Bought this second-hand because it’s a game from my childhood that doesn’t cost a kajillion dollars for an authentic copy, and it was a game I absolutely sucked at as a kid. For most of my life, in fact, I have been really bad at video games. Especially if an important part of the game is “finding out where to go.” Coincidentally, this game’s most glaring issue is that it DOESN’T HAVE A MAP. Areas are pretty big, and feel even bigger when you’re galloping from end-to-end trying to find that last gem to collect, or the last enemy to defeat, or the last bit of a task a character gave you.

Though, the game definitely tries its best to make it up to you. In each stage is an interactable marker that you can use as a way to know where you’ve already been. Flying in an isometric space is hard, so not only does Spyro have an obvious shadow, but also different heights on each stage are designed to be different enough where you know better how high a platform is by its terrain. A platform you can fly to will also always be in view from where you’re standing, too. Now, while these things doesn’t all add up to a flawlessly-executed platformer, I can see the game design underneath what a lot of people might’ve dismissed as soon as this game got frustrating.

Which, it sure can be frustrating, to be fair. One of the most insufferable segments are the Sparx sections, where you play as Spyro’s little dragonfly buddy in a tank-battle-esque, top-down shooter. These levels were mostly unbearable; not so hard to navigate but trying to navigate the enemies with the limited movement is annoying as hell. Again, though, they make up for it by giving you unlimited lives. So, eventually once you’ve found where to go, you can kind of spray-and-pray from the checkpoint and through the boss of the stage and get through it.

Even with its plentiful misgivings, this game did give me the same bemusement for Spyro that I had in the years following my child-self playing this game. Alas, I was not much of a Playstation child (it was the first console I had… but also the first console I broke…), so my actual interaction with Spyro still begins and ends here, on the Gameboy Advance. It’s like Shrek; fairytale creatures, but with that same kind of “isn’t this weird?” wink to camera that Shrek has. I will come back to this game once more before I die, but I sure got my fill of it for the time being (actually getting past the first section).

Isometric Spyro sounded cool on paper, and it was cool for the first 30 minutes. Then I spent 5 minutes fighting the stiff controls trying to blast a fruit or some shit into a hole in the ground while Spyro would just not face the direction I needed him to.

Another half hour later, it was obvious how slow, clunky, and straight up dull the rest of the game is. I was barely an hour into the game and I already wanted to pull up a guide to help me collect faeries. BARELY AN HOUR. Literally the thrill of this kinda game is supposed to be exploration and collecting, and it'd already turned into a chore.

God I hope the classic Spyro games weren't also this frustrating and I was just too young to realize how valuable my time is.

Like Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure, Season of Ice's pre-rendered sprites look really good. It controls fairly well, too. And I can commend the game for at least having more levels and content than Enter the Dragonfly.

The most obnoxious thing about the game, though, is that world states are completely reset after dying. With the exception of enemies not respawning or certain objectives like Lighthouses not turning off, that means any Jack-o-Lanterns or Sandcastles you've tried to destroy to save a Fairy completely reset. Any NPCs you've already talked to will repeat their dialogue boxes if you get too close, as well.

Fairies also only function like single-use Checkpoint Crates in Crash rather than checkpoint flags you can repeatedly return to. Once you save a Fairy, that's your checkpoint area now, and if you die, you return there. As far as I know, you can't interact with a different Fairy to set a new checkpoint for yourself, which makes backtracking annoying.

I'll come back to this later, I just don't think it's worth my time right now.

Season of Ice was the first attempt to bring Spyro to the gameboy advance, and in terms of gameplay, it worked. You collect gems, fight enemies and explore worlds by gliding all over the place. This is all there, and at times it's just as addictive as the console games.

However there's just so many things I cannot stand about this game, Firstly, the isometric perspective. I get why it's like this, but I died so many times due to confusing level structures and layering in a game where they want you to glide and charge everywhere. You can't see enough of the screen to see what's coming when the charge is so fast and your view is so crunched. What this leads to is constantly stopping, standing still and panning the camera, and then finally making the jump. It's a huge pace killer and flies in the face of the fast paced platforming Spyro is known for.

The levels are also huge and very confusing, they try and give each level distinct floors so you know where you can land, but all this does it make it hard to remember where you are when everything looks the same. When you complete any objective, the game loves to warp you away to where you collect the reward instead of just bringing it to you, and this always confused me massively when there's no map.

Outside of the main gameplay, the attempt at speedway levels are straight up atrocious and the top down Sparx shooter missions were passable.

It looks pretty good for the system and the music is very Spyro... it's just not fun, it's annoying. I understand this was. likely a hard transition to make, but this game doesn't stick the landing - 4/10

I first met Spyro in Year of the Dragonfly, but the GBA "Season" games were the ones I first played through. I definitely played through Season of Fire first, then I... at least started Season of Ice? I genuinely can't remember if I beat Season of Ice as a kid. But hey, I did beat it now. 100%, too, more or less.

