Yoshi’s Island has a hand drawn look that appears as though it was ripped straight from a coloring book, though not any one that a kid with a box of crayons could ever hope to produce.
Rather than use the Super FX Chip to turn Yoshi’s Island into a 3D-fest along the lines of Star Fox or Donkey Kong Country, Miyamoto and company instead went in an entirely different direction. He was so adamant about this that he told designer Shigeru Miyamoto the current build of Yoshi’s Island wasn’t up to the new standard and to take the whole game back to the drawing board to get its graphics up to snuff! Donkey Kong Country had set a new milestone for home consoles with its lush, pre-rendered graphics, and then-Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi wanted Yoshi’s Island to be comparable in terms of its visuals. Yoshi’s Island differentiated itself from those two previous games, however, by taking a subtler approach with the visuals-boosting chip. Much has been said about the Super FX Chip, a special coprocessor that powered the visuals of such games as Star Fox, Stunt Race FX, and Yoshi’s Island, and the reason is because it helped yield some of the most spectacular graphics ever seen on SNES. It’s impossible not to notice the unique visual style of Yoshi’s Island the second it’s booted up.
