Quite a long time ago now I reviewed the Reignited remakes of the original Spyro trilogy. I return to these reviews in my personal reflections more than I think you’d realise (yes I do read my old reviews, they are made for me after all!). An abiding thought that sticks with me is that for games which I loved as a child – and given I play the crap out of the remakes still actually – I was a lot harsher on Spyro Reignited than perhaps I had anticipated being. This largely comes down to nostalgia; although I think that the three games in the collection are in their most modern and playable forms, I still hold onto those original PS1 releases in a way that stops me from seeing them as anything but superior.
But what you might not realise is that the Spyro series did not end there. This was the golden age of mascot platformers after all, and despite franchise creator Insomniac’s departure after Year of the Dragon, the publishers were not about to let a cash cow – err, dragon – go quietly into that good night. I confess that I was not familiar with the post-trilogy world of Spyro; I played a little of the GBA game Season of Flame, but other than that as I grew up I neglected to follow our favourite purple dragon’s adventures, especially as the series moved into new and unfamiliar territory with sub-series like The Legend of Spyro and the toys-to-life craze-starter Skylanders. So, let’s take the opportunity to delve into where Spyro moved onto with his first foray into the new lands of the 6th generation of console gaming with Enter the Dragonfly.
Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly (GameCube, PS2 [reviewed])
Released Nov 2002 | Developed: Equinoxe / Check Six | Published: Universal
Genre: Platformer | HLTB: 10 hours
Now, if you know anything at all about Enter the Dragonfly then you’re probably already either shaking your head or gibbering with barely contained glee, but both for the same reason: because you know about this game’s reputation. This game is absolutely notorious among fans of the franchise for myriad reasons and absolutely none of them are good. Let’s get this out of the way right at the top – this game is dreadful.
I knew that going in. While I’d never played it before this review, I’ve seen bits about Enter the Dragonfly, from the occasional articles that list its lengthy rap sheet of problems to videos that dive into what went wrong. I definitely knew this game would suck. I still had to play it, both to make my own mind up about it, but also because I admit to being fascinated by bad games. There are plenty of titles I’ve tried out over the years purely because I’d been told that they were awful – you can’t help but want to see just how bad it is, or whether it’ll be entertaining in its crapness, or even just to find out if a game has been the victim of over-negative press and there’s a hidden gem lying beneath.
Well, I’m satisfied to report that Enter the Dragonfly is just a straight up shit game. It’s neither fun nor entertaining to experience; it’s just an abomination against the media that really ought not to have existed in this form.
It’s easy to look to the developers over this and blame them – after all, they made the game. But some cursory reading shines a little light over this game’s development and, I think, absolves the poor sods who worked on this game. It’s a little unusual for a game to have two development teams from completely separate companies; in Enter the Dragonfly’s case, Equinoxe were the team in charge of the game’s art and assets, and Check Six managed the game’s design and programming. This was already a recipe for disaster – for a game to be good it needs consistency in its development in order for it to be a coherent end product, and what was even more disastrous was that both of these studios were not established developers and yet were jointly handed one of Universal’s biggest IPs.
The more you read about Enter the Dragonfly’s development the worse it gets. Executive meddling from Universal forced a planned redesign to get canned in favour of something more like the PS1 trilogy, but then that in turn garnered criticism from the publishers for not being unique enough. Struggling under the weight of expectations, a too-short development-to-release window, and constant design shifts – not helped by Universal’s insistence that the development team also feature their own reps – financial struggles soon mounted up, with reports of failed pay and low morale. Even longtime series composer Stewart Copeland felt that the project had lost its way, commenting that he considered his work and the direction the franchise was being pushed in were moving far apart.
With all that in mind, it’s a wonder Enter the Dragonfly released, and no surprise that it’s a complete mess. We’ve not really talked about how it’s a load of toss though yet, so let us count the ways.
For a start, the game is hideous. The opening cutscene begins in the Dragon Realms, with a huge parade of balloons to celebrate the day where young dragons partner up with a dragonfly for the first time. A massive, misshapen float of the Sorceress from Year of the Dragon looms over Hunter, Spyro’s cheetah friend, and he lets out a wailing scream. Me too, buddy. It looks fucking awful. Before too long the party is crashed by Ripto and his goons, Crash and Gulp, inexplicably alive once more. The real terror here is in the facial movements on display as Ripto’s lips bulge and stretch erratically, tearing across the screen. Despite his distorting flesh he manages to garble out a plot about capturing the dragonflies. It seems appropriate given the quality on display here that he manages to bungle his spell and instead it merely scatters the dragonflies across the worlds. He then exits stage right, unchallenged, and not to be seen again until the final boss fight.
