Every couple of years I'll end up doing a 120% playthrough of Spyro, and every time I wonder if I'll do it again. I've seen all the game has to offer many times over, but I can't seem to help but finish it whenever I start. I may be biased from it being among the small catalog we had for the Playstation when I was nine or so, but I think it holds up marvelously. It has a few uneven segments, but given the era, it's about as close to perfection as you could expect.

The visuals are charming and consistent, Stewart Copeland (of The Police!) knocks the score out of the park, and it controls well– I just played it through entirely on the d-pad, and I don't think I could finish a lot of its peers that way now, let alone praise them.

I never really got into the sequels, beyond playing through Ripto's Rage in the remaster. I might be biased because we never owned any of them, but they never appealed to me. I feel like the fantasy of the setting works much better without a zany cast of supporting characters. It's a very charming place, and apart from Spyro's own snarky lines when rescuing dragons, a place with an almost contemplative mood.

Whenever I think of Spyro, I think of this game only, and that mood, and I don't ever really see that changing. That's how it will continue to live in my memory, whether my next playthrough ever really is my last.

You gotta believe!

Some of my most fond early memories of my life are the days spent at my grandparent's house. A small home next to some woods with a pond, a very large backyard, and a shed with all kinds of stuff that I thought was cool (it became a whole lot less cool when my grandpa passed away and I realized he was a hoarder and we had to clear all that out, but, uh, that's besides the point) including none other than a cardboard cutout of the purple guy himself: William Aft- I mean Spyro! I don't know where it came from or what happened to it, but I always thought it was so awesome that my grandpa had a huge Spyro sitting back there, and I'd always check it out when I was in the shed. But it wasn't just the shed that had Spyro as my grandpa actually kept a decently impressive collection of games, most notably PS1 games. I don't really remember the full extent of them (I inherited a lot of them, the ones I was interested in, but there were way more), but I'd play on that PlayStation as much as I could back then, and most prominently was Spyro. I loved these games, and I always wanted to go back and play them again as my memories of them, while happy, were rather vague.

Well, now I realize that almost all the vague memories were of one or both of the other games and not this one. Did I ever play the first Spyro? I can't seem to remember, but I was disappointed to learn upon playing this one that there was no Moneybags to be found, nor Cheetah guy, nor skateboard minigame. Instead, I found an oddly liminal experience, a tranquil yet solitude atmosphere. Everything in this game wants to kill you, your only friend is a non-character dragonfly, and you're left to brave the land of low-render-distance PS1 polygonal Windows XP dreamscape while sneezing flaming chunks at sheep and going full sprint with a sound effect that made me think of goofy cartoon sounds. I like that your only tutorials are the dragons you rescue who either say "thanks man" and then pop out of existence, or give you a tip on how to proceed with some stellar deliveries. That's not a joke at cheesy 90s voice acting, by the way, I genuinely love the deliveries in this game. Spyro's is particularly perfect to me. I'm sure the later voice actors like... wait, Tom Kenny? Er, I'm sure the later voices actors like... damn, they got Matt Mercer? Anyway, I'm sure the later voice act- ELIJAH WOOD??? Anyway, I'm sure the later voice actors do a great job, but right now, man, I love Carlos Alazraqui's performance. To me, Spyro's voice in this game oozes earned confidence without sounding cocky, but also a silly little guy who's not afraid of playing along with his elders. Between the performances - I was happy to recognize Clancy Brown in there as well - and the writing, I found myself chuckling at a bunch of the interactions.

One thing I really love about this game is that there is a finite amount of gems (which I really want to eat, they look like Ring Pops), and to 100% the game, you need to collect every single one of them. I hate when platformers only make the main collectible to be part of a score or life system, I love exploring the levels and actually being rewarded by it, instead of getting the 78th 1-up of the hour.

I'd talk more, but I'm actively falling asleep as I type this review because it's 3 A.M., so I'm just gonna throw this on the site

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W_0SE3-1KA

I think I didn't play this until after Spyro 2, and so it felt a bit like a step back, but I've still grown to love it almost as much as the rest of the trilogy. A lot of the bones of what Spyro would become are already present here, and the level variety and structure makes collecting everything super fun. The humor's silly and charming, and the Stewart Copeland music rocks. I also think these chunky polygon models have aged some of the best from this era because of how stylized they feel. Always a delight to revisit