Now that everyone’s excited about Spyro again (because of the remakes, blog readers of the future), I thought it would be an opportune time to follow up on my playthrough of Spyro 2 from… LAST NOVEMBER?? I am now a skeleton, who loves dragons.
Geez Louise. I can’t believe it’s been an entire year. ANYWAY this is Spyro’s first DS outing, and in fact the final game in the pre-Legend reboot continuity. As a tying up of that timeline it does a good job of calling back to previous games in the series, with characters and locations reappearing from all three of the original trilogy and Hero’s Tail, the second PS2-era game. (Sorry GBA titles.) I was pleased by the amount of NPCs, who even if they were new in this game managed to have some personality with a few lines of dialogue.
The problem is that the game is sloppily put together. Transitions are rough and jarring, the controls are clumsy, and the game does a poor job up front of explaining itself. It’s not dissimilar from the 3D platformers in the series, but a poor approximation. With a fixed isometric perspective it can be hard to judge distance and elevation in some areas, and instead of the rollicking rumble of a rambunctious dragon Shadow Legacy is slow and awkward.
The core feature is a light world/dark world dichotomy. You use pads to switch between the drab monster-infested light world and the colourful light world, home to NPCs and source of health-restoring creatures. This works well enough. Spyro has a large arsenal of moves including touch-screen magic spells and button combo chi attacks, but you pick what to learn at each level-up by talking to Dragon Elders, and there’s little guidance. At the end of the game I was still missing half the total upgrades, which I see as a problem.
The main loop can get repetitive: you find a new area, go to the dark world and fight a bunch of monsters, this rescues NPCs who you then talk to in the light world and get sidequests, then move on. As I enjoyed in Spyro 2, seeing new areas and meeting new types of characters kept me going, and the light RPG elements were OK too, if a little half-baked. Small details irked me, like graphical glitches or seemingly pointless secret areas, on top of the generally slapdash feel and combat not being very fun. But overall it’s fine, it’s not awful, it has some redeeming features! I had an OK time, really! I can’t recommend it.