Discussion Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Writeup

[Christi Junior]

Prior to its release, I was on the fence about Yoshi and the Mysterious Book. It was certainly lovely to look at, and seemed like a potentially really fun and creative game, but I was worried about it being condescendingly kiddy and easy. I also had a certain other concern that I will address towards the end of this writeup. However, I ultimately decided to take a chance on the game, and I’m very glad that I did.

Fair warning tho, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is not for everyone; rather than being a traditional 2D platformer, it’s something of puzzle adventure game without much real platforming action to speak of at all. The way Yoshi controls and feels is very familiar, and the entirety of his classic moveset is still intact, but the levels now firmly revolve around exploration and experimentation, rather than traversal and overcoming obstacles. Hell, Yoshi himself is now completely immortal, and unlike for example Wario in Wario Land 2 and 3, there’s no meaningful penalty for getting hit by enemies either.

Each level is dedicated to a creature (usually, but not always, a Yoshi series staple) that you’re supposed to interact with in different ways to learn more about it, with one overarching level objective that unlocks progression. At its core, that’s it, that’s the game right there. I can see how this would be a hard sell at first, as it certainly sounds like it could be an unfocused and boring experience, but what it ultimately boils down to is Yoshi playing to his strengths; in a platformer like Yoshi's Woolly World, I totally felt compelled to stop progressing through the levels and sniff around for secrets every 5 second or so, because there were just SO DAMN MANY secrets and hidden goodies that I felt that I was massively missing out if I *didn’t* play this way. It made for an overly slow-paced and disjointed platforming experience for me, causing me to drop the game relatively quickly - and yes, I’ll certainly acknowledge that this was probably a Me thing, rather than an objective flaw with Woolly World. But with Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, the whole game is literally designed around precisely this kind of more meticulous, exploration-oriented gameplay, and so to me it inherently feels like a better fit for Yoshi.

Of course, the REAL reason Yoshi and the Mysterious Book works as well as it does is its execution: each creature that you interact with is the source of a shocking amount of unique ideas and even original game mechanics, resulting in a whole bunch of extremely creative and clever puzzles. It’s actually kinda stunning just how much variety and inventiveness this game brings to the table; back when Mario Bros. Wonder launched there was much talk about how developer brainstorming sessions had generated something like 2000 different ideas, but in terms of ideas that made it into the actual game, I feel confident in saying that the Mysterious Book leaves even Mario’s latest 2D outing in the dust. Of course, Wonder DID also have to design its levels around 2D platforming challenges, so it’s not a completely fair comparison, though hopefully it gives you an idea of what a never-ending wellspring of cool ideas this Yoshi game feels like.

Yoshi himself is also put to very good use here: the dinosaur’s familiar moveset keeps getting repurposed in so many different ways by the various creatures he encounters, whether they need to ride him, get stomped by him, be thrown by him, go into his mouth, be eaten by him or get molested by his tongue. Most creatures are at least somewhat friendly and cooperative, but some are consistently hostile, requiring you to either destroy, evade or manipulate them in order to achieve various level objectives.

 

[Christi Junior]

In addition to being absolutely exceptional in terms of creativity and variety, this game is also a lot meatier than you might expect: I personally ended up spending something like 27 hours on it while still being a fair bit off 100% completion (way more time than I spent hundred percenting games like Mario Bros. Wonder and DKCR: Tropical Freeze), and while some of this is due to the slower-paced gameplay, it also speaks to just how much content is actually available. Hell, by the time I beat the main campaign I already felt quite satisfied, and then it turned out that there was this MASSIVE postgame awaiting me. The postgame worlds actually ended up featuring some of my favorite levels and mechanics in the whole game, and really, at no point do you get the sense that the game is beginning to run out of steam or getting padded out for more playtime.

