all look like homemade dioramas with floating platforms clearly held up by string, background decorations set up as painted pieces of cardboard, and pretty much everything is held together with tape. It’s an extremely charming style that gets remixed in a variety of classic video game flavors like a desert world, ice world, and a series of particularly cool levels set in a Japanese castle.

Every one of those stages has between five and eight Smiley Flowers to find and 20 Red Coins hidden around that will earn you another flower at the end, as well as two more super-simple Flowers for finishing with full health and with more than 100 total coins. I was usually able to find most but not all of a level’s Flowers my first time through it, but the Red Coins were more deviously hidden – I can count the number of times I was able to 100% a level on my first try on one hand, which always made me want to dive back in.

Crafted World even incentivizes you to replay levels by offering up more Flowers for finding specific objects hidden in the background or foreground of a level. You can fling Yoshi’s eggs outside of his 2D running path, and it’s surprisingly natural to aim where you want (though it can get a bit trickier in busy areas with lots of targets). So if one of the cardboard robot NPCs on the level select map asks you to find and hit five cows in a certain stage, you’ll have to dive back into it and scan the cardboard decorations for cows instead of worrying about beating the level itself. This scavenger hunt was a fun way to be rewarded for revisiting or trying to 100% a stage, though it’s frustrating that you can only ever get one of these tasks at a time, making you jump in and out of levels a fair amount if you’re a completionist.

The levels themselves are all unique, varied, and fun to run through, even if only a few of them really wow’d me with surprising ideas. Outside of some specific repeating mechanics, like special levels that let you ride Poochy around, pretty much every course has an entirely new obstacle mechanic to slow you down. Some of my favorites include a stage with magnets that stick to large cans to make new platforms, a moving level with screen doors that block your view and force you to play based on the shadows cast on their backsides, and even one with murderous, shrieking clown dolls that try to straight-up murder Yoshi with an ax.

Even the less exciting ones have a unique twist that helps them stand out and kept Crafted World from ever feeling repetitive. Sadly, few (as in barely any) of these mechanics ever show up again later to be built upon or used in combination with other new ones. Each stage follows the now well-tread Nintendo platformer formula: introduce a mechanic, teach you what it can do during the level, and then end with a slightly harder version of it to test you before discarding it.

I kept hoping these clever ideas would be better used later on, or at least revisited in an optional stage with amped-up difficulty. I finally got a taste of that in Crafted World’s post-credit stages, which are some of the most challenging and fun levels in the entire game, but there are literally only four of them. They’re a tease that only served to reinforce the idea that there were so many more missed opportunities to test the skills its other levels taught me in exciting ways.

A cool twist that arrives early on, however, is Crafted World’s Flip-Side levels, which let you play through nearly any stage backwards. It lets you see all of the tape and intentionally unfinished edges of the sets you previously only saw from the front and replaces all the coins and other collectibles with a focus on getting fast times. Three Poochy pups are hidden throughout and a timer appears in the top right, making them fun speedrunning challenges that feel genuinely different than the mirrored rehash of a stage I feared they would be.

Without a whole lot of real challenge to test you, Crafted World instead relies on twists and extras like this to keep it interesting – and, for the most part, it succeeded for the seven to eight hours it took me to make it to the credits. I spent another two exciting hours unlocking and beating its final levels (which, again, there are only four of), and few more after that 100%ing some worlds. Still, I eventually lost steam once all I was doing was sprinting through levels looking for props in what is essentially a Yoshi-themed platformer version of Where’s Waldo.

I still had plenty of fun along the way getting to that point, it’s just an extremely predictable game in a time where Nintendo has been impressing us with innovation. Crafted World’s music may be the best metaphor for the experience as a whole: it’s cute and charming, but eventually wears thin. It almost sounds like the ambient music in a Pikmin stage before enemies draw near and more instruments are folded in – it makes me smile, but I doubt I’ll be whistling these songs years from now like some other Yoshi themes.

However, Crafted World does shake things up in a small but fun way with its new costume system. There are over 170 of these to collect, all available in gachapon-style capsule machines themed after the different worlds. There are also a handful of special costumes you can only get from certain Amiibo, letting you do silly things like be a Yoshi in a Yoshi outfit. Rarer costumes offer more actual defense during levels, and not wearing one can mean a significant increase in difficulty if you’re looking for it (and don’t mind going naked). It’s still not very hard, but it’s less easy.

Yes, it seems that in 2019, even Yoshi isn’t safe from the scourge of pay-to-win loot box mechanics – sorry, I couldn’t resist. In actuality, it’s nothing like that. The capsule machines don’t give duplicates and only cost the coins you earn in levels, making them just another adorable collectible to earn along the way. Not all of those nearly 200 outfits are winners – for example, you can put Yoshi in at least two different colors of trash can or have him wear... grass (there's also a Native American-inspired outfit based on one of the bosses, both of which seem a little questionable given Nintendo chose to remove similar imagery from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate late last year) – but ones like the Bullet Bill whose arms move as you run are too darn cute to resist, and it was easy to swap around to plenty I liked.

33 of the Best, Silliest, and Strangest Costumes in Yoshi's Crafted World

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The armor they provide is also important in Crafted World’s two-player co-op, which is chaotic fun but can sometimes veer into the wrong kind of chaos on certain levels. Most stages just don’t feel like they were built for two players to be on them at the same time, and me and my friends often struggled with accidentally jumping on and off of each other (which would cancel actions), eating each other (which makes you drop all of your eggs) and pushing each other off of swinging ropes that were extremely hard to share.

It’s a fun mess, but not quite in the same way something like New Super Mario Bros. is, where you have slightly more space to avoid your allies if you need it. The one co-op addition that absolutely rules is the ability for one Yoshi to ride the other – which presents a scary and confusing philosophical question that I don’t have the time or willpower to answer here. This form of co-op almost feels like Mario Kart: Double Dash, with one player controlling movement and the other firing eggs. It’s a weird hybrid mode that’s actually a fun new challenge.