Is Yoshi's Island DS Too Similar to the Original?
Yoshi's Island DS. After at least ten years of waiting, we finally got a true sequel to the good old SNES game Yoshi's Island. But after playing this game a bit more recently, I have noticed there are quite a few signs that it's rather more an edit of the original than a new game. It tries to be nostalgic and homage the original, but it does seem, as I will explain below that it ended up basically copying many, many of the concepts of the original and about half implementing them.
First of all, note the huge amount of levels and parts which have just been lifted wholesale from the original. The falling block section that used to be in world 2? Now in world 3, but it's pretty much identical to the original. The section with the giant blargg and flower? There in world 1's castle. Heck, even the first boss is very, very blatantly based off the original, with simply two Burts instead of one, in the exact same boss arena, with very similar starting battle music, and even the same death animations!
This of course is only counting the blatant, flat out identical parts of the game. There are some other points in the game however where it seems older concepts have been simply changed graphics wise to provide some 'new' bosses and the like. Heck, many of the bosses are pretty much like this. You've got Big Guy the Stilted which is very similar attack pattern wise to Roger the Potted Ghost, you've got Gilbert the Gooey who is pretty much like Cloud N Candy and you've even got Bowser who fights like Hookbill the Koopa, at least to a degree (same knockback type animations and defeating method by ground pounding his stomach when he falls over). This is not the only similarity, even many themes are pretty similar. Sure, world 2 is a jungle rather than world 3, but quite honesty, thematically wise, you could swap worlds 2 and 3 round and the thmes would nearly completely match up with the original game (at least level wise). You've got also the surprisingly strange part of how both haunted house levels are world 2 fortresses with a ghost themed boss and various other things.
On another side however, maybe they just tried really hard to make a game like the original, by homaging and using most of the level design tricks and gimmicks from the original. The Cave that Never Ends is a definite sequel to the Very Looong Cave from the original, complete with auto scrolling. Heck, even the intro references the original (or more accurately, blatantly retells the story to the letter complete with nice explanatory text and neat images of the characters from the original).
All in all though, it's kinda hard to tell. In terms of some aspects, I see parts where it seems Artoon basically did some minor editing to an existing level, or even lacked quite a bit of level designing skill. In others however, it seems it might well just be a deliberate reference to the original as almost a reward for the veterans who played through that fantastic game. Guess we'll never know...
