YMMV / Yoshi's Story

• Americans Hate Tingle: It has its fans, but many western Yoshi fans saw the game as being overly childish and too easy, which made it hard to appeal to them personally, at least until it was redeemed by those who played the game when they were young as mentioned below. On the other hand, the game is by far the de facto face of the Yoshi series in Japan, to the point of its leitmotifs being carried over into Super Smash Bros. and Kazumi Totaka serving as Yoshi's voice actor to this day.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Baby Bowser is one of the easiest final bosses ever in a game. You just throw eggs or bob-ombs at the ceiling in the first phase while Baby Bowser fires easy to dodge fireballs. In the second phase, Baby Bowser tries to ground pound you while Bob-ombs float from the ceiling. If you have a full arsenal of eggs, you can defeat him in less than a minute as the explosion from the egg is all that has to hurt him. On top of that, the Super Happy Tree is available if you're low on health, and it even has a Heart Fruit to make you invincible during the battle.
• Breather Boss: Even by the game's standards, Cloud N' Candy is ridiculously easy. She gently hops around doing Collision Damage if she hits Yoshi. You defeat her by licking her, which causes her to shrink until she disappears, which can be accomplished in all of ten seconds. The kicker is, every time you lick her, it restores your health. If you want to make it even easier, stay in the left corner of the stage; she won't be able to touch you at all.
• Contested Sequel: While it's near-unanimously considered a step down from its predecessor, there's some debate surrounding just how much of a step down Yoshi's Story is overall. Some consider it to be a boring and overly simplistic game that will only appeal to young children. On the other hand, some consider the game to be a fun, cozy, and relaxing good time despite its short length and low difficulty.
• Difficulty Spike: The first five pages are pretty easy for the most part, and most gamers won't lose any Yoshis there. However, on the sixth and last page, all of the levels are filled with evil traps that will kill your Yoshis that the average six year old would struggle to get past.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Black and White Yoshis, for being cool-looking Game-Breakers.
  • The White Shy Guys, for their useful role of bringing back a captured Yoshi.
• Fan Nickname: The "Melon Quest" for the optional side challenge of beating the game by eating nothing but all of the 30 melons in each level.
• Game-Breaker: The unlockable black and white Yoshis. If you thought the game was easy enough with the other Yoshis, the game will present no challenge to you when using the unlockable ones. They can eat anything in the game without taking damage, regardless of the toxicity of the item or foe. They also gain extra health from eating various things, and have eggs with a larger explosive radius than usual. They also get infinite flutter jumps, and actually glide when doing it. The only balancing factor put in is that once they die, they're gone until you find them again, though even that can be ignored if you're willing to reset the game after dying with either one.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Peepers, yellow, round bird enemies found exclusively in Page 3's "The Tall Tower" and "Frustration" stages, will appear in a never-ending flock whose members will fly from one side of the screen to the other, and it can be easy to get hit by them and lose petals off the Smile Meter. Making them more potentially annoying is how eating them will not replenish any health, nor will jumping on them reward any ♥s. However, hitting them with an egg will cause them to lose their feathers and fall down, and if a Yoshi eats them in this state, they will fully recover any lost petals.
  • Similarly, Spiked Fun Guys, found in Page 2's "Jelly Pipe" and "Torrential Maze" levels, will infinitely spawn from pipes that they drop out of before rolling away and at the Yoshis. It can also be easy to get hurt by them if you aren't paying attention, and they will also yield no ♥s upon being defeated, not to mention that, unlike the Peepers, you can't jump on them without getting hurt.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A giant cotton candy-like monster that our gluttonous heroes make short work of? Are we talking about the Yoshis vs. Cloud N' Candy, or Shaggy and Scooby vs. the Cotton Candy Glob?
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The game was designed to bring in younger kids and get them interested in video games, so the game is substantially easier and shorter than usual. That is, unless you decide to take on the infamous "Melon Quest".
• Memetic Loser: Cloud N' Candy, for often being considered one of the easiest bosses in video game history.
• Memetic Mutation: The Yoshis' Simlish singing on the world map is often stated to sound like "Eat a**hole".
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Some of the minigames are very difficult to ace, in very stark contrast with the general ease of the rest of the game. Two of the more notoriously difficult minigames include Broad Jump^note where the Yoshis must flutter jump across an area to win melons while also using any means necessary to stay in the air for as long as possible and Melon Stack^note where the Yoshis must balance a stack of up to seven Melon Crates and get them to the end while keeping the stack balanced and avoiding enemies. This, combined with the fact that you only have one chance to obtain all seven melons from the minigames, is part of what makes the game's optional "Melon Quest" side challenge so difficult.
  • The stage 'Frustration' lives up to its name. Places with insta-death traps aren't fun, either, especially if your controller sticks.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Each level requires 30 fruit to pass, and any thirty will do. If you want a challenge, however, there's the Melon-only run. Save for the Practice level, each level has precisely 30 melons, and they can be deviously hidden and/or extremely difficult to collect. The game rewards a score bonus for a pure melon run.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Due to being a game aimed at young children, the game is significantly easier than its predecessor, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The level design is very simplistic, there are ripe opportunities to refill your health and become invincible, and all of the boss fights (particularly Cloud N Candy, who is next-to-impossible to lose to) are very easy. However, taking up the optional "Melon Quest" side challenge makes the game every bit as difficult, if not more difficult, as getting 100% completion on Yoshi's Island.
