Damn. Quite easily the weakest of the trilogy. I really struggled with this at a few sections. Not in terms of difficulty, but from boredom and clunky mechanics. Those flying missions that I absolutely hated in the last two games were doubled down on massively. Absolute agony to get through. Not just that though, the missions/sections where you have to play as anyone but Spyro, or just Spyro on a vehicle, were pretty bad too. Nevertheless, I really enjoy the core Spyro gameplay, so I feel like a weak 3 stars is the right fit for this. The game is just held back so much by a lot of things.

lmao I'm so fucking done with Spyro. Maybe someday if someone gets to really work out a fourth game and it's done well with some new ideas I'd try that. A few years ago I promised a friend I'd beat the trilogy cos I think he gifted it to me? I forget. Anyway the first one was pretty jank and shitty but there was that stink gen 5 game charm I guess so I stuck with it.

I heard the sequels were better and rode that hope into 2 which was a bit more interesting and had some fun characters and a good villain. I dunno if it really felt better to play or what but I had a not terrible time with it overall.

Now I've finished the third game and it's back to being just annoying. I dunno if it's just this game was rushed or if it's that I just inherently find the gameplay in Spyro to be not that good or both. I mean I enjoy the general concept of a collectathon game, I loved DK 64 and Banjo Kazooie back in the day but maybe I was just more tolerant of it as a kid or Rare just spoiled me by being the best at it.

I think a chunk of it comes down to the controls. I just don't like how Spyro himself moves. I'm not saying it's flat out wrong, I just don't think I like it. He's a creature on four legs so it makes sense he turns more widely than other 3D platformer characters. Just little bits of it get annoying after a while. Also the camera is just straight up wonky to me and I find myself running off a platform or just dying to things because it doesn't keep up with how I wanna move. It just doesn't mesh with my mind that well.

All of this stood out in my mind worse than in 2 because in this game there is a multitude of other characters you play as in their own sections. I was told by the friend that these sections as other characters are regarded by fans as the worst aspect of the game and yet I found myself enjoying it. I liked flying around shooting stuff as the penguin or smashing guys as the yeti. Hell my absolute favorite was the like "bullet hell-esque" sections as Sparx. I would take a whole game of that. I thought that to myself though and realized I was enjoying this game most when it wasn't being a Spyro game and I think that's ultimately pretty telling.

There's also a bunch of little things in this that I wouldn't say are a detriment necessarily but stuff that stood out to me as being worse than the last game. Like in this there are areas where you skateboard around but you start them on foot and get on the skateboard but they're still treated as separate areas within a level you have to load into. It's a bit of a contrast to Spyro 2 levels that felt like pretty big and you can get lost in almost. Maybe that game just hid its loading well but the big purple portals in this one just feel like corner cutting and make me wonder if this one was more rushed out.

Speaking of rushed, I feel like they didn't really do enough to establish the characters in this one. The villain is definitely the weakest in the series and just wasn't a thing I was like excited to be building towards. There's only really one other new character who they play into like a villain becoming one of the good guys but stuff just kinda happens with her and it doesn't feel written in an engaging way.

I know that's probably thinking TOO MUCH about character and plot development in a Spyro game but just something about the opening cutscene in 2 with being sent to another world and meeting the professor and his companions and how it all tied into Ripto just got my attention right away and made me want to involve myself more. It was neat! Compare to this game where everything feels placed around. Like even returning characters just feel wasted overall.

So yeah I dunno. This game kinda exposed itself to me in how much I maybe don't like it after all. Going through it just felt like checking things off a list. Some of the worlds and music are neat but it all falls flat in my mind compared to 2. It's probably not the best highlight but I did enjoy the side stuff as other characters. Playing as gun monkey was funny. Gimme Sparx 1943 I dunno.

I didn't despise this game because of the amount of times it allows you to NOT play it and it's still probably better overall than the first one. I don't think I could recommend this now though. I mean, fans of it will play it regardless but its not gonna be in my top like 10 3D platformers I recommend someone try if they want one. Still glad to have completed what I said I would do and I'm glad I did Year of the Dragon in 2024, a proper Year of the Dragon in itself.

It improved the new playable character levels of the second game. They felt more polished. Not the best, but better. For instance, the yeti character needs a better camera position because he's tall. It vastly limits your view. The level designs are improved from the second game. More enjoyable to explore since they are linear and not large maps. They have improved the speedway levels to be more clear in the order of collection.

I also love the fact they brought back dragon animations. Instead of rescuing adults dragons from statues, you are collecting eggs. Each rewards you with an animation that is much more fun than simply getting a boring orb in the second game. Some of your helper NCPs return from the second game. Namely the professor and Hunter. The professor I understand, but Hunter? He's still useless. Not sure why they brought him back. Comic relief? The story and villain are more fleshed out and shown here.

