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The Legend of Spyro - Dawn of the Dragon (PS2/PS3)

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Spyro - Year of the Dragon

Game Name: Spyro - Year of the Dragon
Platform: PlayStation (PS1)
Developer: Insomniac Games
Year: 2000
Genre: 3D action-platformer
Rated: Everyone
Mode: Single-player
Multi-Player Support: None
Media: CD-ROM

Dragon Contents:
This rating only indicates the dragon contents and importance they play in the movie/game/episodes reviewed.

R a t i n g :
This rating indicates how good or how bad was the movie/game/episodes reviewed. A rating of 5 stars on 10 is considered as the average which mean it is not good but not bad either.

Reviewed by Tempest
No alternate review available


A new batch of dragon eggs has arrived and the
Dragon World hums with festivities. But a
disgruntled Sorceress has hatched her own plot to
steal them all! Dragonkind could become egg-stinct!
It's Spyro and his friends to the rescue...


Spyro - Year of the Dragon is third Spyro game released on the PlayStation following Spyro - Ripto's Rage! that was released a year earlier. The game features new playable characters and has slightly improved graphics while not changing the basic concepts found in previous titles. While in Ripto's Rage! gathering talismans and orbs wasn't very enticing, this time they returned with a more consequential and interesting formula: you have to recovers stolen dragons eggs and it becomes obvious during the game that there is a convincing reason to get them all. Each dragon egg when recovered will hatch and the baby dragon will do something funny or perform a little choreography for the player. The game contains a total of 42 levels spread over five worlds that are not as big as in Ripto's Rage! but more complex than in Spyro the Dragon. Like in previous games, the player has access to an Atlas to list Spyro's progress. Note that the Atlas will provide a hint for undiscovered eggs, but only one at a time.

Some changes were made over the previous games. For example, in each world you can free an allied character you will be able to control and play with in specific sub-levels. Sheila is a the kangaroo who can make incredible jumps, Bentley is a well-spoken yeti who is all strength but has poor jumping abilities, Sgt. Byrd is a militaristic penguin who can fly and shoot small rockets and finally Agent 9 is a slightly deranged monkey who can shoot enemies at long range with his laser gun. While Spyro is good at pretty much every task, his friends are a bit unbalanced; by this I means that they have obvious strengths but also obvious weaknesses. Another change from previous games is that Spyro is no longer the dragon who does everything by himself, the player will be given control of his friends mentioned above as well as Hunter and each will perform different tasks at different points of the game. Sometimes it feels a bit odd for them to wait for Spyro to trigger the side-quest or mini-game when he doesn't help or even participate.

Note that everything Spyro has learned from the previous game isn't suddenly forgotten at the beginning of this new adventure (contrarily to what happens in, let's say, the Metroid series). He still know how to climb ladders, swim under water and do headbashes. This time, it is Sparx who is able to learn new abilities after completing one of Zoe's "Sparx Worlds" levels. Sparx will thus learn to increase the range of his gems gathering skills (acquired in Crawdad Farm level), be able to point where uncollected gems are located (Spider Town), provide an extra life point to Spyro (Starfish Reef) and to both break open chests and warp Spyro to any level (Bugbot Factory).

As with previous titles, collecting all 148 the eggs and 15000 gems (100% complete) will allow Spyro to access a special level (i.e. the Super Bonus Worlds found in the Midnight Mountain Worlds) at the end of the game where he can collect 5000 more gems and an additional egg for a total of 20000 gems and 150 dragon eggs (the last egg contain twins). It is also there where he will face The Sorceress once again. Moreover, getting all the Skill Points (aka achievements) will allow you to access the Epilogue in the Atlas. Accomplish half (10) of them will unlock the first part that contain six pictures while performing all 20 will extend the Epilogue with an additional six.

In summary, dragon eggs are needed to activate portals, gems are used to pay Moneybags's outrageous fees while completing sub-levels result in one of the portal denizen to help prepare Spyro's mode of transportation so he can reach the next world (it is a matter of needed a five people in order to perform a task such as pulling down a hot-air balloon, fixing the "whirligig" or preparing a rocket). Note that powerup arches do not need to be activated because when Spyro defeats enemies, they provide gems just like in Spyro the Dragon instead of "spirit particles" like in Ripto's Rage!

