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REVIEW: SPYRO REIGNITED TRILOGY (PS4, XBOX ONE - PS4 version tested)

4/12/2018

18 Comments

 
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Of all the original PlayStation icons, Spyro the Dragon was one that I never expected to endure. Somehow, the character - albeit eventually coming to be buried beneath a coagulation of fellow dish-eyed cartoon characters - saw his series evolve into the long-running Skylanders franchise, despite having all the distinctness and personality of a clog that somebody had scrawled the word "DUDE" on in biro.

Despite that, when my kids were little, Spryo was something of a fixture in our household.

​My youngest daughter was never big into games, but the Spyro series (and, later, Kameo: Elements of Power) were her games. Consequently, the splashback nostalgia she still radiates has given me a sort of latent sentimentality towards the Spyro series.

She's 22 now, but even asked for a second-hand PS1 and a copy of Spyro for Christmas last year. Naturally, I was happy to oblige, given that she usually just wants crystals, and dreamcatchers, and all that shit. Though I have noticed that they now do a Spryro incense burner, which is a surprising confluence of things she's into.

Actually, for £29.99 they can fuck off. She can have socks.
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DRAGONOLOGY
The Reignited Trilogy contains the first three Spyro games (although if you buy it on disc, most of the levels on the latter two will need to be downloaded, presumably because the publisher hates us).

Broadly, they get better as they go along - with the third in the trilogy, Year of the Dragon, mixing things up with additional playable characters and more complex levels. In terms of gameplay, it's easily the best of the three, with the middle portion of the trilogy feeling little more than an extension of its predecessor.

To wit: a fairly rote platforming collect 'em up, in which Spyro defeates his enemies by setting them on fire with his combustible phlegm, or by charging into them brow-first. T

The big innovation of the series was, of course, Spyro's ability to glide between platforms, which succeeds in giving the games their one real USP. Also: he sometimes rode around on a skateboard, which seemed entirely unnecessary for a character who could run at high-speed and fly for short distances. But, hey, skateboards are cool - right, kids?

The first thing to say about this remaster is how lovely it looks. The visuals have been rebuilt from the ground up, and they've done a brilliant job. Gone are the muted colours of the originals, replaced with high-contrast hues, and some gorgeous character work. Similarly, Stewart "Policeman" Copeland's iconic score has been beefed up considerably, though fans of the original will be pleased to hear you can switch between his version and the new one. 

What the graphics and music can't disguise, unfortunately, is that beneath the 2018 gloss these are the same games they always were. Consequently, the camera can be a pain, controlling Spyro isn't always easy, and navigating levels can be frustratingly - and this is the only way I can think to describe it - "quirky". 

Remaking a classic game is a delicate balance; change too much and you alienate fans of the originals. Keep it classic and you expose all those original flaws. There have been small tweaks here and there to how Spyro plays, but you'd be hard-pressed to be able to spot them. 

Ultimately, there's no escaping that these are very simple games by modern standards, linear and lacking much in the way of challenge. 
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DEEP RESPECT
Commendably, the Reignited Trilogy has been pieced together with deep respect for the original, and its bafflingly passionate fanbase. This isn't Phil Spector slapping an orchestra over the top of The Long And Winding Road while Paul McCartney was off having a poo; the new graphics are merely an extra layer of production gloss on the original games. 

Whether they hold up today is irrelevant in a way, because this anthology is obviously aimed primarily at those who've retained a fondness from the original releases.

For my money, Spyro - once you got past the notion that 3D platforms were then still a novelty - was always the CBeebies Mario 64. That's not the dismissal you might at first assume; Mario 64 could be overwhelming and difficult, and offering an entry-level 3D platformer (even on as unlikely a platform as the too-cool-for-school PlayStation) has its worth, and there's no disguising that Spyro is an icon to a certain generation of PlayStation owners.

But then, so does the Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone.

What is interesting is that, at the time, I was always much more of a fan of Crash Bandicoot - Spyro's sort-of-stablemate, and the other iconic PlayStation anthropomorph. Yet playing the recent N-Sane Trilogy revealed that the Crash games haven't aged all that well. Spyro, for all its simplicity and repetition, isn't perfect, but the benefit of 20-years hindsight suggests they're the better games.

But they don't 'alf "drag-on"... LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL. Sigh.

​SCORE: 293 °C OUT OF 500 °C
18 Comments
HdE link
4/12/2018 10:24:53 am

This is the second Spyro feature I've seen recently that mentioned Stewart Copeland's score (the other being a video by the lovely Sarah's Game Collection on YouTube.)

I freakin' LOVE me some Police. And Copeland's soundtrack work has always been standout stuff. Got to admit, I'm actually curious now to hear what the remastered score sounds like.

I mean, I watched Highlander II for Stewart Copeland's music. And that's one more Highlander movie than I ever wanted to see. But the plinky-plonk synths and xylophones were totally worth it.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
4/12/2018 05:20:57 pm

I'm glad they kept the option to play with the original music in. Spyro's music was a real highlight for some reason I can't quite describe, and actually one of my favourite things about the original game. It was bright and cheery like most 3D platformers of the day, but with a sort of mystical tone hinting at something grander that set it apart somehow from Crash, Croc, and the like.

