Yoshi (1992) NES Review

Christmas 1998 was a big one for me. Even though my love affair with the NES was in full swing at this point, I hadn’t had the opportunity to get my mitts on any other gaming platforms yet. This Christmas changed all that, though: I was lucky enough to unwrap an original Game Boy, bundled with Yoshi. This innocent present put me on the path of total, unshakable obsession with video games for the rest of my life. Now look at me. Running a blog. Trying to finish 700 games on a dusty grey box for some ungodly reason. Don’t let this happen to your children!

As the first and only Game Boy game I owned for some time, I became very familiar with this little puzzler in my youth. It wasn’t until many years later that I found out there was an NES version of the GB game I loved as a kid, so my inner child has been jazzed to give this one a whirl for ages now.

Yoshi was developed by Game Freak in their early years, and it’s got their fingerprints all over it. The soundtrack by Junichi Masuda is a dead giveaway, as every song in the game sounds like it could slot into Pokemon Red and Blue and no one would be the wiser. Here’s just one of them, which sounds like it could’ve easily been a contender for the Celadon Game Corner theme.

As it turns out, the NES and Game Boy versions of Yoshi are near identical. You control Mario, who stays at the bottom of the screen to furiously swap around four columns of cute little Mario baddies in block form that fall from the top of the screen. Matching two of the same enemy wipes out both blocks, with the end goal of each level to clear the board of all enemies entirely while racking up a tidy score. Something to help you along your way is hatching Yoshi eggs: you can stack blocks onto the bottom half of cracked eggs, and efficiently kill ’em all when the top half of a shell comes along to sandwich them to death. When you take out enemies this way, a little Yoshi happily pops out of the egg! Aww, the miracle of life. Murder can be kinda sweet sometimes.

Yoshi is exceedingly simple to understand. There are no “advanced” puzzle game techniques to be found here – no combos, chaining, T-flips, or anything wild to muddle up the pure puzzling action, which more hardcore puzzle game fanatics might turn their noses up at. Something else to make skilled puzzler fans shiver in disgust, fear, or a mixture of both is that the game relies on luck much more than it does skill: what blocks fall next is entirely RNG dependant, meaning how easily or quickly you’re able to finish a level is left up to the Yoshi gods. There were more than a few times where I found myself aimlessly swapping around the same two blocks for minutes at a time to clear the last pieces of a board, just because I wasn’t getting the right drops. This’ll pinch you hard when you’ve got a massive stack of enemies sitting on top of a bottom shell just waiting to be squished to Super Mario Oblivion, and a top shell has suddenly becomes the rarest commodity on the goddamn planet. Frustrating though it may be, you’ll likely only run into that problem if you’re trying to “beat” Yoshi, so it’s pretty circumstantial and easily avoidable for normal, sane people who aren’t trying to complete every NES game ever made.

All in all, you can’t go wrong with a bit of Yoshi. I personally think it’s best suited for short bursts of play that the Game Boy is perfect for, but there’s plenty of charm and good fun to be had for people of all skill levels to enjoy.

Final Rating: