Spyro: A Hero's Tail Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 11/10/2020)

[Image from igdb.com]

Spyro: A Hero's Tail

Developer: Traveller's Tales, Eurocom

Publisher: Sierra Entertainment

Genre(s): 3D Platformer

Platforms: GCN, PS2, Xbox

Release Date: November 12, 2004

I can empathize with the plight of the Spyro fan circa the early 2000s. Like the Crash Bandicoot franchise, the once-mighty competitors with the likes of Mario and Sonic were blown to the wayside when the next console generation came about, leaving new developers to awkwardly try to rekindle the once bright, burning flame. I wasn't one of these people because the console generation that I grew up on was the PS2 era, but the same thing happened with Jak and Daxter and Sly Cooper once the PS3 era launched. I think I can be excused for being a dumb kid at the time and not having the video game history knowledge that I do now. At the time, Spyro games were advertised on every cartoon channel I watched, so of course, I was aware of the franchise, and of course, it was enticing. It was a video game where you could play as a cute purple dragon that spits fire, for fucks sake. I didn't care or know about the impure third-party developer that was billed to carry the proverbial torch of something that was once great. Thank god I wasn't allured by the abomination that was Enter the Dragonfly and instead played A Hero's Tail, the merely adequate, lukewarm entry in the franchise, or at least that's how people perceive it now.

As of writing this review, I have not really played any of the classic PS1 Spyro games. I played a little bit of Ripto's Rage 10 years ago and have not played any of the games on the Spyro: Reignited Trilogy, so I don't have much to reference in comparing A Hero's Tail to the previous entries. However, I have plenty of experience with other 3D platformers of the time that this game takes inspiration from. In fact, this game kind of made it seem like they were going in a direction to deviate from the Spyro formula to emulate the 3D platformers from the then-current era of video games. Did they succeed? Sort of. I have a certain nostalgic warmness for this game, but I will admit that some of the added features to the Spyro franchise overstay their welcome and kind of become a jumbled mess. On top of that, there are also some awkward foibles that this game also has that are to its detriment as well.

The game begins when an evil dragon named Red and his army of Gnorc minions scatter large purple gemstones called "dark gems" all across the game's world. It's hard to tell exactly what the dark gems do when they are placed into the ground. From what I can tell, the sky turns into an ominous black color and scraggly, pale-green plants grow out of the ground. I'm not sure if these gems absorb the land's nutrients or if they make people around them depressed, so I can assume that they serve as a MacGuffin in both the language of the 3D platformer and in the narrative. Naturally, it's Spyro's job to stop Red from...something and destroy the dark gems that he has planted all over the world.

One thing that I will commend this game on, regardless of the more shoddy aspects, is the frame rate. This game runs as smooth as butter, which is definitely something that this game has over the original trilogy on the PS1. Having a great frame rate is always nice to have in any game, but in a game where the character is constantly jumping, gliding, headbutting, and ground stomping, a great frame rate is ideal. I guess you might have needed to have an imperative to make the frame rate great when developing this game, considering how smooth the gameplay in Jak and Daxter was. What do Jak and Daxter have to do with this game? A lot, considering it borrows an unsettling number of things from it, like its seamless level design and the pole jumping, the rotating disc platforms, etc. There is even a swamp level and a watery ruins level. This can't just be a coincidence. In fact, the direction of this game seems to focus on implementing ideas from PS2-era platformers. There is even an unfitting ball gadget that feels stripped from Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. The developers obviously went for an "if you can;' beat 'em, steal from them" attitude here. One thing that the developers should've implemented from other games was an invincibility frame after you get hit like most, if not all, competent games have. In a matter of seconds, Sparx can rapidly depreciate from golden to red to Spyro being dead with many of the instances in this game. It's really inexcusable not to have this, as lacking it is the biggest detriment to the game.

