Spyro 2: Season of Flame

Spyro: Season of Ice was a tumultuous affair. It had some good ideas, but many of them were rotted out by bad design choices and finicky mechanics. Upon being confronted with a direct sequel, I was naturally nervous. Visually, it looks like the exact same game, so that's slightly damning. But upon further examination, Spyro: Season of Flame is surprisingly greatly improved over Season of Ice. Like, considerably so.

Much like its predecessor, Season of Flame is an isometric platformer that does its best to adapt the console games to a portable experience. The levels are still pretty blocky and mostly just use different texture palettes to distinguish them, but there are improvements here. You've now got smooth ramps to add some sense of verticality beyond samey natural staircases. The levels also, for the most part, flow much better. In a collect-a-thon platformer, sprawling levels are good - but mostly only in a fully 3D space. Season of Ice's levels sprawled in a way that got you lost. By reining it in a bit, Season of Flame's actually feel rewarding to get through, and you rarely feel completely lost.

Which brings me to another huge improvement: Season of Flame features an actual in-game map of every level, accessible whenever you need it with L + Select. Now even if you do get a bit lost, you can see where you haven't been yet, and seeing the whole levels laid out really ties them together in a big way. The levels also seem to rely considerably less on questionable glides to faraway platforms of dubious depth, so I found myself dying far less often due to misjudging the height differences of platforms. Even if you are unsure, the aforementioned map takes topography into account, so you can just pop the map and see if that distant cliff you want to get to is higher than you or not. These are massive, massive changes.

There aren't just improvements, of course. The game sees a lot of added gameplay elements as well. While Year of the Dragon was the first game to introduce ice breath in the Frozen Altars stage, Season of Flame adds it to your arsenal permanently. Add to this several different flame powerup gates, and you've got several different breaths to play with under various different contexts. Instead of melting fairies, you're now freezing fireflies and collecting them. They do run from you slightly, but they can't fly across death pits, so they're not a problem. Said death pits ARE still one shot kills, though, so be aware of that.

Sparx levels and speedways have also been replaced. Agent 9 and Sheila return from Year of the Dragon with their own unique gameplay, to varying effectiveness. Sheila's levels, I found, were actually pretty fun. You navigate an almost Q*Bert esque level one tile at a time, dispatching Rynocs and stomping objectives while still collecting gems all over. These are mostly well done, once you accept that the controls do indeed require you to input up and right at the same time if you want to go up and right. Pressing a single directional input just kinda sends Sheila wherever. But despite slight jank, they're fun levels. Less fun to me was Agent 9, whose levels are 2D side scrolling platformers. You have your gun, of course, but for some reason, you have limited ammo. If you run out, your fire rate greatly decreases until you find a restock door. These levels can be a little frustrating. Many enemies will get the jump on you and knock off a point of health before you can even see the whites of their eyes, and missing one single gem at the bottom of a vertical level can result in doing a lot of backtracking just to 100% said level. They're not terrible, but they were my least favorite part of the game.

Plotwise, it's about as basic as Season of Ice. But now, your old friend Ripto and his cronies have returned. Yes, boiling him in lava wasn't enough to dispatch him forever. These does mean you have actual variety in the boss fights, though they are for the most part trivial - with Crush ironically being the most difficult of the three despite being the earliest. Still, it's nice to have something more than one boss fight recycled. The end game bonus is even improved, with Sparx getting another arcade game, now more in the vein of Robotron: 2084, albeit with a lack of twin sticks (obviously). It's a fun extra mode to play with honestly, and certainly beats Season of Ice's bonus game by a good bit.

Overall, I was incredibly pleased to see just how many of the issues Season of Ice had were addressed in this game. Season of Flame is hardly a masterpiece, but it is actually fun for the most part. Challenge gates return for some variety in firefly collecting, and level exploration is just better. If you absolutely must play one GBA Spyro game, make it this one. Though I haven't played Attack of the Rynocs yet, so who knows? Maybe we'll see even more improvements. Time will tell. But for now, this is decent, and at this point, decent is all I can ask for considering the ill reputation of the franchise from this point out.