Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon | The Adventure...Ends? - AntDude

today's episode is sponsored by Verve for more details and how to get yourself a 30-day ad free trial of Verve premium click on the link in the description below at this stage of spyro the dragon's life he has quickly become a household name in gaming the first two titles were massive successes and within a span of only two years spyro was right up there with crash bandicoot as a platformer name that should be taken seriously spyro 2 in particular took everything that the first game did and made it way better in my opinion more varied gameplay level layouts tighter controls what could a third game possibly bring to the table spyro 3 year of the Dragon thankfully this one doesn't have any sort of weird name changes across regions that's always nice but actually this game was released in the year 2000 the literal Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac you got to give insomniac credit where credit is due they saw an opportunity and damn well they seized it I made my opinion pretty clear in the last video that I think that spyro 2 is the best in the trilogy that's not really a universal opinion though a lot of people say spyro 3 is the best so enough with the jibber-jabber let's dive in and see why some people think that way back in the realm of dragons an evil plot unfolds as it is also the year of the Dragon in the game a celebration is being held where new dragon eggs are brought into the realm however a mysterious rabbit girl Bianca invades with an army of rhinox and steals all of the eggs not without accidentally waking everybody up at the end of course you were so so close and of course they give chase but Bianca makes her escape regardless and she makes her way back to her leader the sorceress to inform her of their success a plan is then devised to send Spyro and hunter through the hole into the quote forgotten realms to recover all of the eggs and naturally stop whatever sorceress is doing along the way it's a bad guy he's doing the bad things Spyros got to stop him that's three games down three games with basically the same plot it's not really a bad thing necessarily I've said it before and I'll say it again platformers are usually always about collecting stuff so just point me in the right direction and I'll go ahead and do that that new character Bianca is pretty cool though I'll give her that she has a bit of a character growth throughout the story and sorceress is a pretty likable bad guy so it all works for me and then we dive right into the first homeworld sunrise spring and from here yeah things are pretty standard some story progression does happen throughout the worlds now instead of just in-between them but other than that yeah you just you run around you collect stuff and then you jump into different levels and you do the same thing there that same idea goes for the controls to Spyro keeps all of the moves that he learned in Spyro 2 they don't pull any sort of Metroid shenanigans here though he does end up losing that sick double jump exploit I know that was never really intended to be in the game in the first place but man it will be missed while most of the game does remain the same that is certainly not a bad thing it is still just as satisfying as ever to collect as many gems as you can and going back to how the first game worked gems once again come out of enemies none of that weird soul removal nonsense and all of the different worlds that you travel to are populated by NPCs as well in need of assistance like before you got a wide group of cutie characters just clearly living in agony and told us one small purple dragon pops in to save the day you all know the drill by now hey wait a second those cool little cutscenes that used to pop in before and after levels also don't return any story that a level tries to tell is now just told through a text box and that's fine I guess but I'm a big advocate for charm in a platformer that doesn't mean a game needs to be more cute to be better but something like Spyro 2 those cutscenes made it seem like those characters existed before and after Spyro came through since that doesn't exist now the characters are just walls of text it's not really a game breaker by any means but it's certainly disappointing though now you can attack all the NPC's that kind of makes up for it the main collectible this time around comes in the form of of course of the dragon eggs and rather than just being the egg itself each one has a unique name that shows up just as they hatched right before your eyes oh that's adorable mo most of it most of the time so the way that these are handled are kind of similar to both Spyro one and two actually some of them like the crystallized Dragons of before are just there to pick up as soon as you can find them while many others see the return of the challenge and mission setup of game two doesn't matter what level you're in man there is no telling what kind of shenanigans Spyro will get himself into so here the son needs to be reignited with these cool sunglasses emojis you got to play hockey again similar to Spyro two but this time you play with live cats that you freeze in blocks of ice because why not insomniac games definitely wasn't going mental at this point and probably the biggest new edition skateboarding radical dude so yeah Spyro can skate now why