Quite a few mechanics introduced in the Mysterious Book are actually so fun and inventive that it almost feels like a waste to not have them implemented in a proper 2D platformer, though of course, who knows what the future might hold. On the flipside, with so many different ideas and mechanics being tried out, some will inevitably not quite land, or feel kinda janky or awkward to control – though again, with the sheer wealth of different mechanics presented here, the few that you don’t enjoy won’t take up much of the time you spend on this game overall.

In terms of the core gameplay experience it all feels very fresh, very different from other Yoshi games, let alone other Nintendo 2D platformers - though in a way, this game kinda reminds me of Pokemon Snap, in the sense that you’re encouraged to mess around with different creatures in every conceivable way to see what responses are triggered - but of course, the Mysterious Book is unencumbered by on-rail gameplay. A better comparison might be Yoshi’s Story, in the sense that the Mysterious Book seems like it provides just the kind of non-linear and chill exploration-focused experience that Story was seemingly going for, but was way too basic, boring and short to effectively deliver. Every single level in the Mysterious Book boasts dozens of different tasks to potentially tackle, aided by an excellent hint system that pretty much leaves it completely up to you how much help you receive. In general you enjoy a great degree of freedom when it comes to exploring each level, but given how these are compact and tightly designed 2D environments rather wide open 3D spaces, the gameplay never really felt unfocused and aimless despite this open-endedness.

Personally, I rather quickly ended up approaching each level with the following goals in mind: complete the main objective (obviously), uncover every hidden flower, and then just keep exploring until I had my fill of the level. I actually very rarely felt compelled to 100% a level, not because hundred percenting any given level is a particularly arduous process (you can even repeatedly spend the coins you collect for more and better hints about how to complete the remaining tasks), but because there was so much to see and do that even 70-80% completion often left me satisfied – plus, by that point I really wanted to see what the next level had in store for me. Also, the game is already so rich in content that I never felt compelled to squeeze every last drop of gameplay out of it just for the sake of extra playtime.

Is the game excessively easy and kiddy? Well, yes and no: as I mentioned earlier, not only is Yoshi invincible, but there’s no real penalty for getting hit by enemies or falling down cliffs. However, in the case of quite a few puzzles you absolutely can screw yourself over to the point that you’ll need to restart the level, and in any case, the focus on exploration and puzzle-solving means that Yoshi’s immortality is something of a moot point. And truth be told, the game can absolutely be mentally taxing and even occasionally tricky in terms of the actions you have to execute to complete certain tasks, they’re just not your typical 2D platforming challenges. Hell, there were even a couple of levels where I actually failed to complete my self-imposed challenge of collecting all the flowers!

That’s not to say some things couldn’t have been better handled – I firmly believe that being hit by enemies should cause Yoshi to lose coins, which would instantly have both made the coins feel way more valuable (the hint system is well-handled, but eventually you’ll have so many coins that the price of hints becomes a non-factor) and the enemies way more threatening - while still not being overbearing or oppressive. Also, the game has a number of boss battles that seem to be here purely out of a sense of obligation, because a boss that doesn’t pose any actual threat is fundamentally meaningless. The one exception is the true final boss, which actually has a time limit attached to it – a very generous time limit mind you, but it at least makes it possible to, you know, LOSE the fight. Apart from that lone battle, the bosses are one element of the game that do not play to its strengths.

 

[Christi Junior]

One thing I definitely appreciated about the Mysterious Book is that its world is not all sunshine and rainbows; while it’s hardly the Watership Down of 2D platformers, some moments of the game were surprisingly dark, like how you in one level need to protect 5 Crazee Dayzees from Ouchins, and failure (which you’ll almost certainly experience on your first attempt) involves the little plant boi BEING EATEN ALIVE WITH A LOOK OF PANTS-SHITTING TERROR ON HIS FACE! Meanwhile, at least one level will task you with using the spotlighted creature to slaughter every single other living being on the stage. And while the game doesn’t play up the cruelty of such events, it doesn’t try explaining them away either; it’s quite clear that the Crazee Dayzee being eaten alive wasn’t simply “sent to another dimension”, but that it’s dead and gone.

