This is what happens when the entire Internet makes one too many "Crash Bandicoot has become Dark Souls" jokes. Some developers will take that as a challenge.

However, despite the balls to the wall level of difficulty here, this might be my new favorite Crash game. Everything just feels so finely crafted and purposeful - from the environment and creature designs to the way the characters respond to your inputs - that I'll forgive a little feature bloat in the form of the N. Verted levels. The way I see it, 100% completion is optional and something to be chipped away at gradually over time, because, yes, I can see how this game would quickly drive someone insane.

This is a game of baffling choices, a video game adaptation released three years too late - a game delayed by Disney lawsuits and originally had a prototype for the NES - of a movie that was such a box office dud that it lead to the death of a beloved American animation company.

It feels equal parts too easy (the lives system is tied to your health so you can easily end up with 99 lives since heart collectables are all over the place) and too hard (a lot of movement involves traveling on tiny platforms over bottomless pits where it's easy to fall off and the second world is a godawful sky-themed world where you're constantly jumping inbetween tiny platforms), where the difficulty is tied to collecting an arbitary number of coins on a level's map until the exit finally starts working, a bold move away from "mediocre 2D platformer" and into "tedious collectathon on maps not designed for that" territory.

This is a game that feels like a bootleg of the movie its trying to portray, either out of embarrassment or because the game developers were not allowed to have a copy of this movie. There are no familiar song jingles, no other characters besides the three in this game (the Dwarfelles, who were the main gimmick of the movie, don't even appear), and no story to speak of until at the very end where suddenly the final boss battle finally transports you into the movie's setting.

Since this game doesn't care to portray the movie in any meaningful way, it tries to instead fill in the whole "Snow White" part of the title by making your main method of attack, besides the usual "jump on small animals' heads with your gangly human body" method, apple projectiles. You throw apples and get special homing apples or explosive apples that send apples flying all over the screen, and sometimes you can find a special jeweled apple that, when touched, causes a screen wipe of all the enemies by sending a bunch of tiny apple pixels scattering all over the place, thus creating a hilarious amount of lag. Between that and your other main collectible being fruit (which you attempt to string together to get bonuses to raise your score), this is a very healthy snacks-orientated game. Again, not a part of the movie at all, but effort for trying.

This is a bad game and a bad adaptation, but at least it's hilarious rather than just degrading. Mark my words, this game sucks, but it's a fun suck. The kind of suck that you tell your friends in a video call "dude, look at this game" and everyone points and laughs.

Game gets an extra half star for the soundtrack and my ability to play as A Funny Little Guy with a walking cane and funny googly eyes, but boy, I'm glad I didn't spend the 30 dollars actually buying a legit copy like my original plan. Emulation; it saves you from making poor life choices (even if I still ended up playing said game) and keeps you from buyer's remorse.

By all accounts, a game with less than a year of development time, with a lot of resources and manpower diverted to making an online mode in the PS2 era, even more resources and manpower diverted to working on a separate game engine, and all the fun horror stories of cut features arising from this game's development cycle should've made a complete trainwreck of a game but instead this is one of the best games in the franchise and ended up creating the franchise's most iconic villain so clearly some black magic was at play at the Insomniac studios in 2004. The cut side-games of this game - the races and the ship battles - don't hinder the game so much as trim the fat and as a result I think this game has a more streamlined experience than Going Commando and brought me the gameplay that I enjoy the most from this series.

But mostly, I must reiterate, this game brought us Dr. Nefarious, who feels like he was created mostly for Insomniac to flex on the competition and go "look at how cartoonishly animated this PS2 character is", and I'm glad he's survived well into the PS5 era where they can raytrace that doofus and make him lavishly animated on modern hardware. Am I speaking from a bias? Possibly. But I think this game's faults would've been way more noticeable if the villain wasn't good and if we didn't get that banger of a song from Courtney Gears midway through the game.

In the 21st century, you're going to end up with one of two mindsets when you play through Dragon's Lair; either it's an antiquated fossil of a game that's as advanced as a bonus feature off a Harry Potter DVD and you'd much rather watch someone else's playthrough on Youtube, or the interactive 80's animated movie feel of the game kind of makes playing through this game (and dying many, many times) honestly kinda charming and you kinda don't care that the game is one giant QTE because you end up losing yourself in the game's general "groove".

I fell under the latter camp. I will admit that I probably would be a lot less kinder to this game if I was actually playing the original coin-consuming 1983 Arcade version rather than the Switch port collection that helpfully allows you to restart as many times as you want and has an on-screen button guide so the game isn't as ridiculously obtuse, but I'm glad time has been kind to Dragon's Lair and that they've now released a version where the picture is so crystal clear that you can practically see the animation cels' imperfections. Perhaps one day I'll pop off the training wheels and actually play Dragon's Lair "the way it was intended to be played" but for now, I'm glad to have finally experienced this piece of gaming history, even if I know that it's not that meaty of an actual game and that most of the game's charm comes from the Don Bluth animation.