not you get to do score challenges partaken racing torch unwanted lizards the typical stuff that you would expect it's weird that's for sure considering how popular Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was at the time why not still an idea from that okay you can also enter into cheat code that lets you skate on a squid as it's totally worth it in my opinion gotta say I do love how these games are set up but man I would have loved to be at the board meetings when they decided just what they were gonna have you do like there's this one where you have to defend a ballerina who's performing her set despite like an entire hockey team wanting to take the ice for themselves there's no real good or bad guy in the scenario is she taking up time when the hockey player should be playing to be fair the hockey players clearly doesn't want to beat her up with sticks I I don't I don't know what's going on here man oh yeah and this is a good one in the level desert ruins the character that you save is a Lehrer Croft parody called Tara Croft and she also just has the same animations as Bianca all right short dude whatever you say naturally the flight levels return as well now including the standard collecting challenge that we're all used to Hunter is hidden around each of them offering a challenge where you now get to play as him instead of just being assisted by him still providing gameplay styles a scene and nowhere else in the game so that's that's pretty cool and brand new to these levels races it's a pretty standard three lap race there are speed boosts that you can go through there are missiles that you can get to shoot the opponent right in front of you it's it's about as good of a race as you can expect from something like this [Music] okay that's right I forgot sound balancing wasn't the thing back in the 90s what were we talking about but the game's claim to fame or flame cuz he shoots fire haha is now Spyro sets an example only to be followed by Sonic Adventure in the future brand new friends so another returning face here is moneybags pulling an EA or Activision just putting stuff behind paywalls and in each home world he is guarding over a different locked animal you pay off the big dumb bear the newly freed friend then knocks him out every time it is very very satisfying and then you get to play as them there Sheila the kangaroo sergeant bird the penguin Bentley the Yeti and agent 9 the monkey all of their levels are basically structured the same but they of course play pretty differently Sheila can make really high jumps and attack with her feet sergeant bird can fly around and shoot projectiles Bentley can whack things and reflect projectiles with his club and also walk incredibly slowly he's he's the worst one of the group and lastly agent 9 has a laser gun that he can shoot and basically be like a blueprint for Ratchet and Clank in the near future some of these characters are also required in spiral levels to fully complete and you know what that means backtracking the same sort of challenge idea applies to these characters too you never know what these characters will be up to this is like their side scrolling okay short there's a whack-a-mole because I guess that makes sense for manly to do with this club you can attack these like cat witches okay oh hey look at that even spyro 3 can play doom there's this boxing minigame with Bentley that is just the bane of my existence there's no rhyme or reason to anything that you try to do here you just kind of keep mashing buttons and you hope for the best but apparently that minigame can actually be played with local multiplayer I mean I say apparently I read that online so it has to be true because I've never been able to convince anybody to play with me and that's not all there's even one more new character on top of all this sparks the friggin dragon fly your health meter has his own set of levels to top-down shooters where sparks I guess this whole time has been able to shoot projectiles from his mouth or something what had been real nice if he had told us about that sooner these levels are just okay easily my least favorite parts of the game they just kind of feel like a slog there's only four of them they all basically play the same way you go and get colored keys to open up colored doors oh hey there's doom once again and really a hundred percent completion aside these are still worth completing since they unlock one new ability for Spyro one of them gives you an additional hit point then you can collect gems from further away there's the ability to have sparks point you to nearby gems which you could always do in Spyro 2 but you couldn't in this one from the start thanks a lot insomniac honestly in my opinion the game has just too much going on for it having variety is awesome that's what makes any platformer thrive but to me this game sort of plays off as variety just for the sake of it there's been quite a bit of speculation as to why insomniac stopped making the Spyro games one of the more popular theory is that because Spyro has no hands and really can't pick anything up aside from his mouth they ran out of ideas of what they could do and considering how many gameplay options are in spyro 3 I can certainly believe that doesn't mean that what we got was bad once again most of its pretty good most of it specifically just most of it when it comes to the aesthetics and