Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

By all accounts, there's an alternate timeline where Enter the Dragonfly is not such a stunningly mediocre and incomplete game. Design documents from the past show some fairly lofty ideas for the first Spyro game to boldly go to next generation home consoles - but of course, excessive micromanagement from Universal seems to have fated the game to be dead on arrival before it ever even had a chance to breathe its first breath. When this game came out and I was but a child, I was very excited. I had loved the original PS1 trilogy, after all. A new game on new hardware could only be the next best thing. But, alas, even through the eyes of a child, it was a pure disappointment. I ultimately wound up trading it in for $2. Yes, two whole US dollars was the value I put in it. So now, decades later, I must confront my past self and ask; was this overdramatic? Is there more value in this game?

Before even getting into any of the issues the game has, I should get it out of the way immediately - Enter the Dragonfly is not entirely irredeemable. But that's almost what makes it sting more. Occasionally, there are flashes of inspiration that make the mediocrity all the worse. The experience of playing this game is not unlike telling your child you're not angry at them, you're just disappointed. Firstly, the level design. A platformer lives and dies by its level design, and essentially every level in Enter the Dragonfly can be boiled down to the same general formula - a large ring that loops back into itself with large open spaces containing excessive amounts of gems scattered haphazardly across the landscape. Exploration isn't really fun in this game because there's so little to actually explore. Every area of a level feels like the last. There are some slight exception cases - Monkey Monastery has one or two cleverly hidden side routes that feel like something you might see in the original trilogy, and Jurassic Jungle is easily the most varied level in the game with volcanic interiors, large ruins, and jungle clearings. Thought a lot of this is still overly large without a lot of flair.

There's also not a lot of levels. You get one single homeworld in Enter the Dragonfly with something like 11 levels. Now yes, these are larger levels than before, with some of them containing entire speedways inside them and higher gem and objective counts than any other Spyro game, but the aforementioned issues apply to essentially all of them. The worst offender is Crop Circle Country, a predictably ring-shaped level with wide open space and an alien invasion motif over a farm. The level is bizarre, quite honestly. The NPC dialogue feels unfinished or broken in a way? Like there's an exchange between Spyro and a farmer in the level where they both just rattle off one word responses with the same voice. It's baffling. The whole game has this disjointed feeling of not being finished - and that's because it wasn't finished. Game or no game, the deadline was hit, and out the game goes. You feel this every moment you play it.

Moment to moment gameplay isn't particularly good, either. Spyro feels sluggish, the framerate suffers constantly, and picking up gems is simply not fun when they're all just vomited across the landscape with no good flow or logic. Some of the challenges are alright. The slides in particular feel decently designed, but of course suffer from finicky controls - like everything else in this game. Bafflingly, Moneybags appears exactly once in the entire game in the very first level. Then you never see him again. There's one boss, but you unlock their phases the more of the game you complete? It's all just incredibly strange - to the point where one can't believe that these were the original intended design choices, but some straight compromise that happened down the line.

There are no extra characters to play as. No post-game bonus levels. No surprises of any kind really, besides the occasional section of a level where you think "that wasn't awful actually", which is the most damning praise that can be given. Stewart Copeland does return for the soundtrack, and there are shades of the previous games that shine through in this. Even so, it's probably the weakest of the three soundtracks as well. Unsurprising, as there's not really anything about the game to motivate a truly inspired soundtrack. You work with what you've got, and with that in mind, it probably is the best thing about the game. But overall, it really is a sad experience. Is it really only worth the $2 I valued it at as a child? I'd actually double that price and say $4. If this were a $4 game on Steam showing up in your queue, it would be a curious little time waster that wouldn't incite any real feelings. But this was a full priced game from a respected series. At least I can rest easy knowing that the worst is likely over for our favorite purple dragon.

I was a huge Spyro fan as a kid, I remember having the first 3 games, and loved the original trilogy on PS1. Then I saw this at a rental store and decided to check this out since I wasn't sure what to expect and I heard this had Rypto back as the main villain and he was my favorite Spyro villain. Well this game managed to both bore me and lose my interest within the first day of playing it, and I was a kid who was pretty easily impressed. The level design was awful, the story was bad, the graphics were ugly, the music wasn't that memorable, and nothing about this was remotely good. Its easily one of the worst games I played.