The upcoming Switch 2 game Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is giving players the kind of freedom that's usually best left out of Nintendo's most child-friendly franchises. Gestures vaguely at the internet's cursed Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream ships.
Previews for the newest platformer featuring everyone's favorite green dino went live earlier this week. Yoshi's watercolor adventure looks expectedly gorgeous and innocent and cuddly, but one thing you might not expect is that players can seemingly name most of the platformer's NPCs.
VGC's Andy Robinson named one smiley flower Mr. Brexit and dubbed another mousy character Geezer, for example, and I'm sure the millions of Switch 2 owners out in the wild won't dream of calling Shy Guy anything worse, right? Right?
We don't need to look much further than Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream as evidence, a life sim that's as powerful a meme generator as its older sibling thanks to how players can create any Miis in their twisted little imaginations, and lock chibi Jennifer Coolidge in a room together with Naruto Uzumaki. Even in the demo, folks truly pushed the lack of dialogue filter to the limit, too, to the point that one former Nintendo PR lead, Kit Ellis, said that the company "might be rethinking their approach to this in the game based on what they're seeing." Nothing changed in the full release in that regard, but the lack of sharing functionality has remained firmly in place.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book doesn't offer quite the same level of control over characters, but I'm both excited for and dreading the day when players share clips of Yoshi interacting with critters named, say, Twelve Cigarettes or Edgar Edgeworth.
Whether the new Yoshi game has a content filter is unclear, but at least in the preview build, the game lets you see name recommendations from other players' systems, making restrictions of some kind seem pretty likely. If my time in online games has taught me anything, however, it's that gamers can get through any filter with enough creative spelling.
GamesRadar+'s Yoshi and the Mysterious Book preview said the platformer has "this lovely quality of experimentation that has long been part of Nintendo's best games."
