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Speedrunning leaderboards, resources, forums, and more! Advertisement (Log in to hide). Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World Yoshi series.

While the general flow of the game is play a stage, get Flowers, unlock more stages, rinse and repeat, there are some elements that keep things fresh. There are what I call event stages. They all have some gimmick and a set point goal you’re trying to reach in a limited time frame. A good example is the Go-Go Yoshi stage, where you climb into a cardboard mega Yoshi and try and break everything in sight with a giant fist. Another is when you pilot a plane by running up and down its length, or guide a solar powered car by steering it into beams of sunlight. These are all good fun, and fairly challenging to boot. I’m glad they are there to keep things interesting, though perhaps the game could have used a few more of them.

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One way Crafted World improves upon Woolly is with their boss fights. Unlike in Woolly World, here you never face the same boss more than once. Each encounter, whether against a main boss or mini boss, is totally unique, and challenging enough that you can’t get too cocky. Some of them are new takes on classic foes, like a giant Piranha Plant, but some are very unique and highly enjoyable. My personal favorite is the Gator Train, but the final boss also gives the one from the original Yoshi’s Island a run for their money. I just wish there were more boss fights, since in the SNES original there were a ton of them, and here there are only 5. That said, I’d rather have less bosses than rehash or uninspired battles. But with that in mind, I absolutely miss the Castle and Fort stages. Those did a great job of building up the tension until you reach the boss fight, whereas here, each boss fight is just its own stage that you unlock.

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Visually speaking, this is a wonderful game and is dripping with creativity. There’s a lot of small moments of genius here, and each level is utterly packed with things to admire. My personal favorites were the Rumble Jungle, Ninjarama and Shadowville stages. One of which includes the first survival horror level I’ve ever played in a Yoshi game. And though I didn’t use them much, the many costumes you can unlock with coins in the game are a treat, especially the weird stuff like Cow Yoshi. One of my favorite parts visually were the cutscenes that occur when Kamek uses his magic to make each boss. These are totally trippy and I highly approve of them. Musically, Crafted World takes a hit. Much like in the last Good-Feel game, here the music is overly mellow and frankly underwhelming. There’s some variety, such as the music in the haunted mansion and ninja stages, but I just wanted a bit more punch. Seeing as how the original game had a bunch of wonderful tunes, I almost wish Good-Feel would just focus on the visual side and hire another team to do their music. Thankfully, the sound effects are all pitch perfect, which helps ease my frustration.

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Thus far I’ve been mostly sticking to the positive stuff, but now I have to cover areas I felt the game could have improved. One involves the gameplay variety, which was overall a bit disappointing. I say that because mechanically speaking, Yoshi’s Crafted World feels a lot less innovative than Woolly World. In that game, there was constantly something crazy happening. Here they mostly play it safe, other than with the visual style. And while I do love the classic Yoshi’s Island mechanics, that game was also known for being very innovative and not resting on its laurels. In many ways, I feel Good-Feel played it safe with Crafted World. Sure, there’s lots of stuff to do, but doing it is mostly the same, and can start to feel repetitive. This goes double when you’re trying to grind through levels to find everything, which really takes a lot of the charm out of it. I don’t mind finding the basic stuff, but going through the same stage for the umpteenth time to find a deviously hidden souvenir started to wear on me.

Another minor frustration is with the egg toss aiming. Since each stage is 3D, even in 2D looking sections, aiming can be a challenge. You’ll be aiming down and might instead hit something in the foreground. This wasn’t game breaking by any means, but it was really irritating in the faster paced moving sections. More of a problem, at least for me, is that I really wanted more to unlock. Sure, each stage is dense, but besides what I’ve already mentioned, the only other things you unlock happen after you beat the game. You unlock a series of stages called the Hidden Hills, and it’s no exaggeration that these are brutally hard platforming challenges. Other than that, you’ll unlock a hide and seek character that will show up in every stage and challenges for boss battles, and that’s it. I really wanted something more, though to be fair we didn’t get much more in Woolly World.

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In the end, I did enjoy Yoshi’s Crafted World, though that was never really in doubt. But unfortunately, in many ways Yoshi’s Crafted World felt like a step back from Woolly World, which in many ways felt like the better game. It’s far from bad, and even is challenging enough that I died a handful of times, but it just felt like it was playing things too safe. It might be better if I had tried the two player mode, though I tend to doubt that would have influenced me much. For $59.99, I do feel you’ll get your money’s worth, as I easily spent 10 hours beating it and many more trying to unlock everything. But your mileage may vary for how motivated you feel to unlock everything the game has to offer. If you’re a fan of Yoshi, I’d say it’s worth buying, but if not, you may want to try another Switch platformer.

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Review Copy Purchased by Author

Yoshi's Woolly World is the first Yoshi game to be on a home console since the Nintendo 64. This game has a yarn art style, similar to Kirby's Epic Yarn. The gameplay is very similar to the Yoshi's Island games, but without any whiny babies to carry and chase after. Thank goodness!

The game received a port for the Nintendo 3DS, aptly titled Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World, which added even more amiibo and the ability to create custom Yarn Yoshi skins, among other extras.