Both the most ambitious and the most flawed of the Spyro trilogy. The vibes are still there and collecting with Spyro is always fun, but a few too many of these levels feel like they're running on fumes inspiration-wise. And the gimmick levels with the friends are...well, they're there. Some are refreshingly off-beat, others are totally insufferable - it's a coin toss every time, which led to me dreading them more than I'd like. Still, it's a collect-a-thon of the highest order, and I'm glad to have finally played through one of my childhood favorite game icon's finest hours.

✅80%

Spyro: Year of the Dragon is one that I started off not really liking, but in the end absolutely loved it. It's got so much charm and creativity which makes it have so much to do. Each level has something unique about it making them stand out. While Spyro's friends could occasionally suck (Sgt. Byrd I'm looking RIGHT AT YOU), there were fun missions in them. The Agent 9 mission in Dino Mines was so much fun, and I liked the side-scroll mission with Sheila. The problem with the side characters is they have something holding them back in controls. Sgt. Byrd feels terrible overall, but Bentley is a bit too slow, and both Agent 9 and Sheila's movements can feel a little stiff. I had fun with most of them, but comparing them to Spyro they don't feel all too great. The game does have a lot of fun missions in the levels to balance this though. I enjoyed the Sorceress as a villain, but I wish her boss battle was improved. It felt like a first draft: no cutscene, one stage, no death. I feel like with how much they were building up this confrontation between Spyro and Sorceress, it just felt underwhelming. I'm complaining a lot about this game but I really did enjoy it. It keeps the charm of the first two games, and the eggs were so much fun to collect. The baby dragons had cute animations and when you unhatched one you just want to unhatch all of them. You don't want any of them left behind. The game looks amazing with the colors being so vibrant and the environments looking great. I genuinely feel like a lot of this game was almost on par with Ripto's Rage, but there are a few shortcomings that prevent it from getting there. Year of the Dragon oozes fun, and despite some issues, still provides one heck of an adventure.

...I'm starting to realize I don't actually like Spyro lol

Once again the simple uninteresting platforming is the same as it always has been across these 3 games but this time in a classic case study of developers completely running out of new interesting ideas to inject for the third consecutive entry for their early 3D platforming franchise (see also: Crash 3 Warped), instead of improving the design or core gameplay in any way, they just tack on a handful of gimmicks and call it a day. Case in point for this game: the alternate playstyles. The game eventually thrusts 5 (not counting Hunter) additional playable extra characters on you in the hopes that you'll like at least one of them, and yeah they aren't really that fun. They're either mundane or at worst they slow the already slow pace to a crawl. The issue is that at least with Crash 3 they tried to improve the gameplay to some extent with the addition of upgrades to Crash's arsenal, and for the most part it actually worked because it ended up boosting his overall movement abilities (Crash Dash/Death Tornado Spin) and made stages/box hunting all the more fun to do so. Spyro 3's extra characters do literally nothing to enhance the gameplay. You're essentially playing the same game, but occasionally it just so happens to get even worse.

The progression structure is sort of a half and half from Spyro 1 and 2, unfortunately still leaning more towards 2's nonsense. On the one hand the main collectable (Dragon Eggs) can once again be collected by finding them scattered throughout levels or by completing a level, just like Spyro 1, allowing you to collect them at your own leisure. On the other hand, most of the time the eggs are handled in Spyro 2 fashion, though instead of completing some stupid side mission to get them, you instead often get to partake in minigames in order to earn them.

These minigames are the pits.

The skateboarding, the ice hockey, none of gimmicky minigames are really what I consider fun, they're just that: blatant gimmicks. Spyro doesn't get minigames exclusively either, sometimes the extra playable characters THEMSELVES get minigames, like the laughably bad boxing match for the yeti. Boss fights are slightly improved but that's not saying much.

I feel nothing but apathy at this point

Year of the Dragon has all the elements to make it the very best spyro game. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that pile up to hold it back.

Spyro's friends are just straight not as fun to play as him (especially Sgt Byrd). A lot of minigames in levels have weird balancing issues where they're either way too easy or brutally unfair. The speedways all have a race tacked onto to them now. And they are mind numbingly boring.

All of this brings down what's otherwise, a stellar spyro experience. Honestly, if you cut out the fluff here, you basically have a spyro game that's on par with 2.

Oh, and there are loads of bugs in the reignited version that make getting all the achievements a bit of a pain.

Again, Spyro 3 is great but it's all the constant little things that make it worse than it should be. Getting your gems back from Moneybags is still a peak gaming moment.