In terms of presentation the game is quite lovely; the storybook theme is beautifully realized, the backgrounds are gorgeous and it’s all wonderfully colorful and appealing. While there’s nothing here that should be remotely challenging for the Switch 2 to pull off, it’s still a treat to look at – though on that note, I did feel that on a handful levels, there were these rare instances where it seemed like the game would momentarily stutter a bit. Considering how the Switch 2 has proved capable of handling a whole bunch of PS5 ports by now, there’s obviously no excuse for ANY performance issues in a 2D Yoshi entry. Apparently this is a Unreal Engine 5 game, which I guess could account for this weirdness – and it certainly IS weird, because in what I would assume is the game’s most graphically demanding level I experienced no stutter whatsoever, so it might just be that a couple of levels weren’t 100% optimized. Definitely unfortunate, but ultimately my impression is that the stutters are pretty rare, even in the very few levels where I noticed the issue.

When it comes to music, Yoshi doesn’t have the best track record as of late. And while the Mysterious Book is no DKC2, its soundtrack at least clears the low bar of recent series entries: the music is not as monotonous as in Yoshi’s Crafted World, nor are the songs offensive pieces of dogshit, like in Yoshi's New Island. In truth, the soundtrack here is perfectly serviceable, there are some decent songs, and there’s even this neat touch where the level’s song gradually grows stronger and more complete as you keep making more discoveries. I generally don’t like it when games essentially withhold music to build atmosphere (Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom did it very poorly, effectively robbing its already inadequate temples of their full themes for like 95% of the time you spend in them), but here I felt it proved pretty effective.

As for how the game fares on my Based Morality Scale – this was actually the second major worry I had about it! This is a game with a surprising amount of text, covering lots of different creatures – meaning there’s plenty of opportunities for trannylators to insert their garbage, primarily their gender ideology and genderblob fagspeak. That might sound paranoid, but remember, just a few years ago these niggers retconned the Deku Scrubs in Zelda to suddenly be “non-binary”. Plus, there’s definitely been at least something of a push to begin referring to individual animals of unknown sex not as “it”, but “they” – hell, I saw this in a recent FUWAMOCO fan video, where the girls ran into a lost dog and consistently referred to the dog using they/them pronouns. It’s a fucking dog, if you have questions about its sex that confusion can easily be cleared up FFS…

Thankfully, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is almost completely free of this shit, being very sparing with its use of singular ghey. The individual creatures are consistently referred to as “it”, even when they’re clearly mammals. One lone exception comes in the case of the Shy Guys, where singular they is unfortunately used – and in that case you could actually defend it, since hiding its true identity is literally the creature’s defining characteristic. I would still have preferred going with “it” or defaulting to male pronouns (they’re called Shu GUYS after all), but given how good the game is about avoiding singular they 98% of the time, I’m willing to overlook this one lapse – hell, I didn’t even notice it during the actual Shy Guy level, since I’d become so accustomed to the game never violating the English language with fagspeak, it was only while playing another level that featured 3 Shy Guys that you needed to rescue from Little Mousers when I actually made note of it.

Other than this, there are no aspects of the game that are particularly relevant from a culture war perspective. I think a Neutral rating is fair here - you could alternatively go -1 for the singular they Shy Guys, but again, given the larger context I’m far from sure even that is malicious. Either way, there’s no content here that I would consider close to a dealbreaker, and only a single incident where I was even briefly taken out of the game and reminded of the sad state of our current Clown World.

Like Star Fox, the Yoshi series has for a long time had an unhealthy relationship with its most successful and beloved entry; ever since the failure of Yoshi’s Story to carve out a compelling alternate path, mainline Yoshi games have kept trying to be Yoshi’s Island + a Gimmick, while consistently falling WAY short of the SNES classic’s quality and fun factor. While still not quite on par with Yoshi’s Island, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is easily the most fun I’ve had with a Yoshi game since the SNES days, as well as a thoroughly unique and distinct experience that never feels like it’s chasing another game’s shadow. Definitely a pleasant surprise.