I knew ahead of time that the easiest Extra level was harder than the hardest non-Extra, but still…
I’ve saved you the trouble of watching the hour of myself growing steadily more frustrated with the game. There are a multitude of problems with 2-E, and each adds up to make the level way more frustrating than it needs to be. The first you encounter is that Yoshi carries momentum from platforms when jumping off. Cool physics, not great for precision, and very not great when the platform is going down and you need to go up. The other major problem is that the height you get off of the bouncing balls is variable. It’s a timing thing, and if you don’t hit the jump button right at the very bottom of the bounce (as far as I can tell, a single-frame window), you don’t get the maximum height. Every bounce in that level requires maximum height, and while there are only three, it’s pretty demanding to put that in along with everything else! Mercifully, the level is also quite short.
The heavily-featured foes in this game are Shy Guys and Bandits. Shy Guys are only difficult to handle in the sheer variety of Guys that the developers came up with. There are Boo Guys, Shy Guys on Stilts, normal ones, flying ones, ones that drop bombs, ones that carry important items, ones that carry spears, and now even ones that have shields and ones that dance! And we’re only at World 3! (In case you can’t tell by the tabs at the top: there are six worlds.) Bandits, meanwhile, only have one variety I remember. However, that variety is extremely annoying and the setup in the Potted Ghost’s Castle is probably the most ridiculous it gets, with a multitude of tiny platforms and hidden rooms. I think there’s more of that particular setup on the way, but there’s not a lot they could do to make it worse.
Speaking of the Potted Ghost, that’s a creative boss fight! It’s kind of like Tug-of-War except you’re pushing. The ghost can’t do very much, but it did manage to hit me once. I probably should have reset to the start of the encounter, like I’d said I would before. Boss fights in this game don’t seem to be the focus, and none so far have been all that hard. The main difficulty is that you have to beat them without taking any damage at all.