Yoshi Topsy-Turvy
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Behold, the most questionable Yoshi game that made the game unamused.
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Yoshi Topsy-Turvy (Yoshi's Universal Gravitation in non-American languages) is a title for the Game Boy Advance developed by Artoon and published by Nintendo. The game is one of the few games in the Yoshi franchise to take place in the present relative to the Super Mario franchise, as Bowser appears instead of Baby Bowser.
Plot
The Spirits sealed up the entire island into a story book called the Forbidden Pop-Up Book. Now Yoshi must meet the challenges put forth by the spirits to earn a chance at fighting Bowser and saving the island.
Why Yoshi Was Indeed Dizzy (In a Bad Way)
- The main problem about this game is that it is that the gameplay had the annoying gimmick of tilting the console to progress in some levels, which off course doesn't work well in a platform game and is what caused this game severe problems that will be explained below.
- Not to mention that the gimmicks doesn't work well because it didn't aged well and it doesn't help that the controls are pretty unresponsive, and because of this terrible gimmicks system, it is incredibly hard to emulate the game correctly, unless you find a patch to control it with the R and L buttons.
- Surprisingly, the controls are terrible, which is shocking because the Yoshi games are know for their tight and responsive controls, or even the Nintendo games for that matter, howewer here it isn't the case mostly because of the horrible gimmicks.
- Not to mention that they are unresponsive, clunky and just overall not great to use, to the point that the game even feel unplayable at times, and some of the other gameplay phases does not help at all.
- The graphics are quite terrible for a 2004 GBA game because the sprite work is a huge downgrade from the first Yoshi Island (in which that game also got a GBA port, and it looked way better), and the sprites are just awful and not great to look at (with the possible exception of Bowser in the final boss), also the backgrounds look a bit off and overall the art style isn't as good as the original or even Yoshi's Story.
- The bosses are absolutely horrendous, and are somehow even worse than both Yoshi's Story and New Island bosses, which were also pretty bland but here this game take this problem to a whole new level because they are simply extremely generic and doesn't even feel like actual boss fights, and not to mention that there's only two of them, yes that right, only two bosses in a Nintendo game!
- The first boss isn't even a real fight, as you just need to run away from the fake Bowser, and that is finished, not to mention that there's no real challenge with the exception of the poor controls themself, and even then it was just revealed that it was actually the spirit that love surprise that did this boss, meaning that it was just downright filler that was here just to pad the overall short length of the game.
- The second boss which is an actual boss this time is with Bowser, and unlike most of his fights, it is pretty bland as you just need to get the bombs to fall on him, which is only hard because of the gimmicks not being well made enough.
- The game is extremely short, lasting only 2 hours, and it doesn't help that the game barely had any replay values.
- Bowser is mostly here for the story because despite appearing in the intro, he doesn't appear that much until the final fight where he actually show up, thus making him mostly a filler added just so the story can had a villain but even then, it is pointless because this game story is as bland as in New Island.
- Very poor level design that is filled with plenty of terrible enemies and platform placements, which often make the game difficult and if it wasn't enough, the game is fully designed with the gimmicks in mind, but here it is in a bad way cause it force you to actually use it even if you don't like it, those kind of problems are even worse in the later levels.
- The different phases of gameplay and the different objectives of the levels, while not a bad idea, is ruined by the fact that the game still feel repetitive because it doesn't do anything with it or at least doesn't do it very well, the fact that the different gameplay phases being bad prove it and feel like they were added just because they wanted to pad the length of the game.
- Not to mention that those gameplay phases are filled with very slippery controls that make them difficult to play well, howewer despite that, they aren't as stiff as the main levels clunky controls.
- Because of the gimmicks, this game is impossible to play on the Game Boy Player, which made a lot of fans and critics upset.
- The story, while interesting because of the different spirits, feel rushed because how does Yoshi doing challenges will help him to defeat Bowser ? And also, it had some plot holes at time such as in the ending where one scene say that Yoshi was not amused, but at the last screen, we see Yoshi being happy and even before that scene it showed Yoshi happy, so how does he not amused ?
Topsy-Turvy Qualities
- The soundtrack is once again very good, as the musics are very catchy and fit the tone of this game.
- The concept of the game wasn't really terrible but the execution was indeed not good and rushed.
- The spirits had great designs, as usual with the Yoshi games, and their designs are also unique and fit their personality.
- The game can be very nostalgic to some peoples who did seen the game, the musics in particular might make a lot of peoples nostalgic.
Reception
Yoshi Topsy-Turvy received mixed reviews by critics and mixed to negative reviews by fans who consider it to be one of the worst Yoshi games next to New Island because of it's gimmicks based gameplay, it's poor level design or the fact that it was not playable on Game Boy Player, it received a score of 60/100 on Metacritic, which make it the lowest rated Yoshi game on the site, which is even lower than New Island.
Trivia
- The "But Yoshi was not amused" line somewhat became an internet meme and is referenced a lot when talking about this game.
- It is the last Yoshi game on the GBA.
- The cartridge features for the first time a tilt sensor to move the game environment from left to right, which is its special feature. This is reminiscent of the Nintendo 3DS due to the fact that it can be moved.
- The game is similar to Yoshi's Story on Nintendo 64 because it has the same plot and graphics, so this installment on Game Boy Advance is considered its sequel.
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