Some interesting facts:
• Spyro could fit in one of the eggs he rescues and he is about 2-3 time bigger than the baby hatchling emerging from them.
• Considering the setting of the game, Spyro is at least 12 years old. The game provides no information on how fast or how long it takes for a dragon to grow up so his age at that point must be a multiple of 12 (i.e. 12, 24, 36 years old, etc).
• About half of the dragon hatchlings are males while the other half are females. This fixes an inconsistency found in the previous games where only male dragons were shown in the Spyro Universe (which in itself wouldn't have made much sense since the concept of male can't really exist without females).


Storyline:
The story begins in the Year of the Dragon, an event that is inspired by the 12-years cycle of animals that appear in the Chinese zodiac and the Chinese's calendar. In the game, this is the year when dragons lay their eggs (it is also implied in one level that dragons reproduce only once every 12 years). While everyone is asleep, a mysterious clocked anthropomorphic rabbit named Bianca comes to the World of Dragons with a group of Rhynocs and they steal all the eggs. Spyro, Sparx and Hunter being the only creatures small enough to fit into the tunnels the invaders came through, are tasked to recover the eggs.

Spyro pursues the thieves to the Forgotten Realms. Dragons once ruled that world but according to Spyro, they left about a millennium ago when they wanted some peace and quiet. However, when they left, their magic just went with them and it slowly faded away to a point when the portals began failing one by one. This Forgotten Realms is ruled by a dinosaur-looking queen called "The Sorceress" and Bianca is her apprentice. The dragon eggs were stolen because dragons are magical creatures and they can bring back magic to this world but as Spyro progress, he will soon learn that there is something much more sinister behind all this.

Spoilers:
(select the text with your mouse to read it)
As stated above, Spyro later learns that the Forgotten Realms were the original home of the dragons. But a long long time ago, the Sorceress banished them to the other side of the world without realizing that dragons were the source of all their magic. Bianca believes that the Sorceress just wants the eggs to be in their world in order to preserve/restore the source of their magic and she even tries to convince Spyro that she would take good care of them if he would just leave. While the story doesn't explicitly state so, it is implied that the dragons came to terms with their banishment and simply made the World of Dragons their new home.

However, the Sorceress isn't trying to preserve the magic in her world out of kindness. She is a sorceress and we can safely assume that she would lose her ability to cast spells but she also has a much more personal stake in this since if the magic withers away, she will by her own words, die too. But as with any evil being, this isn't the complete story since the Sorceress isn't interested in keeping the dragons around. She wants to destroy, smash and grind them all, even the little hatchlings. That they all die does not really matter to her as long as she can collect their wings so that she can use them for a spell to make herself immortal. Though, even if technically she doesn't need to kill them all to take their wings, she thinks that having them dead would stop them from wiggling so much.



Graphics:
Graphics were improved slightly over the previous games but since it's still on the same console that has not changed since its release back in 1995, the improvements are limited.

As with the other Spyro games, using an emulator provides much better graphics and less pixelation. However, there is no settings in the latest ePSXe (v2.0.5) that doesn't result in apparent issues with the 2D parts of the game such as the text, icons for eggs and gems and visual glitches while browsing the Atlas. The game itself is fully playable but I recommend using DuckStation instead since it has none of these problems. You can compare these screenshots with how the game looked back then when played on the original PS1.

If you have never played the game and unless you are into retro-gaming, then you probably should try the remake of this series by playing the Spyro Reignited Trilogy (2018). That remake has much better graphics while still being quite faithful to the original game. Though, it is unfortunate that the developpers thought that female characters absolutely need superficial female characteristics to appear as such: for example, by giving Sheila a human haircut/wig and conspicuous lipstick (that fit a human mouth and not a much wider dinosaur mouth) to the Sorceress.


Sound & Music:
The music as with the others games is not distracting or annoying; most of the time it is quite upbeat, while other times it may sound a bit unusual. But generally speaking, the music in the game contains enough diversity to meet the musical tastes of most people.

As a note, Sparx can actually speak but only in buzzing sounds (i.e. different tones and pitches of "bzzz bzzz" onomatopoeia) like a bee would do in a kid movie. So while he has no real voice, we know that he can communicate with Spyro and the latter is able to understand this language.


R a t i n g
Graphics:(7.5/10) - Good
Sound & Music:(7.5/10) - Good
Storyline:(7.0/10) - Good
Play Control:(7.0/10) - Good
Innovation:(6.0/10) - Average
Overall:(8.0/10) - Very Good
Note: the overall is not an average, but more a general appreciation of the game as a whole.
A rating of 5/10 should be considered as something not good but not bad either (# bad points = # good points).