• Main Theme - Yoshi's Crafted World Soundtrack

Mar 29, 2019  Yoshi's Crafted World - Nintendo Switch. Aside from a handful of interesting compositions, the backdrop consists of an underwhelming and largely forgettable soundtrack. Playability While some intense moments exist later in the adventure, most of the levels are fairly easy. However, it delivers something for everyone thanks to tight. Yoshi's Crafted World has been around for just under a month now, and while the game is predictably adorable in most areas, one particular feature is a little less-than-perfect: the soundtrack. For Yoshi's Crafted World on the Nintendo Switch, a GameFAQs message board topic titled 'Only 20 songs for the whole soundtrack!!'

Gentle and generous, Good-Feel delivers its best game yet in this imaginative and breezy platformer.

The key word here, really, is craft. It's there, first of all, in the aesthetics of this, Good-Feel's second outing with Yoshi (or third if you want to be really picky and include the 3DS offshoot with Poochy). This a world of lollipop sticks and sticky-back plastic, where discarded cereal boxes stand in for rolling mountains and cardboard clouds are suspended on lengths of string; a world where Shy Guys blow into straws to keep ping pong balls afloat so that you can skip along them to your goal.

Yoshi's Crafted World review

• Developer: Good-Feel
• Publisher: Nintendo
• Platform: Switch
• Availability: Out March 29th on Switch

It's there, embedded a little deeper, in what's a meticulously engineered side-scrolling platformer - perhaps the best to have come from Nintendo since 2012's Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. It's certainly Good-Feel's finest creation yet, a world away from the slightly stale Yoshi's Wooly World, a game that ended up feeling as stuffy and insubstantial as a dusty cotton ball. Crafted World, meanwhile, feels fresh and full of ideas, its levels happily rifling through quick sketches and one-shot concepts before it moves briskly onto the next.

Yoshi's Crafted World's best trick is getting to the essence of what made the original Yoshi's Island so beloved. Somewhat incredibly, it feels like the first Yoshi game in nearly a quarter of a century and over five follow-ups that really understands what made the original sing, and it's then bold enough to place its own spin. Yoshi's Island was always a brilliantly tangible, physical game, brought alive by its tactile surfaces - the chalklines, the paper and the clay - and this time out Good-Feel have simply taken to another corner of the stationery cupboard, pulling out cardboard, string and fizzy pop straws to create its own colourful dioramas.

It's a more cohesive, coherent aesthetic than the half-hearted Wooly World, or even of that game's superior predecessor Kirby's Epic Yarn. These worlds feel like they've been constructed over long summer afternoons on living room floors or stretched out across garden patios, with a human touch - and a dash of tilt shift focus - making them feel oh so real. Maybe it's the influence of that corner of Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters that's busying itself with cardboard wonders as it conjures up new Labo creations, as Yoshi's Crafted World displays a mastery of its simulated materials.

And so it presents a world that demands to be played with and poked at, as is underlined by one of the few tweaks to Yoshi's established moveset. You can now aim your eggs at objects in the foreground and in the far distance, bulls-eyeing cut-out clouds or shy-guys peering out from behind the scenery. In another neat trick, levels each have flipsides available once you've completed them, where you track down three poochies while the sellotape, blu-tack and string that holds up the level's primary form is all exposed.

It's a world that invites languid, inquisitive exploration - there are no time limits here, other than in those flipped levels - and each element pulls towards that more laid-back vibe. Yoshi has chilled with age, settling into the stoner rhythm of stablemate Kirby in games that don't really offer any challenge but go out of their way to reward the curious. The challenge here is softer than ever before, but on the flip side the collectibles are more numerous, and often more ingenious

Yoshi himself is a sedate avatar, lacking the agility or momentum of Mario - he appears to have slowed even more since his last outing - but that's almost beside the point. He's there to flutter softly through levels, popping enemies in his mouth before spitting them out in a neat succession of experiments and illustrations of cause and effect. Jump on a foot pump and it'll blast air into an inflatable cat that will scare down the mice in the rafters that are hoarding the key that you need; fire an egg at a boulder in the distance and it'll roll down the hill and clear the landslide that's in your path; stomp a flower encased in ice down into the cold waters below and it'll float across to the monkey waiting by a fishing hole with a rod just down the way who'll then pass it up by way of thanks. This is a video game designed to idly wander through rather than butt up against, and it's all the more glorious for it.

It's not perfect, of course. There's not the jolt of the new that the original Yoshi's Island had, and even if Crafted World is less reliant on old ideas as its immediate predecessor there's no escaping the fact it's riffing off something very familiar. Around the edges there's the kind of flab and excess that wouldn't blight a true classic - Crafted World's eagerness to fill its world with collectibles can go a little too far with the 300 odd crafts and costumes available in gacha machines that pepper the overworld map, and even though there's no real world money involved it's jarring to play a Yoshi game which has folded in the loot box's close relative. The soundtrack, too, is twee to the point of being syrupy, a sweet dirge that grates all too quickly.

Still, that doesn't hold back Yoshi's Crafted World from being a fine achievement. It's a scrolling platformer with an abundance of style and imagination, and a pleasingly laid-back adventure with an ocean of depth to explore. It is, first and foremost, a work born of mastery and a keen attention to detail. This is a game of impeccable, readily appreciable craft.

Tomoya Tomita was the driving force behind the soundtrack to Yoshi's Woolly World, a soundtrack I absolutely adore. There were so many fantastic tracks in that game, and Tomita no-doubt should be praised for his work. Many others agree, and a large portion of those fans were very upset to learn that Tomita wasn't returning for Yoshi's Crafted World.

The soundtrack in Yoshi's Crafted World has been met with a ton of criticism, with fans calling it stale, repetitive, and flat-out boring. They've been taking to Twitter to express their distaste for the soundtrack, and none other than Tomoya Tomita has taken to retweeting those sentiments. Seems like Tomita would have loved to be part of Yoshi's Crafted World, and he's not shy about sharing the voices of those who either dislike the Crafted World soundtrack, or wish he was involved.

UPDATE - There has been some discussion as to whether Mr. Tomita is retweeting things without knowing what they actually say. That would still put part of the blame on Tomita of course, but it would be a shame if he didn't know he was retweeting negative info.

On top of that, Mr. Tomita has shared the following statement on the music of Yoshi's Crafted World and Yoshi's Wooly World. It's a bit of broken English, so it's hard to know the tone he's taking, or the meaning he's trying to get across. If anything, it makes it seem like he was happy to find that people enjoyed the soundtrack more in Woolly World than Crafted World.

Main Theme - Yoshi's Crafted World Soundtrack

Hey, I have not denied YCW music. Because I have never heard of it. I was just happy to say that they were better at YWW.