Well thanks Brainscratchcomms! You fuel my nostalgia drives just enough to make me dust out the copy of Spyro 1 and take another trip down memory lane. Yeah Spyro. Y'know, that one Skylander that was apparently important enough to be in the title of the first Skylanders game? Yeah, that one. Well for all the kids reading this, prepare to have your minds blown, because Spyro actually had games besides Skylanders. Crazy right? And most of these games were actually good.
No, not those ones.
Not that one either.
I didn't care too much for that one personally.
I actually liked that one, but no, not what I'm looking for.
Oh, definitely not.
Yeah, cause that's what we needed in a Spyro game, edgy plot.
There we go. This trilogy of games is what fueled my childhood. I played the heck out of all of these games, and I think it its time to share some of its magic with you. For the focus of today's review, I'll be talking about the first entry if the trilogy, Spyro the Dragon.
The plot of Spyro 1 is as follows. In The World Of Dragons, there lived a being called Gnasty Gnorc. Gnasty Gnorc was this really unplesent...thing who resented the Dragons and their shiny gems. Eventually the dragons banished him to the Dragon junkyard, where Gnasty began experimenting with magic spells. Later, while the Dragons are being interviewed for...something, the question of Gnasty Gnorc is brought up, and one dragon brings up that Gnasty Gnorc is not only not a threat, but is ugly. The nerve. Gnasty uses these magic spells he's been experimenting with to turn all the Dragons into crystal statues. Except for Spyro, because he was too small for Gnasty to hit. And because Gnasty can't just try to hit Spyro with the spell again, Spyro sets out to rescue all of the Dragons, and defeat Gnasty once and for all. And so, The Adventure Begins.
Spyro the Dragon is a 3D platformer. You'r goal, to put it simply, is to navigate the levels and collect everything you can collect. This can range from the multicolored gems, to the Dragon Eggs that you receive from defeating thieves in the first three worlds, and of course the Dragons. To save the dragons, you touch them. That's it. Walk up to them and watch as all those valuable crystals just break instantaneously. And something that's really cool about the dragons is that they're all fully voice acted and always have something to tell you. Some are tutorials, some introduce you to a new world, and most will just say "Thank you for releasing me!". No, like an eighth of the dragons say that line. There are a total of eighty dragons in total, but you don't need to save them all to complete your adventure. Only a certain number of dragons are needed to advance to another world, and eventually Gnasty. The boss levels also need a certain number of dragons but more on those later. Now as for the gems and Dragon Eggs, you don't need to collect those. If your a completionist, you'll need these in order to unlock the secret final level, but in order to beat the game, you don't need a single gem. But you'll collect them anyway. I mean just look at how shiny they are.
Now as for what Spyro can do, well he can do quite a bit. Besides doing the obvious things a platformer hero can do like jumping and using his legs to walk, Spyro is able to use his wings to glide mid-jump and temporarily stay in the air. His wings a puny though, so it's just that. Temporary. In terms of attacking, Spyro is able to breath fire and charge into enemies. You'll have to use these two attacks in order to deal with different enemies. Though most enemies go down with a quick breath of fire, some enemies wear metal, requiring you to charge into them. It's not a large array of attacks, but burning an enemy so hard that they turn into a gem is surprisingly satisfying. In terms of handling damage, that's where Sparx comes in. You've probably seen that little thing floating around Spyro by this point. That's Sparx the Dragonfly (Get it?), who serves as your health bar. When he's yellow, your at max. When he's blue, your still okay. When he's green, you get one more hit. After that hit, Sparx disappears, and Spyro becomes a one-hit wonder. In order to restore health, you take it out on smaller animals, which drop butterflies that Sparx eats to restore health. Now how a little dragonfly is able to determine a dragons health is beyond me, but it still gets the job done.
