Yoshi’s Island is the Super Mario series’ loveliest detour

polygon.com:

Did you know that in one of the best platform games ever to grace the Super Mario series, Mario can’t jump — or, for that matter, run or talk?

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island is a curio, even by the standards of a series that had previously seen an advergame about throwing vegetables (based on a discarded Mario prototype) reskinned as Super Mario Bros. 2. It is the official sequel to the Super NES launch title and best-game-ever contender Super Mario World, yet it has a different art style, a different lead character, and radically different gameplay.

These days, it might be more useful to describe it as the first Yoshi game instead; the game that established the cuddly green dino and his brand of mechanically inventive, tactile, kindergarten-bright platforming. And that’s all accurate. But the wonder of Yoshi’s Island, which is included in Nintendo Switch Online’s SNES collection, is that it can still hold its own among the full-throated Super Mario games, too. It is as exquisitely crafted, as freewheeling, as mischievous, and as joyously weird as any of them, and a best-game-ever contender in its own right.

Yoshi’s Island is a sort of storybook prequel to the Mario games. Mario and Luigi, as babies, are being delivered by a stork, when baby Luigi is snatched away by the Koopa wizard Kamek and baby Mario falls down to the island where the Yoshis live. (This scenario introduces strange considerations to Mario lore, such as the identity of Mario and Luigi’s parents, and why the babies were delivered wearing their distinctive red and green hats.) Yoshi — is it a younger version of the Super Mario World Yoshi, or a progenitor Yoshi? What is the lifespan of a Yoshi, anyway? — resolves to reunite the twins, and carries