Game Name: Spyro - A Hero's Tail
Platform: PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube
Developer: Eurocom Entertainment Software
Year: 2004
Genre: 3D action-platformer
Rated: Everyone
Mode: Single-player
Multi-Player Support: None
Media: DVD-ROM

Dragon Contents:

This rating only indicates the dragon contents and importance they play in the movie/game/episodes reviewed.

R a t i n g :

This rating indicates how good or how bad was the movie/game/episodes reviewed. A rating of 5 stars on 10 is considered as the average which mean it is not good but not bad either.

Spyro - A Hero's Tail is a 3D action-platform game. It follows the original three games released on the PS1 (1998 - 2000) and Spyro - Enter the Dragonfly released on the PS2 in 2002. The core concepts of the game do not break new ground and remain more or less the same as with its predecessor: collecting various items, platforming and charging and burning enemies standing in Spyro's way.

The game contains four Realms: Dragon Kingdom, Lost Cities, Icy Wilderness and Volcanic Isle. Individual realms are much bigger than in the original series and are sub-divided into different areas but without the need of a portal to access them. Though, Spyro may go through a longer than usual tunnel or step on an elevator to access some of them (likely to give time for the game to load the new map and its assets), but the transition feels quite seamless in a way that you have the impression to still be in one very large level. The only time loading screend and transitions occur is when Spyro is teleported to a different realm via a short vortex cutscene and when accessing minigames. Note that portal archways are only used to access Sgt. Byrd obstacle course minigames.

This time Spyro not only has to collect dragon eggs and Light Gems but also destroy Dark Gems. The regular gems acquired by killing enemies, destroying wicker baskets and smashing treasure chests are only used to purchase goods from Moneybags; they do not count toward getting a 100% rating, nor do they unlock anything special at the end of the game. Moreover, the game is very generous with gems and enemies can respawn so technically, this makes the amount of gems available in the game unlimited. When destroying a Dark Gem, it will restore and change its surrounding environment and will make the dark purple goo around it disappears, often revealing something hidden in it or opening a new patch for Spyro to take. This has the advantage of rewarding the player for accomplishing this task instead of just increasing a meaningless game counter. It is also necessary to destroy all of them to break the dark forcefield protecting the boss' lair in a realm. For dragon eggs, they unlock extra features in the menu. And finally, collecting the rainbow and iridescent Light Gems allows Spyro to activate the Professor Gadgets (i.e. the Ball, the Supercharge and Invincibility) as well as unlocking some specific sections of a level that are not essential to complete the game but typically hide a Light Gem and a dragon egg. As with the original PS1 series, the game provide a Task List in the menu showing what remain to be accomplished as well as how many Light Gems, dragon eggs and Dark Gems were recovered and destroyed. The game also provides a basic map of each area and locations that Spyro hasn't visited yet will appear in black.

Familiar characters return in this game, such as Sparx the dragonfly, Hunter the cheetah and Sgt. Byrd the penguin who has managed to upgrade his rocket launchers with more modern weaponry such as guided bombs and enemy-seeking missiles. There is also a new character called Blink the mole who is a more polyvalent replacement for Agent 9 found in the Year of the Dragon game. Aside for Hunter who can be played in a more typical Spyro's way in specific sections of some levels, the other characters are only playable within their own minigames with Sgt. Byrd tasked with the obstacle course and Sparx with the 3D-shooter levels that is reminiscent of old NES games such as Contra (1988). Finally, Blink minigames are slower-paced underground exploration. He is equipped with a laser blaster, can dig out gems from the ground and is able to hang to platforms and monkey bars. He also have bombs that he can use to destroy Dark Shards, break cracked walls and metal crates. Each minigame needs to be completed twice: once to receive a dragon egg (normal mode) and a second time to receive a Light Gem (hard mode). Except for the obstacle courses, the hard mode isn't really much harder but having to complete the minigame twice in a row can sometimes feel a bit repetitive and can slow down the pace of the game. There is of course Moneybags, but instead of looking like a snobbish Wall Street suit only interested in money, he now appears as Middle East Aladdin-like bazaar merchant wearing a fez. His personality has also changed toward a street peddler trying to sell you his wares rather than someone knowing that they have something you absolutely need and who is more than eager to take advantage of the situation. You will mostly buy lockpicks from him (and a Keychain so that you can carry more than one at a time) so you can open the many locked chests you encounter during the game. There is also a few useful upgrades such as the Shockwave for Horn Dive and the Extra Health Unit for Sparx. Since the game provides lot more gems than necessary, money shouldn't be an issue.

