Retro Review - Spyro The Dragon
This game is pure nostalgia for many people who had the pleasure of having played it and also for me, I remember when they gave me the PSONE, it had a Demo CD with some games, among those games was: Spyro The Dragon, at the time of playing it, it did not attract my attention, my mind was focused on other games I had bought, but after a while I decided to buy it, and the truth is that it is a very entertaining game and at the same time a game that has been forgotten over the years.
We are in DragonWorld, a world that as the name clearly says, is a world where most of its inhabitants are dragons, these dragons are responsible for taking care of a large amount of jewelry, for a long time they fulfilled their mission, until a fateful day.
Disturbing the peace of the dragons and DragonWorld, a new race appeared to that world, called Gnorcs, a species very similar to the classic orcs, where his leader Gnasty Gnorc was despised by all the dragons because of how annoying and disgusting he was, so he was exiled to another world, where he was full of trash , to surprise or not so surprise, Gnasty thought that this world was perfect, so much so that he gave the name "World of Gnasty".
While he was in that world, Gnasty was devoted to experiments, spent the days and a long time, until he found two spells that would help him commit a vile act against the dragons.
With one of the spells he managed to turn the jewels into other beings of his kind, the Gnorcs, therefore due to the large amount of jewels that the dragons had under his protection, the amount of Gnorcs he had created was monumental, having low its power a great army of these beasts.
The other spell turned all the dragons into crystal statues, leaving DragonWorld, under total control of Gnasty, but all is not lost for the dragons, since luckily one of them could evade the spell, that little dragon that was saved from the spell, it is nothing more and nothing less than our protagonist: Spyro, now his task will be: to break the spell that turned the dragons into crystal statues, recover the jewels and defeat Gnasty, so our beloved purple dragon, must travel the world fighting the Gnorcs army to save his world.
The first aspect that we can see when playing Spyro The Dragon is the color that its scenarios have, the color level of this game is very varied and at the same time striking, the color palette used was the right one to be able to create a fantasy world that in view of the player is nice to see. As is the custom of PlayStation 1, we can see a lot of polygonal models, said polygons were used correctly to mold this world and all the scenarios where we go with our purple dragon.
Both the design of all the characters in the game are well elaborated, especially in the dragons and Spyro, its modeling is really good and at the same time with small details that give life to these characters, , taking into account that this game was created so that it was mostly played by children, it is quite evident that each design of the characters and each stage was drawn and programmed so that this children's audience is more attracted to playing it, adding also the great show that have the colors of this game makes it visually pretty.
It should be noted that the movements of all those characters that we see in the game, but especially in Spyro have an excellent level of fluency, these move in such a way that they do not look rigid, taking into account that these models were developed in polygons, work done in them gives quite a glimpse.
In the section of sound is not an aspect where it stands out too much, its main theme is composed in a way that is easy to remember, but does not innovate, despite this the soundtrack of Spyro The Dragon, fulfills its mission: that is to accompany the player while he is playing and traveling through the DragonWorld stages, although I must also say that on many occasions we can notice that he repeats too much, so he tends to bore a bit.
Our duty as the only surviving dragon to the spell of Gnasty is to save our fellow dragons and reverse the spell, so we must go along 6 worlds each with a different type of design to the other, where each has its own personality.
The control of Spyro in turn is quite easy, we have a series of movements such as running, flying and launching fire (although this attack has a short range), we must go between each world defeating Gnorcs and recovering stolen jewels, at first it is an easy task, but as we progress through the game, the difficulty will increase moderately, it does not become an extremely difficult game but it does have a certain degree of difficulty.
It should also be noted that some of the enemies that we find have weakness in certain attacks that others do not, therefore we must learn among all the variety which of them is weak before certain attacks, in such a way that it becomes faster for us to defeat them when we fight against them.
It is totally a platform game in 3D, the character of Spyro was created as a direct competition towards Mario and although it did not reach the degree of success that the plumber has, Spyro is a game quite remembered by all those people who played it, so if you like platform games this is an excellent game to pass the time.
Spyro The Dragon is an excellent platform game that perhaps in some moments sins to be repetitive, because in each world we must go to defeat so many gnorcs we are to recover the stolen jewels and free the dragons from the spell, but even so, it is still a game that marked the childhood of many people, despite being one of those games that has been forgotten over the years, there will always be a group of people who have this game always in his memory.
This is one of the few 3D platformers on the PSX that can rival the ones on the N64. In my opinion, the sequels are way worse because they tried too much to focus on "quirky" characters and unrelated gimmicks. Spyro 1 is still the best.
Also, I'm quite sure that the image of Spyro by the river is actually from Spyro 2.
Yeah, you can tell by that character in the background, he is in part two, not one. Good eye.
Yeah, my bad...
Fixed.
Ahhh~ Spyro.... I only played the third game on PS1 (at the time I thought it's the only game) and loved it so much.... I've spent too much time of my childhood in it.
I watched a video talked about the history of this game, and wow!! the original developers were so creative!!...
I didn't play the first spyro game. but the third one didn't have the boring repetition you talked about.
I liked your review, especially the use of "we" instead of "I" and "You" I use in my reviews...
Yup, one is here!!
Thank´s bro!
This franchise is one that I had high hopes for as we entered the Playstation 2 era but the ball was dropped as Universal (I believe they took it over, as well as Crash Bandicoot) took the reigns.
Sony did things right here by giving the developers plenty of time and money to make Spyro be all it could be. I loved this franchise and played it quite a bit (I got into Spyro 1 after years of playing part 2).
Such a great franchise.
It was a pretty promising game.
Great points.. thanks for bringing these important points in our view.
Thanks for sharing the video with us.
I've resteemed your post!
please up vote this comment.
Ahh its been years :)
Many years!