After playing Crafted World I figured it was a good time to finally get this off the shelf and out of my backlog, as one of the few Yoshi titles I hadn't touched. Starting life as a trade show tech demo to show off the features of the upcoming DS, apparently Nintendo were so happy with it that they turned it into a full retail release for the launch window of the console. Well, I say "full"...
As seems to be Nintendo's way on and off over the years, if you already have a story from an earlier game, then why bother writing a new one? So as various other Yoshi games do, this one returns to the fertile ground of the original Yoshi's Island. Not that it spends any time on exposition, you just see that the stork is carrying the baby brothers Mario when they are attacked by Kamek and you're off to the races. Since there are two phases to the game, I guess it depicts a partial interquel set during the YI intro? So that's something. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Touch & Go is at its core an arcade-style experience. If it released later it might have been called a roguelike, but it's really an old-school score-chasing style that they're going for. Your run starts with Baby Mario floating to the ground with a few balloons slowing his descent; if he hits a hazard he loses one, so they act as hit points. As the omniscient stylus-holder, you draw cloud paths on the touchscreen and interact with enemies to keep him safe on his way down… and collect coins, of course. This phase formed the original tech demo, and it plays out basically the same each time, aside from randomisation of the layout. Time Attack mode does change it up though by adding super stars for a faster pace. The sky gameplay makes you not only react quickly but think and plan ahead, and the three hit points are nice to have.
Your performance in the sky affects how you start the ground phase, which is the main event, but the impact isn't huge. For most of the modes scoring ranks up the colour of Yoshi that Mario ends up riding, giving you a greater egg capacity and apparently boosting your run speed (thus assigning a value judgement to their colour, which usually is not done). Yoshi then auto-runs to the right until… well, until he dies, usually, or until he reaches his goal, depending on the mode. Unlike Mario in the sky, your run is completely over if you take even a single hit, which is extremely aggravating and not exactly lore-accurate might I add. Well, OK, I guess if he has no stars at all the Toadies can grab Mario right away. Fine. Dying on the ground also does let you restart without having to redo the sky section, saving your starting conditions. It’s an odd choice especially when the ground section is often much longer than the sky section, and it breaks the arcade-inspired cycle.
On the ground Yoshi runs on the touch screen, so you’re able to interact with them more directly. You can still draw cloud paths to run along or block enemy movement, and create bubbles around things to convert them to coins and move them around, but now you can also make Yoshi jump and throw eggs. In another instance of changing the rules, Yoshi can’t eat your foes, and you have to rely on fruits to replenish your egg supply by varying amounts. Frantically keeping a barrage of baddies away from a fragile Yoshi feels so wrong, and the entirely touch interface for all these actions can get mighty fiddly.
The goal, inasmuch as the game has one, is to top the leaderboard in the two available modes, which unlocks another two. Score Attack limits your maximum distance to 1000 yards (yes, yards, even though I have the Australian cart and we’ve been using the metric system officially since 1970), challenging you to defeat enemies and collect coins as much as you can before reaching the stork. Time Attack instead has you catch up to a group of Toadies carrying Luigi, where cloud paths now speed up your run and some egg precision is required to get under target times for the leaderboard. These are the modes that have some kind of closure in terms of an end goal, but Marathon mode is where I spent most of my time.
In Marathon you just have to survive for as long as you can, moving through different environments that offer their own sets of enemies and challenges. There’s not too many so you’ll probably see them all in a few runs, but it’s nice to feel like you’re on some kind of adventure even if there’s no end to it. Conserving your egg resources is important, as well as timing when you hit a 100 coin milestone, which spawns a superstar that gives Baby Mario a huge speed boost and infinite projectiles while it lasts. I usually got these right when a Yoshi changeover was about to happen, wasting it completely. Going for a top leaderboard spot to unlock the Challenge mode makes for long runs that feel extra punishing when you inevitably fail, so despite this mode offering some much needed variety it was also the source of the most frustration for me.
Challenge mode is another timed mode where you’re fighting and getting points to add more time to your clock. When it ticks down Kamek swoops in and ends your run, although that may happen sooner since this mode floods the screen with spiky enemies. It’s overwhelming but since nothing is locked behind this mode, I treated it as more a novelty than something to be mastered.
Four modes… is that enough? It doesn’t feel like it when you can “clear” them in a few short hours, as I did. Even as a launch game this feels seriously lacking in content; the modes give you different objectives but you’re doing very similar things in each, and you’ll be seeing the same stuff again and again, and I mean the same few level chunks being reused from run to run. There’s no boss fights to break up Marathon mode, no roguelite-style unlocks, modifiers, or metaprogression… and no reason for me to play this any more than necessary. I already wasn’t getting on too well with the imprecision of the touch controls, the autoscrolling pace, the punishing one-hit deaths; so I was happy to put this down having experienced yet another low point in the Yoshi legacy.
The VOD for last night's livestream of Luigi's Mansion is on YouTube!
Nintendo put this game on the Switch 2 just in time for Halloween! So let's help Luigi hunt ghosts in a spooky mansion, and take a fun trip down memory lane!