the soundtrack the game holds up just as well as Spyro 2 does since we got a bunch of new varied areas that we haven't seen before as well as getting a new handful of characters there's just a whole lot going on here visually sure the PlayStation 1 does show its age a couple times terrifyingly so but then sometimes we just get amazing gold right after what did I just watch we also finally get to see the for homeworld idea as opposed to the previous game only having three with a rumored fourth one and all of these are based on a time of day sunrise spring midday Gardens evening lake midnight mountain similar to the seasons idea of the last game this kind of just gave the developers an excuse to make really nice and varied home worlds and I'm a big fan and of course we get a great soundtrack once again - although not only thanks to stewart copeland but also with the help of a new face ryan beverage regardless of having a new composer on board things sound just as good and spyro a as before and also the music - fireworks factory exists and the game kind of deserves a ten out of ten for that alone actually this would be as good of a time as any to bring up the greatest hits version of the game so for those of you who don't remember normally whenever the greatest hits banner showed up and it's really really ugly green it was simply a reselling of the game that signifies that it sold really well however in this instance it was practically a vintage update patch while it did fix a few glitches here's the kicker you see the original version of the game that I have repeats music tracks in levels where it really shouldn't play as the soundtrack wasn't really completed at the time of release the most notable example all of the speedway's play the same exact track in the original that bump on pineapple banana it's it's all four levels however in the greatest hits version each one has a unique music track also this one cutscene just straight up doesn't play in the original game period you can only watch it via cheat code' ultimately it's not really a big deal though Sony release to the original version on the PlayStation Store as opposed to this one confusing move there it's really just a unique part of Spyro and PlayStation history so by completing levels one of the NPC's will follow you back into the home world to assist in building a flight vehicle to transport you over to the next world your new animal friends even assist you in the boss battles is actually a really neat touch in my opinion all the people you save pitch in together and help you back out that's cool and of course not everything is hunky-dory all the time in between every world is a big bad boss to tackle now what's really interesting is that we finally have some mid-level bosses as well none of which are really all that threatening but they fit the bill for being a mid-level boss it isn't until you get to the big bosses that you fight some really creepy looking things these are honestly freakier than anything that spyro has seen so far scorch in particular genuinely kind of scared me when I was a kid look at this thing they actually followed the wish that I had back when I was making the Spyro 1 video the bosses are technically enemies and other critters that have been beefed up due to the sorceress as magic kind of similar to Yoshi's Island and here it really works out since the bosses make sense in the context of the game's universe and it makes the sorceress seem more powerful and threatening cuz man she can just do that on a whim but luckily you are clearly not alone in this adventure on top of everyone else that you're friends with this time around even Bianca has a change of heart slowly going against these sorceress as orders seeing that what she was doing was purely aiming for power above all else seems weird she would follow her plan in the first place but hey probably sounded like a good idea at the time I don't know hell at one point in the game they kidnap hunter and then she gets a thing for hunter and helps him escape ok sure you know I didn't think a game like Spyro would get a romantic subplot but why not they look great for each other watch out Bianca he's an idiot eventually Spyro makes his way to the sorceress herself and so in in the original version of the game the music that plays is the theme of sunrise spring what a way to ruin the atmosphere also the fight is incredibly easy and simplistic you jump on these vehicles that drop down from the sky you shooter a bunch and that's it the cheery music definitely doesn't help but at this point rip tell can't for sure claim that he is the most threatening villain of the trilogy the sorceress then falls into a pool of lava and quotes burns to death spoilers not dead and then in another throwback to Spyro 1 Spyro gets interviewed about his victory I like that a whole lot actually Oh Laura hey baby girl where you been all I'm in I miss you so much and they T they tease a bit of romance between her and Spyro I know I was just crapping on Bianca and Hunter that's just because hunters an idiot I like him he's just really stupid this I I am totally down with this we get a bit of a good glimpse at what everyone has been up to since the adventure ended the credits roll once again being exactly the same as the first two games rounding off the trilogy perfectly and then you get to burn the crap out of moneybags oh hell yeah you