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HdE
4/12/2018 09:01:05 pm

That 'bright and cheery' feel to the music is likely no accident. Stewart Copeland is a master at making the kind of thing that other composers might put out as a flat, dreary background warble sound much more upbeat. He's a very under-rated musician, in that sense.

I won't bore anyone reading this with the in-depth theory of how he does this, but its definitely an identifying factor in his soundtrack work. If you look at stuff he's done over the years, like the soundtrack for the old TV show 'The Equalizer,' his music is so distinct that it almost becomes another character in the show. (Which is a pretentious cliche, I know, but... eh. It kinda fits, I guess.)

Super Bad Advice
4/12/2018 10:27:41 am

My one remaining bit of freebie gaming tat from the long-dead Gamerseurope website is an original-era Spyro the Dragon mug. I've always kept pens in it and used it as a desk tidy, because it looks so cheaply printed I feared the paint might be toxic.

(hashtag best anecdote ever)

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CJJC
4/12/2018 12:25:37 pm

I reviewed the Wii version of Twilight Princess for that site based on about two hours of gameplay the day before the official release. My first and hopefully last video game review (it’s not one of my skills).

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Spiney O'Sullivan
4/12/2018 01:23:35 pm

Was it the first two hours? Because those do not create a good first impression.

Col. Asdasd
4/12/2018 06:53:26 pm

What are you talking about? I only played the first two hours of Twilight Princess but I could easily tell it was the best cat-finding simulator released that year.

MENTALIST
4/12/2018 10:45:23 am

Having played Mario and Banjo first, Spyro was the only Playstation platformer I could stomach playing back in the day.

And my kids have played a fair amount of Skylanders in the last few years (fortunately for me, we could lag two years behind releases, so get them either new or second-hand dirt cheap), and they watch the Netflix series, which I find passable.

So I'm slightly curious to see where this franchise goes. If this, resolutely singleplayer experience does well, and they're keeping making the TV series, I suspect that we might see Toys For Bob make a Skylanders Academy game, either without the toys-to-life stuff, or with a significantly reduced focus on it.

Although I would prefer co-op in it. If it weren't singleplayer-only, I'd probably have bought the reignited trilogy for my kids for Christmas.

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James of the North
4/12/2018 11:44:51 am

Kameo is vastly underrated/overlooked, probably because proper boys and real men's men grimace at the thought of playing as a girl fairy. But it's well worth setting all that aside and giving a solid chance if you're a fan of Banjo/Spyro-type games.

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Pete Davison link
4/12/2018 01:21:55 pm

Seconded! Kameo is a legitimately great game that suffered a bit from people judging it based on what it was originally intended to be, rather than what it actually ended up being.

Beautiful presentation and amazing soundtrack, though. And, as a fat hairy man, may I just say I absolutely love playing as girl fairies at every opportunity.

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James of the North
4/12/2018 01:33:22 pm

What was it originally intended to be?

I have a sort of demo reel MP3 of the soundtrack that I bust out from time to time. It's first rate, and really adds to the tremendous atmosphere in certain set pieces. Ploughing through a battlefield of ogres on horseback while the main theme builds is next level stuff.

Pete Davison link
4/12/2018 03:37:24 pm

If I remember correctly, it was originally intended to be a bit more "Zelda-y" with more RPG elements and suchlike, but underwent numerous revisions and even jumped platform from original Xbox to 360 at one point in the development process.

I watched a good video about the history of it recently but I can't for the life of me remember who it was by. A quick squiz back in my YouTube history suggests it might have been this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqTSTPZ0wvE

James of the North
4/12/2018 03:55:32 pm

Cheers for that, I'll check out the video tonight. It's a shame people couldn't get over that change in direction. Better to make a damn fine yacht if your plans for a helicopter aren't working out.

Spiney O'Sullivan
4/12/2018 05:14:49 pm

I don't think it was just the change in direction that put people off Kameo. It was just kind of a victim of an acquisition that, from the outside at least, didn't seem to make sense.

I love most of the games that Rare made in the N64 era, but I'm really not sure why Microsoft decided to buy a studio which mostly made games that were pretty much the opposite of what would appeal to the Xbox's core audience, and where most of the people heavily responsible for the few games that would appeal directly to the Halo/Gears crowd had long since left to found other studios.

As for the Nintendo audience, Kameo might have worked with them, but the Nintendo die-hards (i.e. the only people playing Nintendo's non-handheld systems at the time) weren't likely to buy an Xbox 360 for it, and a certain soreness in those ranks towards Rare for a while after they were bought out was likely still an issue when Kameo was released, particularly as the Gamecube was circling the drain and Nintendo was still a year away from making its huge comeback.

So with Xbox owners and Nintendo owners largely unlikely to buy it, Kameo was just kind of stuck in no-man's-land.

Col. Asdasd
4/12/2018 06:51:34 pm

It also suffered a bit from the backlash to their previous major release, the execrable Grabbed by the Ghoulies.

Raybies
4/12/2018 07:12:23 pm

Biffo, I'll fuck off for £29.99 if you want. Do you want my payPay details?

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James Walker link
5/12/2018 12:05:40 am

Dude, you messed up.

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Raybies
5/12/2018 06:08:13 am

What's one letter when I could have nearly thirty sterling? That's nearly thirty four euro!




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