Spyro Reignited Trilogy (2018)

Currently playing: Spyro 1

Having only played Spyro 3 when I was young and now playing 1 for the first time, I'm really surprised about how clunky the controls feel. I'm not sure if they redesigned them after the first one or it's just nostalgia talking, tho.

The game itself... well, it's Spyro. It's always fun to play, even if the dialog is full 90s-mascot-with-an-attitude.

Let me preface this by saying I’ve always been a Crash Bandicoot man at heart. I’ve always generally liked Spyro, but I never really got hooked growing up.

These remasters are glorious, but I do feel they have justified my feeling that Crash was the superior platformer. I’ll start with the positives, all three games are visually gorgeous. The level design is creatively varied and I really enjoyed running through these meticulously rebuilt maps. The music and sound design is also top notch. Especially on a good sound system, these games are really pleasant to listen to.

My gripes are as follows. All three games are generally too easy. This complaint sticks the most for the first one, which has few difficulty spikes at all. The second game is also generally a cakewalk, but, extremely frustratingly, it has a few random difficulty spikes that are not in any way fair when compared to how cruisey everything else is. In particular I’m looking at the second boss fight.

That of course brings me to the third game, which gave me the most headaches. I did appreciate and respect the efforts to create variety and keep the game fresh by introducing a plethora of mini-games and activities that are required to complete the levels. However!! A jack of all trades is a master of none. And a platformer that forces me to play a simplified (and less satisfying) Tony Hawk segment over and over, or try to grapple with terribly wonky vehicle controls for spaceships and submarines...well that’s a game that’s pushing it’s luck. When the mini games work they can actually be pretty fun; but there is way too much slow-paced slog in the mix and it kinda put a damper on the trilogy for me. Not to mention, and I’m genuinely sorry to be calling out Toys For Bob specifically, but even on my brand new PS4 Pro, the third game was laggy and dropping frames constantly throughout the last quarter of levels. For a PSOne remake, that’s downright unacceptable.

I may be complaining a lot but I did actually really enjoy revisiting this franchise, for the most part. Spyro was a good taste of what Insomniac could do (before they were knocking it out of the park with Ratchet and Clank). Good fun, but I probably won’t be revisiting again soon.

I just beat all 3 games, each with just above 65%. Took about 6 hours for the 1st game and about 10 hours for each of the sequels. It's possible to unlock the final boss level(s) in the first two games without ever stepping foot into some of the later levels if you're very thorough with collecting gems, eggs or orbs+talismans in the early levels. The 2nd and 3rd games require you to play all the levels in all the worlds except the last one before the final boss. However, at least with the 1st game you would be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't play some of the levels in the later two worlds because they are some of the most creative in the whole trilogy.

I never played 2 & 3 at their time of release but after playing them here and going back to 1 it made me really wish that the hover move was added into the 1st game because some glides are quite unforgiving and need careful positioning and gliding right at peak jump height. Also it would've been nice if some of those shallow pools of water didn't cause Spyro damage in the 1st game where he couldn't swim. Otherwise it's just as fun today as I remember it back during its release. The gorgeous updated graphics make it even more enticing to explore the levels. The main weakness of the 1st game are the bosses. Except for the final boss, they're all way too easy. Most of the boss fights involve you chasing the boss in stages instead of actually fighting them and figuring out how to damage them.

The level design philosophy is definitely different in the 2nd game where the levels are smaller and there is less emphasis on platforming. It's mostly replaced by dedicated areas for secondary challenges, which could be a minigame or some other task. You won't have to complete all of them in every level but you'll need to do some of them to progress through the game. However, I found most of them to be simple and not very interesting nor fun. For me the most bothersome thing is that practically every level involves NPCs opening gates to different areas multiple times in a level, which slows the pacing a lot. There's just too much of this gate keeping. The one change that I wish had carried over to the 3rd game was that defeating enemies did not yield gems. This was nice because for me it was tiresome trying to make sure I defeated every enemy in a level and got their gem. The 2nd game made the boss encounters more traditional although they are no longer part of a level with platforming and gems to collect. Instead you are dropped into an arena with the boss immediately and you have to figure out how to damage them. However, there are only 3 bosses in this game. They are more challenging although I found the 2nd boss much harder than any of the bosses in the entire series. I think it took me almost 30 times to beat him. Apparently this added difficulty was a change made in the Reignited trilogy.

