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Yoshi's Universal Gravitation

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  • Awesome Art: The game features a nice art style reminiscent of Yoshi's Story that looks gorgeous for a GBA game with its prerendered 3D visuals.
  • Awesome Music: The game features some nice tracks for its levels, such as the usual level theme, Spirit of Cuteness and the Bowser boss battle theme, both of which are very energetic as well as calm and cozy/ominous and threatening respectively.
  • Funny Moments: The intro, when The Spirit Who Loves Surprises gives you the power to alter gravity. He asks you to test it out on a boulder a short distance away from him, and most likely, you will immediately send the boulder crashing into him, sending the Spirit blasting off like Team Rocket, A Twinkle in the Sky and all! Unlike Team Rocket though, he praises you for figuring out the power while flying off because of it!
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game seems to be better regarded and better known in Europe, if only because out of the four portable Nintendo games to use a tilt sensor (the other three being Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, WarioWare: Twisted!, and the obscure 2002 offering Koro Koro Puzzle Happy Panechu!, which never left Japan in the first place), it was the only one to actually reach European shores. As a result, this was the only time that Europeans got to experiment with such a control scheme, instead of simply being one in a line of similar games. It is unknown if Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble was ever considered for an European release, and the last word we got of a possible EU release for WarioWare: Twisted! is that it was still undergoing safety testing at LGA. A criticism of Universal Gravitation is that Twisted! implemented the tilt sensor to greater effect, but of course most Europeans never got to experience that.
  • Memetic Mutation: "But Yoshi was not amused."Explanation
  • Nightmare Fuel: If a Piranha Plant gets Yoshi on his last hit point, you hear the poor dinosaur's death yell while the plant chews him up. Just as the death jingle ends and a split second after Yoshi's green flower drains all color and turns blank-faced with eyes closed, the plant starts chomping air again, meaning it either swallowed the dead dino or is chomping him up harder!
  • So Okay, It's Average: This is what critical reviews of the game mostly boiled down to. The majority agree that it was a decent platformer with nothing outright bad about it and with nice visuals and music that can be fun, but the level design was somewhat uninspired and the tilt controls, though interesting, proved polarizing. The fact that it came out at the end of the GBA's lifespan, when the Nintendo DS had already released, hurt its sales somewhat.
  • Spiritual Successor: To Yoshi's Story in some ways, it features a very similar artstyle reminiscent of it, has the same flower health system, and the goal in some levels is to collect a specific number of fruit. It's also Lighter and Softer like it, but designed to be played by anyone interested.
  • Waggle: The tilt controls of the game generally work quite well for the most part since you just have to tilt the GBA either left or right, with the notable exception of the Final Boss Battle. In it you have to move the GBA extremely quickly to both sides repeatedly to make Bowser fall into the lava from the small piece of floor he's standing on; the tilting can get very imprecise and bug out/eat some movements, which can make it hard to make Bowser fall before the rising lava reaches and kills Yoshi.
  • Woolseyism: Universal Gravitation, while unique and referencing the Gravity Master mechanic, doesn't really give an indication of what's special about the game, plus it's oddly formal and serious for a quirky platformer. Topsy-Turvy not only instantly gives an idea of the game's mechanics, but fits the tone of the game far better. Many fans prefer the much more unique American Market-Based Title.

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