If any game series deserves the Crash 4 "begin from square 2" treatment, it's Yoshi. Yoshi's Island is a ****ing masterpiece, up there with Wario Land 4 and DKC2 as some of the best the Mario expanded universe has to offer, and then the sequels are just so mind-numbingly... meh. Woolly World is probably the closest Yoshi has got to a return to form, but even then it suffered a lot of the same problems as YIDS, Universal Gravitation, Story, and New Island. (particularly a lack of innovation, difficulty, and willingness to break from the Yoshi formula)
I think UniGrav and Story at the very least had creative characters and worlds, but there's not much to look back on with Crafted, YIDS, and New Island other than the simultaniously simplistic-and-absurd time travel plots and the latter's music.