Spyro has always been a very versatile character in terms of his range of movement, but what about his range of attacks? In the first three games, he could headbutt his foes and breathe fire because he's a dragon. After the first three games, the new developers thought it would ideal for Spyro to have an arsenal of different elemental breaths. Apparently, this is not the first time someone has tried to implement this in a Spyro game, but we're just going to pretend like this is a unique feature to A Hero's Tail because the other game need not mention it. For the most part, the fire breath is the only real practical one, while the other breaths are used to solve puzzles and traverse through the game. You can defeat most enemies with the electric breath, but it usually takes five seconds or so before they keel over. The water breath is only used to defeat fire enemies in the last world of the game. Otherwise, it's exclusively used for puzzles. Using it on any other type of enemy looks like you are giving them the blowjob of their lives. This is something I observed as an adult replaying this game, not as a child. Calm down. The ice breath is pretty much used the same way as in Metroid, in which any enemy is frozen for a short period, and all you need is a single hit to obliterate them. I would say that it's more useful than the fire breath, but it is only available for the last fourth of the game. Overall, I've always liked the different breaths that Spyro could use, even if now I realize that Spyro's fire breath was already perfect as it was. This game just wanted a large variety in it as an evolution from the original trilogy.

The thing that gripped me about this game initially before playing it was the vast amount of characters you could play as in the game. It's amazing what kinds of things draw you in when you're a kid. As it turned out, this was not the character roulette that I had hoped for when I was eight years old. Spyro is still in the limelight as he is with any other Spyro game, but you can play as four different characters, each with their own move set. However, except for Hunter, the other characters are confined to mini-games where you earn collectibles.

For the first time ever, you can play as Spyro's easy-going pal Hunter. Whenever you encounter Hunter, he jokes that Spyro is tired of running around, and it's his turn to excavate the area for light gems and dragon eggs. This is about as close as I expected the different character gimmick to play out as an excited kid because Hunter's gameplay is pretty much the same as Spyros, only that he climbs on vines and can shoot enemies from further away with his bow. Playing as Hunter isn't bad by any means, but he doesn't have the versatility of Spyro.

Sgt. Bird is a returning character from Year of the Dragon, and his mini-game is a revitalized version of his gameplay from the previous title. As a kid, this mini-game stressed me out because of the number of things you had to attend to before the time limit ran out, but after replaying it as an adult, this is the best mini-game out of the four because it's at least the quickest to complete.

Sparx, besides being your health bar, also aids you in a mini-game that involves spelunking through narrow crevices to shoot at bugs. Why Sparx ever pulls this out on the field is beyond me, but he mows down dozens of bugs in a game that is incredibly similar to Star Fox, so I guess the developers borrowed a little more than just the strengths of fellow 3D platformers. Sparx's mini-game is alright, but more than often, it suffers from not having an invincibility frame because Sparx is careening towards the targets, and they're often not boulders falling from the ceiling. It's a lot to dodge, and the game can unfairly punish the player due to its own shortcomings.

The mini-game that I enjoyed as a kid that seems to be the bane of everyone else's existence is the Blink mini-game. In this one, Blink the mole burrows under the ground to destroy the tiny dark gems that are scattered all over the world that you've seen plenty of times already. As a kid, I liked Blink's mini-game because it involved more 3D platforming than Sgt. Bird and Sparx, but as an adult, I've grown to despise this mini-game. The unfortunate thing about Blinx is that he seems really unneeded in the grand scheme of things. We already have two platforming characters in the game that work just fine. We didn't need another one that plays like the handicapped version of what we were already playing. Blink moves like a car with poor acceleration, and his jumping are incredibly rigid. Not to mention, he has to blow up the little dark gems with one of his bombs which takes a painfully long time to execute, considering Spyro can just obliterate them in a matter of seconds in the overworld. Blink's sections are long, tedious, and hard to control, making them a grueling slog to play through.

