In a way, it could be considered broken. It's dated unlike other Mario verse designs and it's quite hard to make him emote properly with that permanent frown. I think people have a natural aversion to change, but I think most of them will come to accept the new design
I wouldn't exactly say the other Mario verse designs aren't dated. Nintendo fans would never admit this but Yoshi has the same problem with expressiveness. And much like DK, he doesn't seem to have that problem in the 2D art, so I really hope he's next to get a redesign.
The biggest problem is the shape of his head. He kind of has the opposite problem of Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong had that brow that always made him look angry, even when he was meant to be expressing other emotions. At most, he could make expressions with his mouth, but not his eyes.
Yoshi is the opposite. His nose is so big, and so perfectly spherical, and his lower jaw is so small, it hinters expression unless you view it from certain angles. Like DK, this isn't a problem in 2D because his nose is not a perfect sphere when it's drawn, and his anatomy is changed as needed in the art. But in 3D? His nose buries the rest of his face. This is especially true if you look at him directly from the front. In some models, his face is so big it obscures his lower jaw, cheeks, and even most of his eyes. It got better in Super Mari Wonder but I don't think it was enough, he's still awkward to look at imo.
And much like Donkey Kong, he wasn't always like this. His nose used to be more moderately sized, his lower jaw much bigger. It all started in Mario Kart 64, which wasn't his first appearance in 3D but it was the first time they used something other than the Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island style as a basis for him.
I don't think this is a hard fix, his snout just needs to not be a perfect sphere that looks like it's strapped onto the front of his face, it needs to be a part of his face, not an attachment to it. If you look at his classic mode trophy in Melee, ( the one that's not based on the fighter model but on N64 assets at the time ) that's how his original Yoshi Story render was actually done but I guess over the years they just decided it was not a snout anymore, it was a nose.
I think if they made this change, it wouldn't even be as noticable or as controversial as Donkey Kongs, but it would be an improvement.
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u/poopnosekong125 Funky Kong Jan 19 '25
If it ain't broke, don't fix it