In addition to his ability to breath fire, Spyro will acquire electric, water and ice breath weapons by defeating bosses. The water breath has the longest range and while it appears to be limited to only activate water-wheels, it ends up to be quite useful in the Volcanic Isle realm where there are lot of fire-based enemies. The Electric breath can activate devices and platforms while the ice breath will freeze enemies solid which Spyro can then defeat by charging them or with a headbash regardless if they wear a metal armor or not. Spyro can now grab ledges right at the beginning of the game but he will also learn new moves by talking to the four dragon elders scattered across the different realms and they will teach Spyro how to use Double Jump, Horn Dive (aka headbash), Pole Spin (allowing Spyro to hold on horizontal poles like a gymnast would), Wing Shield (used to deflect blunt object but not sharp ones) and Wall Kick (aka "wall jump" or "triangle jump" used to climb up opposite walls if they are close enough to each others).

To obtain a 100% rating, you must destroy all 40 Dark Gems (the smaller Dark Shards don't count), recover 80 dragons eggs and collect 100 Light Gems. You will spend a lot of time backtracking for missed gems and eggs but sometimes, you are required to backtrack to previous levels in order to access an egg or a gem either because a door required a certain amount of Light Gems to open that was impossible to have before completing later levels or because Spyro had not learned a move yet (such as Wall Kick). In one case, a door in Frosbite Village needs 95 Light Gems to unlock and at that point Spyro has already reached the orrery in Red's Laboratory (the final level) and he is moments away from his final battle against Red. This backtracking tends to disrupts the flow of the game and you can also spend a lot of time looking for a missing gem or egg or how to reach it without realizing that it's simply impossible to do at that point. If Spyro manages to recover a whole set of eggs (i.e. a complete horizontal line of similar colored eggs), this immediately unlocks a specific extra feature in the menu: the Concept Art, a 3D character viewer, Ember as a playable character, Flame as a playable character, Sgt. Byrd mini-games, Spyro turret mini-games, Sparx shooter mini-games and Blink mini-games. The minigames are the same as the ones already encountered in the game, but it gives an easy replay access from the menu rather than scouring the game to find their access points. Note that there is no special level that become available at the end of the game but if you have collected every egg along the way, Flame and Ember are playable in the last few areas of the Volcanic Isles without needing to complete the game.

As stated above, if Spyro manages to collect all fire-red eggs and pink eggs with daisies, this will unlock Flame and Ember as a playable character, respectively. Flame looks almost exactly like Spyro but he is red instead of purple and he has a longer snout and an arrowhead-shaped tail end while Ember is pink female dragon with a different head shape and a heart-shaped tail end. However, the NPCs will still address these characters as Spyro and the game will even switch back momentarily to the Spyro model in some discussions and when using the Ball Gadget. Moreover, the voices and sounds these characters make will remain exactly the same no matter which one is played. This can somewhat work with Flame since he is a male, but not so much for a female dragoness like Ember. Playing as either of them doesn't change anything to the game since they have exactly the same attacks, breath weapons and moves as Spyro. So this whole allowing the player to choose a character doesn't feel terribly appealing and appear to have been poorly implemented.

However, the main problem with these two characters is that they are wasted opportunities. They are obviously of the same age as Spyro, they seem to know each other, but they serve no purpose at all. For example, Ember is a very stereotypical and cliché female character who has a crush on Spyro and wants to marry him (even if she seems a bit young to think about these things) but this makes no sense considering the context or more accurately the complete lack of. She is just there in one scene next to a Dark Gem and that's all. She could have been shown to be a stronger character like Cynder in The Legend of Spyro where we can see some sort of relationship slowly building over the course of game. Or her infatuation toward Spyro could have been a motivation to help him or even do daring things to catch his attention but she only says a few lines that's all. There is no depth in this character and she permanently disappear from the game once Spyro enters Crocovile Swamp. Same thing happens with Flame, which again putting two dragons about the same age as Spyro in the game and making them playable on top of that, feels like they should dwell a little more on the relationship those two share with Spyro. The developers could have even given them a short level where you must play as either one of them maybe with slight variations in their abilities (such as greater/shorter breath range, higher double jump ability, longer glide, etc.). Switching character could have been done within the game by talking back to them and it would have given them some purpose. I know that they originally intended for Ember to be a fully playable character but they decided otherwise since it would have required new NPC interactions and alternate speech but I'm not fully convinced that this would have required a lot of effort to implement considering that there isn't that much dialogue in this game to begin with.


Storyline:
The story begins with Gnasty Gnorc and his minions coming to the Dragon Village carrying Dark Gems and Dark Shards and planting them into ground, corrupting it and making deadly plants grow. They then open a portal and enter it, presumably to do the same in other realms. Gnasty Gnorc retreats in a cave and a red dragon named Red is seen closing the cave with a dark forcefield protected behind thorny vines.

