the main draw for me as a kid to YI was the different-colored Yoshis.
as a kid, an older kid at my day camp told me a rumor that the JP version of SMW had a purple Yoshi who could use all of the Yoshis’ shell attacks, combined. this is the same guy who played a bunch of (at the time) hard to find orchestral arrangements of Final Fantasy music on his PC, running some kind of DOS-based music player.
i one day wrote to Nintendo Power to ask about the Yoshi, but they denied the rumor. however, they did concede that i was correct to note that the one screenshot released of Yoshi’s Island contained a purple Yoshi.
and to this day, i continue to like games for purely subjective and arbitrary reasons