Now Playing: The Legend of Spyro - A New Beginning

 Darkier and edgier. I love it.

That ain't a bat, it's Spyro!

 Now this one is might promising. I've heard nothing but bad things about the Legend of Spyro... but I think it's gonna just like Crash Bandicoot all over again. People, clouded by nostalgia, just can't stand the idea of either character changing, so they are gonna bash it regardless. Which kinda sucks, since edgy Spyro has a lot of potential.

 The new melee combat threw me off initially, since I wasn't expecting that in my Spyro, but I quickly got used to it. Sadly, the combat is starting to feel very dull already, and I barely made it into the Ice Realm.

 But while the gameplay is meh, the story is really interesting, I'm quite invested already and I hope to get to see Spyro grow.

Review #561: Spyro - A Hero's Tail

 A puny tale.

Not as gloomy as it looks, I promise.

 Enter the Dragonfly was a lame attempt at a traditional Spyro game, but four games in, Spyro had to change in order to remain fresh,and thus, Vivendi Universal took the reigns and produced a very different Spyro game... but a great one.

 While it's set in the same continuity as previous games, the last home-console Spyro game to do so, the entire voice-cast has changed, and characters have been redesigned. Story plays a bigger role in this one than in any other Spyro game, but it's still just an excuse to collect things. That said, the game looks brilliant, with fantastic, colorful and cartoony characters... and the dialogue to match. The script tries so hard to be funny, but it isn't, and it will probably only appeal to children. Sadly, you can't skip the dialogue, so be prepared to cringe a bit.

Dragon Shores are a staple by now!

 So how has the game changed? For starters, it's no longer based around different levels, but rather interconnected areas. There're three different collectibles: 100 Light Gems, 40 Dark gems and 80 eggs. Treasure is still around, but now it's an unlimited resource that can be spent in shops for power ups or keys for chests. You only need about 40 light gems, which allows you to activate everything that requires light gems, but you must destroy all 40 dark gems in order to finish the game, eggs being relegated for bonus unlocks, like skins for Spyro. There's a lot of stuff to do in A Hero's Tail, that's for sure.

 Spyro himself plays pretty much just like he did before, but they swapped the Headbutt-charge and Breath buttons around, just to annoy you. And they finally did justice to the brilliant breaths idea from Enter the Dragonfly, as each breath has environmental and combat uses. Fire breath is the default breath, not much to talk about really. Electric breath can be used to activate a few mechanisms, and has more range than any other breath as well as a seeking property... at the cost of being the weakest breath. Water breath doesn't do any damage, instead slowing down enemies, but can be used to activate water wheels or defeat flaming enemies. Lastly, Ice Breath can be used to freeze water, as well as pretty much any enemy, making it the most powerful breath in the game... and the last one you unlock. Movement is tight, and everything feels great... but the gliding. There's no hover, so dropping out of a glide can be a bit imprecise, at least until you learn when to let go of the X button. It can take a while, though.

Surfer bros? yeah, this game is appealing to a younger crowd.

 Taking a page out of Spyro 3, alternate playable characters are back. Sparx gets on-rails shooting levels, Sgt. Byrd gets the flying challenges(Destroy a certain amount of objects under a certain time limit) and newcomer Blink gets platforming challenges in which you must destroy 5/10 crystals. I've seen some criticism levied against Blink and how slow he feels, but I felt his levels weren't THAT bad, but certainly the most boring out of the entire cast. Each character gets a stage on every world, so that means four stages for each, not too shabby, and much fairer than Spyro 3. However, there's a small caveat... If you want to collect everything, each stage must be played twice, first for a Dragon Egg and then on a harder difficulty for a light gem. To be honest, you don't need to play any of these stages, since you can get every single Dark Gem you need just by playing Spyro, so if you hate any of their gameplays... avoid them. There's a final playable character, Hunter, who gets the most complex and in-depth stages, stages that don't need to be played twice, at the cost of only getting two stages in the entire game, one that is mandatory. Luckily, he is fun to play as, so no biggie, heck, I'd say it's disappointing how he gets less stages than the others!

 I'd say A Hero's Tail is pretty much great. There're a few small design flaws, like having to play every character-mission twice, or no easy way to drop out of a glide, but overall, it's pretty darn great. Bosses are a bit boring, but the stages are fun to explore, and collecting every little thing you can quickly becomes addictive. It's easy to recommend to both fans and newcomers alike.