My criticisms of the 2nd game's level designs seem to have been shared by the developers because in the 3rd game, the level design goes back to something that feels closer to the 1st game. There's much less NPC gate keeping. However, nothing in the level design in the 3rd game feels noteworthy or more creative in comparison to the 1st game. Like in the 2nd game, there are secondary challenges, which are definitely more fun & interesting here. Despite some fiddly controls with performing tricks and landing, the skateboarding is actually fun although the race is annoying and hard. This game also introduces levels that are exclusive to new characters, which changes up the gameplay more. There's the kangaroo, the flying bird that shoots missiles, the yeti with a giant club and the monkey who was probably the prototype for the Ratchet games with his 3rd person shooter gameplay. The kangaroo levels are actually not bad and her jumping mechanics are interesting with a double jump and a super high jump. She does not have a secondary running attack like Spyro and it would've been nice if she had one. In fact, none of these secondary characters can run. The Yeti in particular is slow and can barely jump. His intro level is poor. He literally cannot jump onto a step that is barely higher than his knees and he can't just climb onto it. Luckily there are not many of these levels and they aren't hard but I would've only kept the kangaroo and ditched the rest.

The bosses in the 3rd game essentially follow the same template as the bosses in the 2nd game. Another character drops random power-ups for Spyro to use to attack the boss. The final boss is the worst because the random power-ups are replaced by different vehicles you have to drive and the last vehicle controls terribly. It didn't even seem like it would follow the direction I tried to move it as it would always end up veering off out of the arena and potentially dunk Spyro in hot lava. Easily the worst final boss out of the trilogy. Incredibly unfair to force the player to drive vehicles they likely don't even remember how to use in a final boss fight. Despite this, this final boss ends up being the easiest out of the trilogy. Ideally, bosses would've been a combination of the first game's boss levels with a bit of chasing and the 2nd game's arena bosses or a mixture of the two.

The 3rd game almost gets everything right and it definitely feels like a culmination of the best ideas from the first two games. But it doesn't quite top the platforming challenges of the 1st game. The added variety in the secondary challenges is better than the 2nd game except for most of the new playable characters. All three games are good but the main platforming gameplay and level design is the best in the 1st game.

Friendship ended with SONIC the Hedgehog -- Now SPYRO the Dragon is my best friend

I'm joking of course, but I do gotta be honest about how pleasantly surprised I was by the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, a set of full-blown remakes for the old PS1 games in the classic 3D platformer franchise. You play as a small dragon (Spyro), who has two main attacks: breathing a small burst of fire, and charging into a sprint (ramming into enemies with your horns). He can also glide with his wings, but not fly (save for in special bonus stages, and in certain instances where you get a limited-time power-up). All in all he controls great -- I never ran into any big issues. The camera also seemed to handle fine, though I imagine it helps that levels are mostly large open spaces, and there is relatively little in the way of precision platforming.

The Spyro games have a strong emphasis on collecting things, like many other 3D platformers. Luckily it doesn't go completely overboard with this, though some of the challenges offered in 2 and 3 are pretty ridiculous and I decided I wasn't going to bother going for 100%. I just wanted to focus on the missions I found enjoyable, and the games don't require too much of you if you just want to get to each final boss and its game's story ending. Perhaps one day down the line I'll go back to this and try freeing more dragons, earning more orbs, and finding more dragon eggs, but for now I'm content with having won each game.

I have to mention just how beautiful the Reignited Trilogy looks. (I played on PS4 btw.) It's a delight to just trot about in these gorgeous cartoony worlds. I think it's also worth noting how cute Spyro is (I was surprised -- I was expecting an annoying Dreamworks Snarker), and how funny a lot of the side characters are. Particularly in 3, where there were multiple instances I had to laugh aloud at some of the more clever Loony Toons-esque scenarios.

All in all I had a blast playing through these, and recommend this to any fans of 3D platforming -- and to parents looking for a title for their kids (you know, before they jump straight into Call of Duty at age six, lol). The Spyro games are 100 times less frustrating than the Crash games too, which is perhaps worth mentioning when the two IPs get grouped together all the time in 3D platformer discussions.

So I played through the first Spyro game in the Reignited Trilogy already. Great, great, fun.

I decided to watch some of the original PS1 game of it on Youtube just to see how different it looked. And hot damn! How far we've come.

Also, Reignited Spyro is about a thousand times cuter than the PS1 version. That voice he has in the original... just, wow. LOL.

Playing Spyro 2 and really appreciating the new challenges for orbs. Some are very simple, but they give levels more personality and variety.

Spyro 2 has a very warm place in my heart so I'm glad to relive this experience, even though some art decisions stray away from what I remembered, just minor things so far... Like he dancing Skeleton in the "Badlands." I remember it being much more charming before...