This sets up our primary collectible: dragonflies. Their dispersal across the Dragon Realms has weakened all the dragons however, including Spyro, and our protagonist finds himself only able to breathe bubbles instead of flames. Fortune has smiled upon us though as it turns out bubbles can trap lost dragonflies long enough for them to be spirited away back home (I assume). This does mean though that the dragonflies we need to collect are fiddly little bastards who flit and fly around like deflating balloons in a wind tunnel so even once we’ve found one of them you still need to charge around like a lunatic to get close enough to them in order to bubble-breath them into submission. I don’t know about you, but one thing I always want in a collectathon platformer is for the main collectible doodad of the game to be even more annoying to pick up.
In true Spyro form there are also of course myriad gems strewn about the worlds that need gathering up. Unlike previous entries in the franchise however, there isn’t actually any reason to collect them this time around. The series’ staple avaricious bear Moneybags makes an appearance in the first level of the game where he, in his usual form, must be paid in order to progress, but that’s genuinely the only time he shows up! Other than this single time you never need gems at all; in theory you need them for 100% completion, but because Moneybags never comes back you can’t do the usual thing of getting your spent gems back from him so you also can’t actually achieve completion in Enter the Dragonfly either!
As you progress through the game Spyro thankfully manages to collect new abilities to augment his diminished skills. The most important among these are the breath powerups, which at first return Spyro’s ability to breathe fire, but also you get a few additional alternative types of breath such as lightning and ice. Some of these are offensive in nature, such as lightning which winds up being essentially a palette swap of the normal fire breath, whereas others like ice are a bit more like utilities given that freezing an enemy isn’t fatal. In theory you need these other powers to progress, but they’re sparingly used; there’s a bare handful of stages where lightning breath powers up some electronics necessary for progression, and you’re supposed to be able to use ice breath to freeze NPCs into platforms but I found that the game never let me actually jump on top of them (something that its predecessors got right but apparently this one cannot manage).
There’s also not many stages to explore here either. Spyro games have always had hub worlds which you can explore in relative calm and offer portals to other stages within them before culminating in a boss fight and then moving you along to the next, but Enter the Dragonfly’s truncated development time put paid to that idea. Instead we get only one hub world from which we can reach every world, and it’s mostly a disappointingly empty expanse. Instead of portals to other worlds that clearly display where you’re going, we get NPCs standing around who tell us how many dragonflies we need to activate whatever mode of transport gets us to their stage. There are portals in the actual world levels though, so that makes for a needlessly confusing inconsistency.
The levels are as bland as the hub. The move to this newer generation seems mostly to have resulted in huge and empty spaces as opposed to the tightly designed levels of the past, and so you will spend an inordinate amount of time aimlessly charging through obvious loading corridors or around bland areas looking for something to do. Rhynocs – sorry, they’re Riptocs this time around because, uh, Ripto I guess – occasionally accost you but a lot of them are fairly easy to ignore, and besides which they only drop gems which, as we’ve established, are pointless to collect in this game. You’ll also come across portals throughout the stage which take you to challenge zones, but I can’t say any of them were exciting or interesting, and many of them I’ve entirely forgotten despite beating the game only a few weeks ago at time of writing.
Look, we all know it, Enter the Dragonfly is bad. I wasn’t actually prepared for how bad it was, but regardless it’s still a load of old pap. Aside from the fact that it’s aggressively boring, bland, and empty, it also doesn’t even run well, constantly struggling to maintain even the remotest attempt at a respectable framerate. There’s any amount of footage out there detailing the myriad bugs and glitches, including one that lets you swim through the air and bypass all of the gates that are intended to slow your progress throughout the game so you can make a beeline for the final boss in minutes. That this is where our favourite purple dragon wound up after what was arguably the strongest trilogy on the PS1 is nothing short of abysmal.
1/7 – ABYSMAL.
Oh dear. Perhaps it’s broken, perhaps it’s savagely offensive, or perhaps it’s a barely-constructed mess. Either way, avoid it at all costs.
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