greedy arsine years of annoyance two games worth of penny-pinching this is what you get burn burn it's a good that's a good reward the final reward then becomes accessible and it is the super bonus round in yet Oh No a throwback to Spyro one there is a lot of those here this level sort of plays like nasties loot you just run around and collect a bunch of gems defeating a bunch of thieves along the way you open up a lot of doors that have these gem limits to keep progressing and you even take on a few extra challenges awesome idea but oh god the skating challenge is the worst you got to get in first place in this race right and if you mess up just once you may as well just restart on the spot every jump you take you got to make a bunch of spins you got a boost at all times basically making your hand a pretzel for the entirety of the race it doesn't matter how many times I practice this it is always so so painful it sucks and then at the end you get to take on the sorceress one last time there's no cutscene leading to it or whatever I mean we saw that she survived the lava but she's just here now okay and now it's a UFO battle but it's it's a fight that's even easier than the last time okay yeah that's it that's it it's really quick man that's probably the weakest finale of the trilogy to be honest you do get a dragon egg with two dragons in it so that's pretty cute at least the Elder Dragons then get to finally enjoy the presence of all of the baby dragons capping off and otherwise fantastic trilogy the story would directly continue on but III don't really I don't really want to talk about that again there's a new roundup of skill points to go for rewarding you once again with a new set of cute little images the same group of cheat codes are possible to pull off in the pause menu at all times another crash bandicoot demo is here this time being crash bash and yeah I think I think that finally covers it Spyro Year of the Dragon certainly has a lot going for it I mean there's a ton of variety like there's skateboarding five extra playable characters there's more bosses than the last game but to me I feel like it just tried to do too much sure Spyro 2 had a lot of variety too but it never felt like the developers were stretching themselves too thin here oh yeah oh yeah they definitely were here it helps that the characters that they created are super charming and certainly not bad by any means but this is the reason that I still prefer spyro 2 over spyro 3 and while the Spyro games would continue on unfortunately insomniac would no longer be involved despite them having created Spyro in the first place Universal Studios are actually the ones who owned the rights insomniac games would go on to work directly with Sony to make Ratchet and Clank while Spyro uh by going in-depth thoroughly with the trilogy I hope this explains what made these games special and show you why the later mainline games just all missed the mark these originals had such a great blending of gameplay mechanics colorful landscapes variety up the wazoo really fun soundtracks they were just overall great packages and whatever the game set out to do it did it really well thankfully this mentality would go on to the Ratchet and Clank franchise but maybe I'll save that for another day you know it did feel really good to talk about this trilogy again I may do this in the future redoing some old games that I've talked about I feel like I do a much better job now so I hope you guys hope you guys think the same way and now that I've talked about the originals all we got to do is wait for the reignited trilogy and it's coming soon all you gotta do is wait a few more weeks until September 21st oh ok that's that's a while away guess I'll watch some Verve instead for those you who are not aware by now Verve is a media hub built around culminating media channels of all different types to appeal to fans of video film anime and more and it is available on multiple devices so you got many choices by clicking the link down below or going to vervet cove slash and dude you will get an ad free trial of Verve premium for 30 days and on top of that you will be able to watch your favorite shows without an internet connection and new to the platform and I'm sure if you liked the video you may be a 90's kid therefore you're gonna love your favorite Nickelodeon shows are now there as well you got dog cat dog angry beavers rocket power Rocko's Modern Life oh and there's a whole lot more how how awesome is that I've said it before and I will say it again of the reason why I keep plugging verve is because for one they allow me to do so but also because I genuinely really like this service and use it all the time back in the day I used to go back and forth between 90s cartoons and games like Spyro all the time so now if you use the link below or go to verb go slash and dude you can do the same and that's a pretty cool deal in my book [Music]

Channel: AntDude

Views: 450,998

Keywords: AntDude, Dude Reviews, Review (Media Genre), Video Review, Spyro the Dragon, Spyro 2 Ripto's Rage, Spyro 3 Year of the Dragon, Spyro Enter the Dragonfly, Spyro A Hero's Tail, Legend of Spyro, Playstation, PS4, Insomniac Games, Naughty Dog, Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy, Bad Spyro Games, Toys For Bob, Spyro Reignited Trilogy

Id: VoVAT2l-6TM

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018