There are five worlds for Spyro to explore, each filled to the brim with enemies, gems, dragons, and levels to explore. The levels are...surprisingly linear, with only a number of them having side-paths, and only requiring backtracking when you locate a key for a chest. And the boss stages are exactly the same. Linear levels with a multi-hit mook at the end. And every single one is incredibly easy. But many bosses do have some charm to them, like the first one, which is a pumpkin dressed in a Grim Reaper costume, which is revealed to be a sheep on stilts. So there's that. Then, there's the flying stages, where your granted infinite flight and have to get 4 different groups of 8 items before the time runs out. Hitting a target grants more time, and the game saves your times. But that's not what your there for, as these stages are not required to beat the game, and are only needed to be play for 100% completion. But these stages are pretty good.
Now I've mentioned the extreme nostalgia that I hold to this game. But as I've grown older and have since grown more critical about games, this game just doesn't hold up like it used to. The first thing is that, for what you can actually do, levels are much too large. These are essentially sandboxes with an exit, and since there are no other objectives to accomplish, the game lacks variety, and the levels start to blend after a while. Occasionally a level will mix things up, like a level that has different power-ups, or a level that is nothing but charging, but many of the levels just feel the same and lack any real identity. If you were to give me a name of a level, I wouldn't be able to tell you what's in it. This is fixed in the sequels, but its present here. And also, for a platformer, there's not much in the way of platforming. You wouldn't tell from the above image, but besides the occasional "glide over a bottomless pit", there's not much in the way of actual platforming other than just jumping on things while jumping to other things, with no fear of death. And when the game does require platforming, a couple oddities in Spyro's control start to appear. Some of the jumps you need to make are really tight, and you'll just miss them by a little bit. Future games will add a little hover at the end of a glide, which helps in situations like these. But in this game, you can only continue gliding towards the ledge and pray to a god that you'll make it, or else you'll hit the ledge and fall like a purple rock. And when gliding to smaller platforms, you'll notice another oddity. When gliding, there's no easy way to stop. As mentioned before, a hover will help you position yourself with precise platforming. In this game, you can only press Triangle and drop straight down, making it likely that you'll miss your mark while gliding.
Despite the bland levels, the game is great presentation wise. The models look great for a 32-bit systems, and the colors chosen for the models and levels make everything stick out. There are some really dark areas, particularly the fourth world, but since dark was that worlds theme it's okay there. Also the world is just filled with personality and charm. Ignoring the sheep boss mentioned above, enemies will react to Spyro approaching and occasionally taunt him. And this is just normal mooks. And everything is based on medieval times, so everything has a natural, artificial setting and layout to it. And all the dragons you save have medieval like names, such as Thor and Conan and...Cleetus...I suppose. And though levels might be barren, very few are boring. Levels in the 5th world then to be a highlight, as well as Tree Tops, which though driving children to insanity, is one of the best levels in the game. Spyro's world is just bursting with stuff like this, and it makes the game really stand out. It just feels like a dragons world, and that's really cool. And the music. Oh man the music. The soundtrack was composed by Stewart Copeland, who was the drummer for the band The Police. Though not the best soundtrack on the face of the earth, Copeland managed to make every track feel like they belonged. The tracks just...fit with the worlds that they're played in, and that's just amazing. Great job Copeland. Great job.
The inner 7 year old will forever disagree with this, but Spyro 1 is a flawed game. A few oddities in the controls and bland levels with few objectives and little variety. Despite this though, the game is still fun. The games pretty to look at and great to listen to, the world oozes with charm, and is still good overall. This game just has a few issues that were fixed in the sequels, and Spyro 1 suffers the problem of "not much inherently wrong, just part of a trilogy where the sequels were better". But this game is still fun to play. Its just not as good as future games. It's short, clocking in at about 5 hours, but it makes for a nice game to sink your teeth into. It's also cheap. It's on the PlayStation Network as a PSOne Classic for only 6 dollars. For that price, Spyro 1 is worth playing at least once. Nothing fantastic, but a fun time nevertheless. Still worth your time, and still recommended.
The Silent Protagonist thank's you for releasing me!
All images are the property of their original owners. If I made them, I would have a much more vivid imagination then I actually do.
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