Eurocom saw fit to shake things up slightly with their take on Spyro. A lot of the formula remains but there are tweaks that seem small but change the whole experience. It’s still good but it marks the beginning of the era where the series began drifting away from its roots.
Considering I’ve played a lot of the series out of order, I found A Hero’s Tail illuminating for the context of later games. For example, a lot of redesigns for characters and objects that I observed in Fusion and Shadow Legacy originated here, and many of AHT’s NPCs carry over to SL. This game also fundamentally changes the gem system from a collectible to an economy, which I suppose gave permission for the continuous gem drops and shop systems of the aforementioned games. SL’s shop is even a direct evolution of Moneybags’ travelling, teleporting bazaar here.
Speaking of Moneybags, he has an outrageous, almost Watto-from-Phantom-Menace-style voice. All former voice actors have been booted in fact, not that it’s a huge deal to me. Since Moneybags’ shop pads are everywhere his clips become annoyingly overplayed, but the only really insulting one was Hunter, who has gone from goofy to an unwelcome ‘tude. The writing in general has regular moments of meta-humour, and ranges between chuckleworthy and trying too hard.
But what about playing the game? Spyro still charges, flies, and breathes elements (this time it’s fire, electricity, water, and ice; I used electric 90% of the time), but each has had its function tweaked. There are still sections where you hand off to Spyro’s friends (Byrd plays quite like the old speedways, Hunter and Blink the mole have—yawn—3D action platformer bits, and Sparx has boring on-rail shooter bits, not to mention turret shooting and hamster ball segments), and again they universally made me glad to return to Spyro. It’s a collectathon, yes, and MacGuffins are this time split between dragon eggs and Light Gems, as well as destroying Dark Gems to allow progress.
The key difference, which I’ve been having trouble expressing, is that AHT leans slightly in the direction of action-adventure and away from the classic collectathon format. Instead of self-contained worlds to clear, AHT has large, sprawling environments with warp points. There’s more navigation and exploration of an environment. Gems are numerous, including in the respawning baddies; in fact, it’s a bit unbalanced, as I had hundreds of thousands by the end and nothing to spend them on. These aren’t criticisms per se but important to understand in order to enjoy the game on its own terms.
What I did enjoy was a tad stronger plot and characters. There’s Dragon Elders and fairies to meet and get new abilities from regularly, and a story involving Red, the dragon gone bad. The Professor and Hunter are always around, and Gnasty Gnorc is back as the first boss, with his minions as the constant grunts (with different outfits as you continue). Sadly Bianca has been given the cold shoulder, but overall it’s a good balance of expanding the world and keeping the familiar. Everyone looks good, well modelled and with expressive animation. The new NPCs within worlds were also fun, mainly realistic-looking but slightly anthropomorphised animals.
I stopped this one before reaching 100%. Backtracking is required since there are various new abilities gained over the course of things, which is fine, but since certain worlds are so large and tedious to traverse (like the Skytown-type area, which looks nice but whose map is worthless) tracking down each missing thingamajig seemed not worth doing. And that’s it! I’ve played more or less every other Spyro game that exists, which means I’m ready for the Reignited Trilogy! A bit late but when am I ever up to date with games eh.
PS: AHT does away with the concept of extra lives (yes thanks), but compared to previous Spyro games it swaps the flame and charge buttons (why??).
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