It's the Year of the Dragon, so I finally played Spyro Year of the Dragon. Just like Crash 3, Spyro 3 relies heavily on bad gimmicks because it mistakenly thinks it needs them to keep things fresh. Unlike Crash 3, Spyro 3 doesn't have incredibly good non-gimmick levels to fall back on. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have even noticed the levels feeling kinda lackluster if it wasn't for the gimmicks being so prevalent... they really just bring everything down and highlight the deficiencies. It's really not a bad game, I still mostly enjoyed it, but it's easily the worst and least essential of the trilogy; it doesn't have any aspects that would make me recommend it over the previous two.