It's particularly heinous to take such a beloved character from such a beloved trilogy of games and then completely throw out everything that made them beloved in the first place in the service of making a "better" or "modern" gaming experience.

We didn't need Spyro to become an epic fantasy with booming orchestral music, dark edge, and blood and gore. But hey, if the updates game mechanics at least added something significantly better to the formula, I could have forgiven the misplaced tone shift. But even the new mechanics and move set feel like tacked-on elements ripped straight out of the spectacle fighters that were big at the time such as Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, and God of War. It's incredibly bizarre to add such elements to a 3D platformer. And the character just wasn't designed for that sort of gameplay. He's a dinky little dragon who is built like a cat. He's not a fully able-bodied humanoid. So, you're still stuck doing things like throwing projectiles at a distance while being bombarded with arena-based enemy ambushes that just makes the combat needlessly infuriating.

And yes, Spyro's new design looks god-awful. But that's the least of this reboot series's problems. If the gameplay felt like a natural evolution of the foundation built by the original games, I wouldn't care if the main character were an ugly fucker. But nothing else redeemable is found elsewhere, so the bad character design feels like a bigger offense as a result.

Anyway. I don't like this game. And I don't like the revival era of the franchise it belongs to. None of these "Legend of Spyro" entries are fun for me. In fact, they made me sad and depressed to play.