• 1Unused Map Data
• 2Test Levels
• 3Test Folder
• 7Early Pause Menu
• 8Unused Color Correction Parameter Scripts
• 13Regional Differences

Unused Map Data

Test Map Data

mapdata has 42 archives for test maps. This seems to be used to test out various things such as engine rendering.

Epic Yarn Map Data

In mapdataepic_yarn_kirby, there are 78 stages which quite obviously belong to Kirby's Epic Yarn. However, these might be the files that contain the coordinates of certain map objects à la Super Mario 3D World, or XML-styled formatting.

Test Levels

Yoshi Woolly World 2-1

TESTMAP004

TEST_MORI

A simple stage with a few objects placed around. The stage appears impossible to complete, due to missing objects being replaced with placeholders.

TEST_UV_REGULATION_X4

This stage appears to be a slightly different version of the stage that was shown in Nintendo Direct 23 January 2013. Objects are missing from the stage and are instead replaced with placeholders, most likely due to the object data being missing from the game. It's not possible to complete the stage, as you can't travel to the other side. The level may also lack a goal ring entirely.

MAP001_MARUTA_MASTER

One of the more detailed unused stages in the game. It appears that Yoshi would have been able to switch between the foreground and background at least once during this stage, but due to missing objects, it's impossible to do so, and as such not possible to complete the stage.

TESTMAP009_SHADERTEST01

Test Folder

In the root of the game, there is a test folder full of objects, shaders, and some Miiverse stamps. Shaders and Miiverse stamps are split into two different folders called shader and body_memo_sample.

Shader

There are three test shaders within this directory.

• simple.gsh
• simple_fragment.gsh
• simple_vertex.gsh

body_memo_sample

This directory seems to have been used for testing out the Miiverse features, such as stamps. While the final game does have stamps, these are done in a very different style. The folder also has .tga and.gtx versions of the stamps, along with an SDK tool for converting .tga images to .gtx called tga2gtxTEstTool.bat (sic). There is also a very humorous drawing of a Swapnote envelope with a body saying 'Hi'.

memo.tga

stamp_73.tga and stamp_73.gtx

stamp_80.tga and stamp_80.gtx

Character Test Data

In charatest, there is leftover data for a test character. It may have been used for animation testing of some sort according to the archive size of TESTANIM00.gfa being around 2.4mb in size.

Coins

Located at /test/tr_coin_yellow and /test/tr_coin_red are models for the coins and the red coins like the ones found in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Sequenced sounds exist for the objects in the bfsar.

120 - SD_REDCOIN01 to 129 - SD_REDCOIN10

194 - SD_COIN1

There are no other SD_COIN_x sounds.

Unused Jingles

There are two unused sequenced jingles.

108 - WSD_StageClrDemo

An early stage clear jingle.

109 - WSD_LODING

An early loading theme.

Early Pause Menu

Yoshi Woolly World 2-2 Flowers

Contained in env/in_game/pause_old.gfa is an older version of the in-level pause menu. This older variant contains a few early versions of existing graphics used in-game.

Bead Patch

Flower Patch

Stamp Patch

Interestingly, according to Merino.msbt (the game's text archive), Stamp Patches were once called Mii Beads.

Wool Patch

Unused Color Correction Parameter Scripts

TEST_KURAOKA_000.txt

Used for testing, it does not use a texture for filter.

TEST_KURAOKA_001.txt

Used for testing, it uses LutTest.gtx.

Unused Light Parameters Scripts

There is a hefty batch of 25 unused light parameter scripts for various test levels. Ranging from environment mapping, stages with UV scrolling, and other render methods such as photo realism.

Revision

Present in debug/buildRevision.txt.

Boot Config

Present in bootConfig.txt.sample.

Present in bootConfig.txt.viewer_sample.

Other Text Files

data_gfa_convert.bat in the game root is a batch file probably used by Good-Feel to create a .gfa file, in this case, data.gfa.

Present in env/convert_in_game_gfp.bat.

Present in test/body_memo_sample/tga2gtxTEstTool.bat.

Yoshi Woolly World Soundtrack

sound/SoundDisableCallFrame.bson has text in it. The single kanji in this file (found on line 6) simply means 'Wednesday'.

Regional Differences

Despite the fact that the American version was released four months after all other versions and unlike more recent Nintendo games which had two completely different English translations, the American and Australian/European versions have only minor textual differences.

Text

This change was necessary because 'pants' refers to outerwear in American English and underwear in British English. Even though the American meaning is used in Australia, the British English version of the line is still used; however, 'trousers' is technically still not incorrect.

Yoshi Design Names

A handful of Yoshi Design names differ between the American and European versions:

Scrapbook

The scrapbook option has different names across regions.

In addition to all the enemies except Kamek having separate names for the Japanese localization, one entry was altered even in English.

The red and blue variations of this enemy were previously translated as Gargantua Blargg and simply Nep-Enut respectively in English localizations of the Yoshi's Island series. The European localizers apparently didn't notice that no small version of a Nep-Enut exists in this game, or in any Yoshi game for that matter. This was caught by the North American release.

Internal Project Name

Yoshi S Woolly World 2-3

Yoshi's Woolly World's project name is Merino according to the game's text archive. Merino is a sheep breed that is commonly used for their wool.

Yoshi Woolly World 2-2 1

Yoshi Woolly World 2-8