My thoughts from the original generally hold true for Reignited, so see my original review here. It's obvious that Year of the Dragon made for the template that the rest of Reignited was based on (i.e. game feel from Year of the Dragon was backported into Spyro 1/Ripto's Rage), so this is more directly just a straight graphical upgrade more than anything else. Therefore, I'll just keep this as a quick lightning round of thoughts:

- Yeah I don't love the new Sheila design. It's all right, and honestly Sheila probably benefits from not just being a nondescript cartoon animal, but I dunno, there's something plainly cute about the original design that's lost with the hair and the reproportioned body.
- The other redesigns are great, though. Agent 9's fangs really add something, and I LOVE how beastly Bentley looks this time around, really highlights his original joke even more.
- Thanks to the Elora redesign, the ending, hinting at a budding relationship between her and Spyro, actually landed for me! Nice!
- The Rhynocs look like such freaks, what the hell. Those over-the-top smiles as they wind up that clubbin' they're not gonna make, you gotta love it.
- I love that so many of the original jokes were kept! Definitely would've expected to lose the Nancy Kerrigan Polar Bear or Tara, but no, there they are, fully-realized and better than ever.
- I really kinda loathe that the Reignited Trilogy uses the same credits for all three games. Like I get it, the same team probably worked on all three of them, so staggering it out would've been more trouble than it was worth. But you're missing all the charm of the original credits sequences. No epilogues, no touring the individual worlds, no nice little send-off from the team... Like, was there really no way to get some sort of unique acknowledgement at the end of each game? Ah, well.

In short - a good alternative to the PS1 version; I probably prefer the original, but this is more of a close match for me.

After finishing Spyro 3 Reignited I felt very conflicted. Content wise, I think Spyro 3 is probably the best of the original trilogy, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I played the worst version of the game after finishing it.

I took a break from the reignited trilogy after finishing Spyro 2 back when the game released in 2018. I remember hearing about all the performance issues and glitches with 3 specifically and figured I could take a break and wait for the glitches to get patched since I was feeling some burn out after completing Spyro 1 and 2 back to back. Based on what I had heard about Spyro 3 when the trilogy originally released, I think a lot of those original glitches and performance issues were fixed, but I still experienced a lot of really annoying glitches and performance issues even now in 2024. My game's performance slowed down to a crawl multiple times and the skateboarding races ended up being really annoying since I experienced multiple instances of Spyro trying to half pipe of the middle of the race track, completely killing my speed and making me wipe out most of the time.

To focus on some positives, I think Spyro 3 does a better job of balancing the new ideas introduced in Ripto's rage with the core collectathon gameplay from Spyro 1. I think most of 3's minigames are better than 2's. I'm really glad the spirit particles from 2 are gone and think that it makes the levels feel less repetitive and formulaic than 2's.

I think Spyro 3 also has the best story and villain in the original trilogy. The cutscenes with the sorceress are great and serve as a great motivation to take her down.

I know the different characters tend to be hit or miss with people, but I generally liked them. I think they provided a nice variation to the gameplay while mostly staying true to spyro's core gameplay. I think Sparx's sections are probably the weakest since the controls never fully clicked for me and it probably has the least to do with the core gem collecting of the trilogy.

Overall, I think Spyro 3 is alright. I think I can say it's my favorite of the trilogy, but I can't help but feel I would have had more fun with the original. I was shocked with the lack of polish still present in Reignited's Spyro 3, and while none of it is game ruining, it was still really annoying to deal with and ended up sticking with me more than the stuff I liked about the game.

Whilst this game introduces a ton of new concepts, that upon viewing seem interesting and a fun way to spice things up - the realisation slowly sets in that the way these are executed are more tedious than enjoyable. This is in part due to the recurring bugs that plague each level, to no fault of the developers, thanks to this game being rushed out by Activision. But as a whole I question why some of these earlier levels feel so much harder than those that appear nearer to the end game. I can't say I was terribly stuck on each, but having to constantly look up solutions to beating these areas which usually result in having to play in a different manner to what was supposedly intended, and constantly changing framerates in hope that this will miraculously solve the dilemma you are facing, feels more effort than what it's worth.

Despite all this though, I did push through, this game still has the charm of the two that proceeded it, but its flaws just hold it back from being a well-rounded experience, and it's something I don't think I'd visit again.

NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE IT! Much better than the last game.

The Good
- Great Level Design
- Fun Platforming
- Great Music
-Vibrant Visuals
-Great Quality of life improvements
- Fun Bosses (Best ones in the entire trilogy)
- They actually made the Flying challenges fun! Mostly due to suggesting optimal routes for each speedway.
- New characters to play that kept the game fresh and fun all the way through.
- Spyro keeps his moveset from the last game!



The Meh
- The backtracking got annoying at times but it wasn't nearly as bad as it was in the first game.


The Bad
- Long Loading Times (Might just be because I played on Switch)
- Choppy Frame rate at times (Might just be because I played on Switch)
- That one mission with the twin dragons was so AWFUL.


Conclusion
I was extremely critical of Spyro 2. This is mostly because of being constantly told that it's the best one in the series only to be disappointed by its awful backtracking, hit-or-miss minigames (mostly miss), and frustrating skill point objectives. This game feels like the sequel that Ripto’s Rage was supposed to be and improved on nearly everything that the previous two games did wrong. It's kinda ironic because I was told that this was the worst one of the trilogy. I'm looking forward to whatever Toys for Bob cooks up for Spyro next. And hopefully, it won't take 10+ years to see our boy torching sheep like he does best.