 8.0 out of 10

Review #560: Spyro - Enter the Dragonfly

 Ain't no Bruce Lee in here, but this game deserves a one-inch punch.

 I would be frowning too if I had to star in a game like this.

 Even though Insomniac left their purple child behind, the powers that be wouldn't give the poor Dragon a rest, so Universal Interactive got a new team and tasked them with bringing Spyro into the next generation of Videogames. Then they rushed them to meet a deadline, and thus the story wrote itself.

 Everything is fine and dandy in the Dragon Realm, and the baby dragons are about to get their companion dragonflies, but not before Ripto returns and scatters them around 8 different stages, so Spyro is back to collect everything he can. While a measly 8 stages sounds small, and there's a single hub world, each stage is fairly large, with 10 fireflies to collect and about 800 worth of treasure to find. The story is even less prevalent than in Spyro 1, and characters are pretty much forgotten. Bianca appears twice, in the opening and in the ending, and Moneybags appears once and charges you gems that single time, which makes treasure pretty much useless, besides 100%, since access to levels is gated behind your firefly collection.

Bianca is back!... for a grand total of two cutscenes.

 Everything looks the same, albeit in higher poly-count thanks to fancy PS2 graphics, but feels off. This is the most slippery Spyro has ever moved, the hover move doesn't work very well, so expect a lot of your glides to end outside the platform you wanted to get to. That's when it works, since sometimes Spyro has trouble standing over certain surfaces, like bridges. Getting on top of frozen NPCs, required on the first stage, is almost a nightmare. For the first time since I played a Spyro game, the camera felt stiff and uncooperative. I used to play with Active camera, but this time it didn't cut it, and even though now we have the right analog stick moving the camera... it's so slow and stiff! And Sparx seems to miss gems on occasion, so expect to backtrack for missing treasure. Finally, Spyro's trademark headbutt charge feels weak and lacks oomph.

 And don't even let me get started on the horrid framerate! The game struggles so hard to keep it steady, but it fails to. If you get to play that is, the game is ridden with extensive loading times and loading screens FOR loading screens. Incredibly enough, load times are inconsistent, you might get lucky and the game might load a bit quicker than usual, some times. The loading times REALLY kill the flow of the game.... not that the bugs and glitches don't already do that just fine. Let's see... the game froze once during a loading screen, one time it failed to load part of a level and had me running over an empty void and I had to exit the stage to fix it, another time I went through a barn's gate before firing up the fireworks, which meant I had to do another round through the level, plus, numerous audio and graphical bugs. Oh, and the last boss may enter his vulnerable stage two times in a row, or it might take upwards of five minutes before he does. It's so wonky!

It looks the same, but combat lacks oomph. It feels like your hitting air instead of solid objects.

 I felt that Spyro's moveset pretty much tapped out at Spyro 2, something Insomniac probably realized which is why they added more characters in 3. Well, the one thing that they could've done, which they toyed with in Spyro 3 with the Frozen breath, was adding elemental breaths. And they did. And they suck. Fire breath is your default breath and behaves just as it used to. Two challenges require it in order to burn scarecrows under a time limit, and that's all the 'unique' use it'll get. Bubble Breath is useless and can only be used to catch Fireflies, since it does no damage. Good luck catching them, though, as it only seems to hit under a tiny, minuscule radius. Frozen Breath is used to put out fires in two challenges and is the only way to defeat robot dinosaurs on the Jurassic stage, it doesn't make any sense, but that's its single use. Finally, Thunder Breath is used to activate a few lightning rods. It's the breath that you'll use the most for its unique ability. And that's it, elemental breaths could've been a great new addition, but they barely get any use. In combat they are basically the same and there are barely any puzzles that require creative use of them. Another new move is the Wing Deflect, which is only required in a single stage to deflect energy bolts. That's it.

 At least the core of the game is decent. It shows that the game could've been good with more time in the oven. If they had ironed out the bugs and the loading times, the end result could've been a decent, albeit far from great, Spyro game. Because the platforming is still decent, when it works, and collecting stuff is still fun. They even managed to get sliding right, as a matter of fact, slides are the only thing that work better here than in the first Spyro games! There're some very interesting levels, like the one drenched in Honey, or even the one infested with Robot dinosaurs, it's a shame they couldn't polish the gameplay and tweak the physics so that Spyro didn't have trouble standing or hovering onto things.