There are also these turret mini-games that Spyro does a couple of times in the overworld. They feel a little out of place in the setting of a Spyro game, and they play almost exactly like the mini-game in the swamp level of Jak and Daxter. As you can tell, I'm not really a huge fan of these mini-games as I think that they are an unwanted distraction from the initial Spyro gameplay. There really isn't a point in the game when you'll want to play as any of the other characters except maybe Hunter when you have to in the third world when Spyro gets captured. However, the game does something sinister to the player and gives you an incentive to play these mixed-quality mini-games. Once you complete any mini-game once, you earn a dragon egg which is an extra item that rewards you with things like concept art and character skins. Seems neat, but your reward for being the mini-games twice on a more challenging difficulty is a light gem, an item needed to progress further in the game's story. You can already find some of these gems in locked chests if you remember to buy them, but at some point, pretty early on in the game, you'll need 24 light gems to progress through the game. It was at this point as a kid that I was stuck because of the harder portions of Blink and Sgt. Bird's mini-games that I was now forced into doing were aggravating to me. Why would you reward the player with the optional collectible first before the vital one? Invest in some keys because playing the harder versions of the Blinx minigames to progress in the game is a fate worse than death.

As for the other NPCs in the game, the new developers made some weird choices. They changed Moneybags from the posh, bourgeois British stereotype into a hilariously bad Jewish stereotype where he constantly badgers you to "SVEND SVEND SVEND" at his store, whether it be in the hub world or on the go. Whatever he's doing with all of your money isn't clear, but I'm sure the game wants you to conclude that he's opening a bakery or a law firm with it. Bentley from Year of the Dragon is back as an NPC. He briefly makes an appearance to tell Hunter to murder his rowdy neighbors. There are two new characters named Ember and Flame, both of which are just different variations of Spyro with redder skin and with girl attributes. For being new characters to the franchise, one would think that they'd have some hefty screen time, but both of them only appear once in the game. I thought that perhaps they were older characters making a brief cameo for fan service, and it's really befuddling that both of them aren't considering how brief their presences are. You can unlock both of them as skins for Spyro, but I still don't see the appeal in it, considering no one really knows these other characters.

Level design in Spyro: A Hero's Tail is also almost exactly like, you guessed it, Jak and Daxter. The game is divided into four main worlds with two or three sublevels branching from the main hub. The first and second world's levels have an interesting variety like swamps, valleys, clouds, and beaches, but the third and fourth world stick with a theme of ice and fire, respectively. Personally, I prefer the levels with a range of themes because insisting on one gets tiring after a while. I have no idea why, but the level in this game that I have the most nostalgic warmth for is the Sunken Ruins level. Sure, you could argue that it's a ripoff of the Lost Precursor City level from Jak and Daxter (and you'd probably be right), but it had a strange effect on me as a kid. There's something about the sublime, creepy atmosphere of the level that drew me in. Since then, I've had a thing for dilapidated underground levels with a balance of water and toxic slime like a specific 3D platformer fetish. Thanks, A Hero's Tail.

Gnasty Gnorc also returns as the first boss of this game, leading me into another lackluster aspect: the bosses. At the end of every world, once you've destroyed all of the dark gems in the world, you travel down a dark corridor where the cheerful Spyro music stops. Each boss tries to intimidate Spyro with a very long cut-scene of dialogue before the fight, usually making fun of how small he is. The bosses are incredibly standard fare for any 3D platformer. They have an obvious weakness to exploit, and the game gives you so much ample opportunity to hit it that it's absurd. None of them are especially difficult, and having a cut-scene every three hits saying Spyro defeated them is confusing and irritating. This is even the case for Red, the supposed dark, imposing force that should not be taken lightly. His design is great, but like everything else in this game, the execution of his role in this game lacks substance and challenge. He isn't even imposing as a giant robot because that final boss is designed almost exactly like the others. Most of the time, you're just waiting for it to be over.

After a game like Enter the Dragonfly, things could only get better for the franchise. How much better? Well, it's definitely an improvement. It's a game with solid presentation that runs very smoothly, but everything else falters in every other aspect. This game borrows too much from other games, especially Jak and Daxter. The mini-games are a mixed bag of tedium, and the game is so easy that it lacks the substance to make up for it. After playing this game again after several years, the warm nostalgia I feel for this game was still present, meaning that it at least had some merit to it, but it is a total mixed bag. Funny enough, this mixed bag of a Spyro game is probably one of the better-remembered games in the franchise, whether or not you have a nostalgic holding for it.