Yoshi's Island, also known as Super Mario World 2, was one of the platform games that had the most impact when it was released in 1995. The Super Nintendo was the console that had the privilege of having this excellent game within its catalogue, which fulfilled all the expectations of the players of long ago.
Today we still talk about this video game, motivated by the fact that it was the pioneer in many aspects of gameplay in a side-scrolling platform title, however, there is something that makes it very special, is the way it was made or designed, a task that was not easy due to the limitations of technology in those years.
Before the development of Yoshi's Island was thought of, Super Mario World was one of the most important games of the Super Nintendo. Shigefumi Hino was on the team that made the game, and he was responsible for designing all the sprites for Super Mario World, which he did successfully, but Nintendo would give him a special task.
Wishing for a completely new video game that would captivate players, Shigefumi Hino came up with many ideas, but all of these were discarded, until the day came when he thought of the charismatic Yoshi, a secondary character within Super Mario World. He immediately began working together with Takashi Tezuka-san, Toshihiko Nakago-san and Hideki Konno-san, shaping what we know today as Yoshi's Island.
In this video game Yoshi would have the main role, leaving Mario (in this case Baby Mario) as a secondary character, which we could handle in specific situations, but 90% of the game we would be escorting and defending him until the whole video game is over, that's why we can notice in great emphasis the transformations of Yoshi and his companions.
One of the most striking things about Yoshi's Island is its graphics, but at the time when the game was being developed, they were about to use pre-rendered graphics because of the success Donkey Kong Country was having and its peculiar graphics. However, the team ruled out this idea because they already had a lot of work ahead of them, as well as because they wanted to take risks with their visual style.
This one was very peculiar, since absolutely everything in Yoshi's Island was drawn by hand, in order to take all this to a computer all the images that they drew were scanned to be able to have them in the computer and to be able to work on them. The person in charge of doing this difficult work was Hisashi Nogami (Producer of Splatoon 2), who declared in several interviews that it was a really complicated job.
However, the pre-rendered graphics were not completely discarded, because in later deliveries they would use it, specifically in the video game Yoshi's Story, but this is material for another article in the future.
In order to make the most of the graphic quality they needed from the Super Nintendo, they needed the Super FX 2 chip, which was the successor to the FX chip used by several video games such as Star Fox. Thanks to this chip it was possible to visualize more colors on the screen, better rotations in the sprites or use the 3D in certain levels, causing a visual impact at first sight.
The person in charge of composing the music for this excellent video game was Kōji Kondō, which has had an enormous relevance in different Nintendo titles. Due to this musical section many people remember Yoshi's Island, this added to its visual appearance and playability makes it one of the best platform games of the 90s.
Have you ever played Yoshi's Island? Tell me your experience in the comments section.
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