Monkey Monks. Why not?

 I think the devs were on the right track, and their hearts were on the right place, it's just that they didn't have the time or the experience to get it working right by the time the deadline hit. Unless you're a hardcore Spyro fan, this one's better off skipped.
4.0 out of 10

Now Playing: Spyro - A Hero's Tail

A good tail. I mean, tale.

 Hunter finally makes his official playable debut!

 I've heard a lot of things about this game. A lot of bad things. But I played about 30 minutes of it, got to the swamp before I started running late for work, and boy oh boy, it was good.

 Sparx's wonky grab rate from Enter the DragonFly? Fixed. Awkward camera? Fixed. Janky movement? Fixed. The game oozes quality, the platforming feels very tight. I don't understand why swap the headbutt and fire breathing buttons, though, why mess with muscle memory?!

 The dialogue is dumb, and is reeking with infantile humor that will make most adults grimace, but as far as gameplay is concerned? So far, color me impressed.

Review #559: Spyro - Year of the Dragon

 Which is whichever year you happen to play this game.

The cover is a bloated as the game itself.

 Spyro 2 was pretty much the pinacle of what you could with the Spyro formula, there wasn't much that could've been done to expand upon it, save elemental breaths(But I'm getting ahead of myself there...) so Insomniac did the only thing left to do: Add more characters. It also brought back a few mechanics from Spyro 1, for whichever reason, thus making Spyro 3 feel like a bit of a retread.

 The excuse, erm, story this time around concerns the Dragon eggs, it's the year of the Dragon and they are about to hatch. But that would be to easy, so a sorceress and her apprentice steal all the eggs before they hatch. Now it's up to Spyro and his cohorts to get them back. The game is about as long as the previous one, but since Spyro's potential was pretty much tapped out, it introduced 4 different pals that you get to play as on bonus levels in a few stages. Sheila the Kangaroo can jump high and kick her enemies, Sgt. Byrd flies around, shoots rockets and can drop bombs, the Yeti is slow but packs a heavy wallop... and can also reflect projectiles, and lastly, Agent 9, a monkey that shoots lasers.

\Some things never change... including the forest landscapes.

 To be honest, these side characters are pretty dull to play as, they are a lot slower than Spyro and their gameplay is nothing to write home about. Sheila gets some annoying secrets hidden over tall heights and Sgt. Byrd gets a few neat puzzles involving dropping stuff over other stuff, but that's about the extent of things worth mentioning about them. For all intents and purposes, their small sub-stages are little more than mini-games. Finishing the game unlocks 4 over-the-top shooting mini-games with Sparx, they are pretty decent but the rewards come too little too late if you've been collecting everything. Improved gem-grabbing reach? Nice, but there are no more gems left to collect. The ability to point towards nearby treasure? Which treasure? I had every gem collected by then. The ability to teleport to whatever stage from the menu? Thanks, but there's nothing left to collect now!

 The new additions are a bit dull, but treading old ground felt a bit lame as well. Keys and chests were gone, why bring them back now? Wizards that alter the stage and buff other enemies? I fought them already in Spyro 1, it was cute then, it's old new now. And the egg thieves that you must chase return, once again, why? They weren't in 2, so it's too late to turn them into staples. It also brings back a few ideas from Spyro 2, like a stage based on planting plants, albeit done better here, and it double down on mini-games, hope you like skateboarding, cause there're a couple of those! It feels a bit like Crash 3 in how they went a bit overboard with all the side-activities, putting it on par with the platforming, something I wasn't too fond of.

The skateboard stages are all kinds of lame, but they can be beaten... even the bonus one.

 Something I appreciated about Spyro 2 was giving worth to the treasure you collected, besides being a gate to stop your progress. Purchasing new moves felt rewarding, even if there were only three different moves. In Spyro 3 money is just a gate. Want to unlock the new character? Pay the price. Want to open up the bridge? Pay the price. It's a minor nitpick, but oh well! What did bother me, however, is that some levels aren't up to par with what I've come to expect from Spyro. Some stages just aren't well designed, hiding treasure behind walls that you must jump and kick with Sheila felt particularly nasty, and there're two slides that are a pain in the butt to try not to fall off from. It's just a few levels that felt like this, but something I didn't come across since Spyro 1's dreaded running jumps on the treetops!

