Yoshi and the Mysterious Book devs comment on the game’s difficulty
Posted on August 8, 2026 by Brian(@NE_Brian)
in News, Switch 2
The team behind Yoshi and the Mysterious Book has discussed the game’s difficulty and revealed that during development, Yoshi was originally able to take damage.
The news comes from the latest issue of Nintendo Dream as part of an interview with senior producer Etsunobu Ebisu, director Masahiro Yamamoto, and producer Hisashi Nogami. According to Yamamoto, rather than focusing on difficulty, the team focused on “preserving the players sense of agency and interest investigating the creatures.”
As for why damage was removed, the team felt that having that in the game could impact players’ interest in risk-taking and wanting to try out different possibilities.
Our translation of the interview excerpt is as follows:
Even though there is no game over where you take damage, there are still places in the game with solid action. How was the difficulty of the game decided?
Yamamoto: We didn’t plan to be that conscious of difficulty. The things we thought about were preserving the players’ sense of agency and interest investigating the creatures.
Nogami: During development there was a period where Yoshi would take damage.
Yamamoto: Yeah, that’s right. Our staff and Nintendo staff are the kinds of people who are proactive by nature. When they were play-testing, they would push ahead with their investigations, not worrying about taking damage and before they knew it they would be defeated (laughs).
Yamamoto: We thought it was important for players to try all kinds of challenges, but if you get defeated, and your remaining Yoshis goes down, or you get a game over, you wouldn’t feel able to do dangerous things. Therefore we removed those elements.
Nogami: The most important thing was how you would interact with the creatures and the fun of conducting investigations into them, so we didn’t feel there was any real meaning in you feeling like you made a mistake by having you take damage.
Yamamoto: Allowing you to come back after taking damage or falling into a hole wasn’t because we wanted to lower the difficulty. It was because we thought we wanted the players to have a sense of agency in the investigations. That’s the same reason we didn’t set up goals for each stage too. By not having a goal area, we thought we could better maintain the desire to continue making discoveries.
Exactly, by aiming to reach a goal players may continue forward without trying out lots of things. By the way, there were staff credits in the middle of the game, what was the thinking behind that?
Yamamoto: That was also us wanting to manifest agency. In other games once you clear the ending, I think that gamers have a feeling that now they can do anything, the world is open to them.
Yamamoto: So we wanted players to get that feeling a little earlier in this game.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book can be played now on Nintendo Switch 2. You can read more about the game’s development here, including how it started off as a Nintendo Switch 1 title.
Translation provided by SatsumaFS, Philip Proctor, and Simon Griffin on behalf of Nintendo Everything.
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