Spyro The Dragon: Reignited Trilogy (2019)

The original Spyro game was always a game that I remember fondly while never actually playing the full game. I remember the commercials, I remember playing the demo and loving it, but I never actually rented or owned the full game itself. I played the demo for the game on various Playstation demo discs, but it always had a twinge of “childishness” to it. Which really isn’t fair to what the game actually is. While I set out to play something at the beginning of the year, as the first couple of months look fairly bleak as regards to new game release I wanted something basic and simple.

Spyro isn’t a hard game, but in the realm of 3D action platformers it always held a special place in my heart, due to the original PS1 demo discs. Controlling the little purple dragon is fun and the run mechanic is solid. Gliding around to find hidden areas and trying to get 100% on each level and even the hub worlds are easier said than done. Which gives these games a bit more to do than I originally thought.

I could have breezed through this game in a few hours, but finding all the collectables is something that drew out the game’s length, and made it much more challenging. I found myself retracing my path through each level multiple times just to try and get every single gem.This simple mechanic of collecting gems, finding dragons and chasing down enemies who held a special egg, gave the game so much more depth. Even though there were times where I was just stumped and had to move on to the next level because I couldn’t perceive any way that I could be missing anything even with a 70% completion.

The game seems overly small for a game now-a-days, and I had to constantly remind myself this was an early PS1 game, just remade. One of my favorite things about the entire game was one of the objectives to complete the game, reaching and unfreezing the dragons that Gnasty Gnorc has turned to stone. Each dragon has a unique voice and style to them. Either they were large warrior types, or nerdish bookworms… every single dragon feels like there was care and time put into making them stand out from each other and not just a quick copy and paste job you see in so many other games. It’s a small part of the game, but I always enjoyed restoring these dragons and hearing what they had to say, while enjoying the appearance of them.

Spyro, like the Crash N.Sanity remastered version before it, is a wonderful way to breathe new life into some older games that might not hold up so well, because of the technology involved in the creation of those games. The Reignited Trilogy will hopefully be a game I can come back to throughout the year to try and cleanup everything and get 100% completion on everything in the game.