• Surprise Difficulty: When played normally, this game is braindead easy, as would be expected of a beginner platformer aimed at younger children. However, if you try the Melon Quest, it suddenly becomes outright Nintendo Hard, as not only will you need a lot of precision and perfection (especially with the minigames), but losing your Yoshi is an actual and bigger threat as you won't have easily-accessible healing everywhere. Expect to reset a lot if you decide to try pulling it off:
  • Each level has exactly enough melons to clear the level, meaning you can't eat any other piece of fruit even once or else you'll have to restart the level. You will also have to be careful to not lose even one melon, whether it be due to it falling down a bottomless pit or you walking away far-enough for it to despawn, as losing even one of them will also force a reset.
  • Some melons can also be very difficult to find, you may need to sniff every inch of the level to find every hidden melon unless you have prior knowledge of their locations. Some of the minigames required to get all of the melons can also be hair-tearingly difficult to complete perfectly.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The melody to "Baby Bowser's Lullaby" has some similarities to Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" from The Nutcracker. The title theme also resembles the pa-rum-pum-pum—pum motif of The Little Drummer Boy.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The Yoshis' hitpoints aren't tied to their health or vitality, but their happiness. This indicates that whenever the Yoshi you're playing as is out of hitpoints, they've actually become so cripplingly depressed that they can't continue the journey, fight or even move. The sequence that follows has your Yoshi hauled off by the Toadies in tears to Baby Bowser's castle, too apathetic to try to stop them.
  • When the Yoshi you're playing as is one hit away from being lost, the music is distorted and slowed down in a somber, even disturbing way and the Smile Meter, which is normally a happy flower, becomes blue, devoid of petals, and bites its lip while trembling miserably. The Yoshi's idle animations during this, whether it be hyperventilating or sadly bobbing their head from side to side, doesn't help with the somberness either.
• That One Level:
  • Level 4-2, "Jungle Puddle", doesn't seem so bad in the first half, but the other half is an entirely different story. At this half of the level, two different varieties of giant fish called Blurps are introduced, and they will persistently chase down your Yoshi and attempt to eat them, which will result in the instant loss of your Yoshi if they succeed^note not even the Super Happy state will protect them from this!. The standard orange variety will periodically jump out at your Yoshi while the blue variety will spit water at them like an archerfish to get them to fall into the water. Having to try avoiding their attempts at eating your Yoshi, especially while also attempting to obtain all 30 melons, can easily make this level an exercise in frustration to complete, and it is also easy to lose multiple Yoshis to the Blurps if you aren't careful.
  • Level 5-4, "Shy Guy's Ship", where the player must avoid Bob-Ombs and stop them from exploding if on breakable rocks, which must be kept intact if aiming for obtaining all 30 melons. Not to mention the constant ledges and the fact the Bob-ombs just love to hit you as you're leaping from one ledge to another. Finally, the second section has Yoshi riding seagulls as platforms while avoiding Bullet Bills, and on the last half of that section, more breakable rocks, the first two rocks not holding a Bill Blaster have Melons revealed by Ground Pound on them, which requires precise timing to avoid the Bullet Bills knocking Yoshi over the rock and into the Bottomless Pit.
  • Level 6-1, "Mecha Castle". The machinery can instantly kill your Yoshis if they get crushed or even get in between the cogs. The segment with the pistons has an unusual pattern that can throw you off if you're impatient.
• That One Sidequest: The infamous "Melon Quest" (where you have to eat nothing but 30 melons in a level), which instantly jumps the game up from being very easy to bona fide Nintendo Hard.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: When any Yoshi performs a flutter jump, they are shown to have teeth and visible gums that are... disturbingly human, to say the least. As shown here◊. While Yoshis would be depicted with cartoon looking teeth while performing flutter jump in Yoshi's Island DS, it's still incredibly off-putting for otherwise cute characters that usually are shown without teeth.
• Vindicated by History:
  • At the time, Nintendo was widely ridiculed for making this a 2½D platformer, with most critics claiming that games like Super Mario 64 and the then-upcoming Banjo-Kazooie were the way of the future. Nowadays, 2½D platformers are one of the most popular genres, with few people other than Nintendo themselves producing any 3D platforming games (and even then only in the Mario series).
  • Some fans of the original specifically who once directed their ire here are looking at it in a new light after the relative failure of Yoshi's New Island easily being the most divisive entry in the franchise.
  • The game was originally made for children and is easy because of that. Many adult game reviewers and fans didn't like this. But now people who were the right age for the game when it came out are now adults so they remember it much more fondly and help its reputation because of that.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Even the game's detractors will admit that its art style is positively gorgeous, especially for an N64 game.

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