Spyro is a hard thing to translate into 2D, even moreso than a lot of your 3D platformer mascots of the era. Banjo-Kazooie, Crash Bandicoot? You can largely replicate their whole thing. Spyro? Well, that's a harder ask.

I think what they came up with - an isometric platformer with an emphasis on running around and flying across gaps - works well enough. Definitely not my preferred mode to play, as the game ends up asking for some leaps of faith every now and again, but it's generally fair with its challenges. Season of Ice generally focuses on the more exploration-based missions from Ripto's Rage/Year of the Dragon than the bigger mechanical missions, so it works out okay. Those thieves are kind of a good showcase why Season of Ice shouldn't be mechanics-driven.

One thing I didn't really appreciate before is how much of an attempt there is to maintain continuity with Year of the Dragon. There's obvious stuff like the presence of Rhynocs (who start their march into inexplicable relevance here) and the core hero friend group being Spyro/Sparx/Hunter/Bianca. But you have deeper cuts as well, like "Hummingbird Fort" being a nod to Sgt. Byrd's backstory (complete with the Hummingbirds all being French), or "Roman City" seeming to take place in Year of the Dragon's "Sunny Villa". Honestly a bit of a nice treat; if I'd been more aware of Spyro lore as a kid, I would've gotten a ton out of all that.

Weirdly, with its limited focus on Spyro and Sparx as the only playable characters, this is perhaps the closest Spyro as a series ever returned to the purity of form of the original title. The only real distractions are the Sparx shmup stages (which, weirdly, may have been one of my first forays into the genre? They're all right) and the Speedway stages. The GBA couldn't possibly replicate the Speedways as they existed on console, so here they're basically Space Harrier-style SHMUPs. They're a'ight, though I don't know what the hell is going on with some of the enemies. Also, while it's cool that the Speedway stages have a time travel motif, what the hell is the "Aqua Age"?

Actually, that Space Age Speedway kinda screwed me over. The palette it uses to differentiate between Green and Yellow enemies is too similar for my colorblindness to distinguish. You need to hit the Yellows to extend your time, while the Greens are just fodder. I'd managed every other Speedway to that point, but no matter how many times I attempted it, I just couldn't get the Hard fairy. I confess I eventually gave up and - since you normally need every fairy in the game to get to the final boss - used a code to cheat my way in. I made up for it by using a glitch to collect two extra gems, so my save file still counted me as having cleared 100.0% of the game. Hopefully that's of some consolation to poor Micki the Fairy?

I owe Season of Flame a revisit to see how well it holds up. I definitely liked it better as a kid, since you get multiple breath types in that game, but who knows? Maybe this'll be another case where I prefer the original's mechanical purity of form on revisit.

Credit where it's due, the visual and audio design is actually superb. Whether on a handled or blown up on a giant tv this game is actually kind of great to look at. That's the only nice thing I have to say here!

The camera makes levels feel like a frustrating maze, controls feel stiff and objectives are incredibly annoying. I got to the end of the first world before having to call it quits. It's so frustrating tip toeing around trying to find your way to the goal, only to get knocked off the edge by an offscreen enemy and get sent back to start.

They clearly ignored the limitations of the Game Boy. Just because you can put a 3D style Spyro game on the system, doesn't mean you should.

This is not an incompetent or technically flawed game (in terms of glitches and such compared to Enter the Dragonfly). However, there are a lot of flaws that make this game kind of meh and frustrating to me. Before I go on, I played a fan version of this game via a romhack, which adds a map feature and has a lot of quality of life fixes. Even then, I couldn't really enjoy the game that much. First things first, the control issues like charging being fast. This leads to Spyro falling from the stage and making him uncontrollable in general. Additionally, trying to catch the thieves is a pain. Another problem with the controls is the backlash you get from the enemies. As a Castlevania fan, I can accept a certain amount of knockback, but the amount of bootemless pits in the levels leads to instant death. Addition to that, there is something else you can't control; when you finish a task in the game, you are always warped to a random section of the level, and you have to come back to where you were. These issues with controls, or the lack of them in this case, made me annoyed with the game. There is another part of the game that complements the control problems, which is the level design. I'm not against isometric platformers. When they are done well, they could provide interesting levels and scenarios. The problem is that Season of Ice has bland level design, which is copied and pasted throughout the game. These bland levels are usually filled with minimal platforming and simple tasks like killing five things or making five things. The control issues, as well as the ocational warping and poorly handled camera, create levels that require frustrating backtracking to find missing items. That was the reason I dropped the game, because I was so annoyed that I couldn't find a gem that I was missing and the level consistently was screwing over with his layout that I stopped playing actively. Some may say Spyro 1 had a lot of repetition in its level design. I disagre. Spyro 1 always had clever platforming sequences and clever ways to explore the levels. In short, this game was tedious.