 All in all, Spyro - Year of the Dragon is still a great platform-adventure game, and among the best and best aged on the Playstation 1. It's simply not as tight as the first couple of games. They definitely went for quantity over quality, so the quality suffered a bit, but you got more characters, more vehicles and more silly gimmicks.
 8.0 out of 10

Review #558: Spyro 2 - Ripto's Rage!

 His anger is your enjoyment.

Barney's back!

 Spyro the Dragon was a hit, deservedly so, which meant that a sequel was pretty much a given. Spyro 2 is every bit as good as the first one and then some, the improvements might not be game changers, but the first game was so good that there was little left to improve on.

 So, there's this nutty professor and his entourage fiddling around with a portal, accidentally bringing the pint-sized tyrant Ripto into their realm. Claiming ownership of the realm, but not before making it clear that he is afraid of Dragons, Ripto leaves on his merry way, so now the professor uses the portal to bait a Dragon into their realm in order to save them. As luck would have it, Spyro is the one sucked into the portal, and is quickly coerced into aiding their cause. The game is divided into 6 different worlds with about 6-8 stages and a boss each, and is about as long as the first game.

Headbutting enemies feels so good! And they deserve it too!

 The format of the game has changed a bit, now each stage has three different goals: Collect all the treasure, collect the talisman and collect the orbs. Treasure is peppered throughout every stage, and now has a use besides 100% completion, you can use it to buy access to stages, areas or new moves, such as climbing, head-smashing and diving underwater. Orbs are gated behind side objectives, usually minigames, such as completing a mine-cart course, finishing a turret section, finishing a hokey match, defeating every enemy of a certain type, etc. Orbs are used to unlock bonus flying stages. Lastly, Talismans, which are used to advance through the first two worlds, which are earned by finishing the stage's main objective, because this time around, stages are not just a collection of platforms and puzzles, but rather each stage has an objective, such as saving every villager from tree-monsters, ending the curse of petrified innocents or getting baby turtles to a safe haven. Needless to say, while I liked Spyro 1's simplicity, I like this approach much more, and making every collectible rewarding in some way goes a long way into motivating you to collect everything.

 As for Spyro's moveset, it's pretty much the same as it was in the first game, with the addition of swimming, climbing ladders and head-smashing. You still have charging headbutts and flame breath as your attacks, and will have to do with jumping and gliding to do all the platforming. Each stage also has a temporary upgrade, such as an accelerated dash, fireball-breath or flying, that's locked behind a defeated enemy counter and is usually required to obtain an orb. It's a good moveset, and level design is varied and well done, so you never feel like the game is cheating you. As a matter of fact, Spyro's slippery movement didn't cause me to die once in this game, so level design has been
tweaked a bit around that.

Enemies are different but offer no new challenges for Spyro.

 While every tweak is an improvement, and every addition is very welcome, I still feel as if Spyro 1's simplicity has its merits. Regardless, Spyro 2 is a better game, if only slightly, so I'm guessing that whichever game you play first is the one you'll like the most. Regardless, Spyro 2 is easily among PS1's greatest.
 9.0 out of 10

Now Playing: Spyro 2 - Ripto's Rage!

Still.... SO good.

He's got Ratchet's initial smugness.

 So, I had played a few hours of Persona 5, but was about to go to sleep. Why not play a bit o' Spyro 2? Suddenly I'm one hour past my bed time, wide awake and with the biggest grin on my face.

 Spyro 1 had a limited moveset? Now you can earn the ability to swim or to climb. Collectibles weren't rewarding? Orbs unlock bonus levels, treasure unlocks moves and stages and talismans unlock boss battles. Couple that with the same ol' brilliant gameplay and you've got a recipe for success.

 I'm sad to say... but I think I may like Spyro more than Crash. I mean, it helps that Crash 1 has aged like milk, but even so, Spyro 1 and Spyro 2 are just so GOOD, I wonder what's in store for me once I pick up Spyro 3?