Played the demo last night, I enjoyed it but have really mixed feelings.
Positives:
-Paper arts and craft style looks great, very eye catching.
-Exploring different "layers" of the stage is fun and makes you stop and look at all the lovely little details and elements in the background and foreground which encourages you to think to yourself "Oh hey, can I hit that with an egg too? Is that an area over there that I can visit later if I take a branching path?"
Negatives:
-Resolution/IQ is not as crisp as it should be for a modern HD release. Looks good for the most part docked but still not very sharp, it looks very fuzzy and washed out in portable mode.
-Yoshi's model for the game is dull. It's an arts and crafts game yet they're using a model that looks like the default CG Yoshi render just with a light coating of "fuzz" on it. Shy Guys and piranha plants don't look "crafted" at all either, just regular enemy renders. Really hope you can add Yarn Yoshi to the game as an Amiibo costume.
-I really hope there is much better music not long after the first level because yikes, that track is hot garbage. Tomita's soundtrack for Woolly World was incredible, shame he isn't at Good Feel anymore. Totakas's recycled Yoshi noises are super annoying at this point.
-Can't move while aiming eggs and all egg aiming has to be done manually. I get that part of the reason they are doing this is to encourage aiming eggs at the background and foreground due to the nature of the game, but it still feels off and contributes to dragging down the pace of the gameplay. Eggs are just auto generated, can't spit them at enemies.
-You no longer get a nice, extra boost to your flutter jump after stomping on an enemy and holding down the jump button as in earlier games in the series which was used to enhance harder platforming sections.
-Having to go into the options menu to set the controls to proper SNES style is annoying. This would make sense if you were playing with a Joycon but I was playing with my Pro Controller in docked mode. It seems like there is a supervisor or someone at NCL who is dead set on making sure every 2D game has NES style A for jump as default or some other kind of annoying forced default control quirk that has to be turned off in an options menu (SMB U DX mid air flip set to A/jump unless using the secret option to disable it).
I know it's just the first level but so far it feels like they are going for a much more relaxed, low energy approach to the game compared to the original Yoshi's Island and Woolly World and comes across more like a follow up to Yoshi's Story with a proper collection system. I appreciate the feeling the demo presents of "Hey, take a fun tour of this cool little diorama we created" but not sure how well this will work for an entire game, it mainly made me want to play some Woolly World or original YI. That said I'm going to try to have an open mind and for now will be keeping my pre-order. I could see this being fun as long as later levels have a lot more action which I'm sure they will but so far the demo feels like a step back compared to Woolly World which was just a fantastic game overall where it really felt like they had gotten the series back on track.
On a side note, if anyone from Nintendo is reading this I just want to say it's really awesome of you to provide demos ahead of time for games like this, really appreciate it. :)