In the Professor's laboratory, he explains to Spyro that Red is a fallen dragon thought to have been long gone but who now appears to have been mining Dark Gems (life-draining stones that fuel Red's evil power) and planting them all over the Realms with Gnasty Gnorc and his minions doing all the dirty work for him. To stop Red, Spyro must learn more about him and destroy all those Dark Gems. The Professor also tells Spyro that he needs to collect Light Gems to powerup the gadgets he made to help him in his quest (even if at first, he wasn't sure what items were being collected in this game; a small joke and an opportunity to make reference to the fact that Spyro games are about collecting things and that often changes from one game to another).

At the same time in the Dragon Village, Spyro witnesses egg thieves running away from the nursery with their loot stolen from Nanny, a pink dragoness who reveals to him that 80 dragon eggs are now missing. Though, the egg thieves are in possession of only 10 of them (the green speckled ones), the others are just randomly scattered around. Spyro proposes to find the dragon eggs for her since he is on a quest to save the world anyway.

While exploring the Dragon Kingdom, Spyro encounters Elder Tomas who tells him that Red intends to take over the world by using the Dark Gems. But when Spyro asks who is this enigmatic dragons that he never encountered before, Tomas only replies that he was an elder like him and that while he could tell Spyro the whole story, he is old and it takes him a really long time to tell stories so he prefers to only tell him how to destroy the Dark Gems instead by using his Horn Dive ability. Later in other realms, Elder Magnus reveals that Red was part of the Order of Dragon Elders until his jealousy and hunger for power led him to try to overthrow their leader but he refuses to tell Spyro anymore information. While meeting with Elder Titan, he remarks that Spyro has been quite inquisitive about Red and when Spyro points out that everyone seems to be avoiding the issue, Elder Titan only says that Red has been banished from the Order of Dragons for his terrible crimes. Lastly, Elder Astor who is held prisoner since Red returned from exile, simply avoid the subject entirely.

So with this mysterious evil red dragon planning to corrupt and conquer the Realms, Spyro and his friends are the only people standing in his way...

Spoilers:
(select the text with your mouse to read it)
It becomes quite evident early on in the game that everyone Spyro encounter find one excuse or another to avoid revealing any specific details about Red and what he did. Moreover, the game does not reveal any valid reason for them to behave that way. If for example, Red had killed Spyro's parents or was Spyro's father or one of his relative, then I could see why someone would not want to be the one revealing this information to him but this isn't the case here. So the story contains a large blank to be filled by the player's imagination but the game doesn't provide much to work with.

And the ending is as basic as it can get: Spyro defeats Red and roll the credits. There is a very short and silly discussion between the elder dragons but that's all. So the spoiler here is that there isn't really a proper ending or even the simplest conclusion to this game. For example, we don't learn anything new about Red; his motivation, his plans, what he did exactly to be banished or why he was reluctant to trounce Spyro the first time he met him (at this point, Red didn't expect to be defeated by Spyro so not wishing to fight him felt more like he didn't want to harm Spyro rather than fearing him). And the ending doesn't elaborate or reveal anything else, be it about Spyro's backstory or any information about Ember and Flame.


Graphics:
The game graphic and appearance of the game remain faithful to the original series. The game has the same style with enemies having relatively simpler shapes and lower polygon count than the main characters who are more detailed and complex. However, the game was designed for the PS2 and the graphic are significantly better as the limits imposed by the PS1 do not apply here. The game does not experience any slowdown and gameplay is fluid with no loading screens except between realms and for minigames. There was no notable buga either, except for one Dark Shard in Stormy Beach that seemed to not respond well to collision detection but since this is only a shard and not a gem, this wouldn't prevent you from reaching a 100% game rating. While the game has a wide variety of beautiful and colorful environments and varied levels with well-animated characters, it doesn't make use of the full potential of the PS2 console.

As with similar titles on PS2, the game rather cartoon-ish appearance with relatively simple textures allow the features found on an emulator to easily improve the graphics of the game to a level that is more than acceptable even by today's standards. You can see the difference by comparing the game when played on the PCSX2 emulator compared when played on the original PS2. Since the game use its own engine for the dialogues between the characters and NPCs, there is no issue with pre-rendering videos and cutscenes that tend to look quite blurry due to the low native resolution of the PS2.


Sound & Music:
Generally, the music is quite light-hearted throughout the game and this is something to be expected for a Spyro game. At the exception of the main menu music that felt was a bit too carnival-ish for my taste, the in-game music was appropriate for the theme of the area where it is used. For example, the music is more muted in the Sunken Ruins so to give the impression to be in an underwater environment while the sound of water falling in the background really create the right atmosphere. I also found the music in cloudy domain to be particularly good by being a bit more serious and helping to create a more heroic theme.

Though, as you spend a significant amount of time in each level to look for gems and dragons eggs, there is a risk for the music going in loop in the background, to become repetitive after a while.