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Yoshi's Island DS

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  • Awesome Art: The game faithfully preserves the beautiful art style from the original Yoshi's Island while being able to show it in even richer detail thanks to the Nintendo DS's more powerful hardware and dual screen setup. Unlike Yoshi's New Island, it even has unique hand-drawn artworks for every level on the world map showing what they are about like the original!
  • Awesome Bosses: Has its own section, just like its predecesor, the game features creative bosses with various twists and turns.
  • Awesome Music: Has its own section. While the game's music is not quite on par with that of Tough Act to Follow Yoshi's Island, it's good in its own right and features more awesome music, also being vastly superior to that of its 3DS sequel*. Some standouts include the Title Theme, Flower Fields, Jungle, In The Clouds, and Wildlands themes; all of which feature varied happy, cozy, relaxed, and adventurous tones; all of them also are either completely different or sound very different from each other unlike Yoshi's New Island, where almost all of them are remixes of the main theme that sound very similar to each other. The latter one is memorable to the point that it was even included in Super Smash Bros.!
  • Contested Sequel: DS is regarded as a great game in its own right due to its various additions to the gameplay (in the way of new characters/abilities, enemies, level features and additional minigames and Time Trial modes) that make it feel like a worthy successor to the original game; it's just not considered to quite reach its greatness and some fans (particularly some fans of the original) dislike its huge Sequel Difficulty Spike and certain unintuitive changes.
  • It's Hard, So It Sucks!: This game is a lot harder than its predecessor, which is not to everyone's taste, with the typical criticism it gets therefore being that it can be too hard to properly enjoy if not seeking an huge challenge.
  • Nintendo Hard: Don't get fooled by its cutesy appearance, this game is brutal. DS has a massive Sequel Difficulty Spike compared to the original game, with numerous One-Hit Kill traps and level design that gets much more difficult as the game progresses, on top of dropping the storable items you could win in that game like extra time, eggs, and super melons. It's not an overstatement to call it one of the hardest Mario games, and even 2D platformer games, particularly regarding its very difficult later levels and secret/extra levels. The difficulty also is very real for the most part, avoiding Fake Difficulty caused by Checkpoint Starvation on the majority of levels (a few Brutal Bonus Levels aside), though with many dangerous traps that will execute you simply for the crime of not expecting them. 100% Completion is extremely hard and takes a lot of patience, skill, perseverance, and tries.
  • Padding: After World 2 is beaten, a cutscene plays of Yoshi trying and failing to carry all three babies on his back. It doesn't move the plot forward an inch and just reiterates what the player already knows—Yoshi can't carry all the babies and must use Stork Stops to switch between them.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Instead of running automatically like in the original game, out of all of the babies, only Mario gives Yoshi the ability to run faster by holding down the B button. If you want to use the other babies' abilities, prepare for the game's pace to go down a notch.
    • Only Baby Mario, Baby Wario, and Baby Bowser's green and yellow eggs bounce, eggs created while Yoshi is carrying Baby Peach and Baby DK don't bounce at all and explode on first contact (creating a large explosion in the latter's case), whereas in the original game they only did so after they became red after bouncing off walls twice (following a green-yellow-red sequence for bouncing, with green ones being able to bounce two times, yellow ones once, and red ones exploding on contact).
    • The game removes of the extra special items that helped recover time (health) and eggs as well as super melons which gave additional attacks. That alone makes the game harder than its predecessor, but coupled with its Sequel Difficulty Spike makes it brutal, especially for 100% Completion.
  • Sequel Difficulty Spike: This game is widely considered to be a much tougher game (unto even Platform Hell levels) than the original, with many dangerous traps that will execute you simply for the crime of not expecting them. The lack of an inventory system to fall back on also contributes to its severe difficulty. It's not an exaggeration to call it one of the hardest Mario games, and even 2D Platformer Games, especially when referring to its latter levels and secret/extra levels.
  • That One Level: Has its own section for it, and for a very good reason.
  • That One Sidequest: Getting 100% Completion in each stage not only requires knowing the stage front to back due to the obscure secrets and countless points of no return but damn near perfect play due to the lack of items and absurd level lengths making reaching the end of stages with full health a nightmare (though mercifully the checkpoints save your health so you can just intentionally die each time you take damage, unless the level has no checkpoints).
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Donkey Kong, Wario, and Bowser and Yoshi are revealed to be star children that possess "an extraordinary amount of power." That piece of lore is fairly intriguing and, though strongly implied to indicate how each of them grows up to be a capable hero/heroine/villain in their adulthood, is not elaborated further than that in this game and it has yet to be revisited directly in any other games of the series.
  • Unexpected Character: The rare Black Yoshi and White Yoshi from Yoshi's Story appear in every Secret level and every Extra level respectively, unlike both Yoshi's Island and Yoshi's New Island where Yoshi (Green) is used instead.
  • Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Bowser's standard model. It's very much his 3D Yoshi's Universal Gravitation sprite with rotoscoping applied. Artistically, he ends up looking oddly detailed compared to the more stylized look of the rest of the game, and thus completely out of place as a result. Bowser's slower and noticeably jankier animation — especially alongside the more fluid movement of his younger self — makes his appearance even more jarring.

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