Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly is BAD

I like Spyro Spyro is fun I have many fond memories playing the sparrow Trilogy on PS1 back in the day it was always fun to run around and explore some interesting vibrant levels collect some gems find some dragon eggs and even take some time to have a race or play some ice hockey it was even more fun getting to recently revisit those fond memories with the Spyro reigniter Trilogy in 2018 was that four years ago anyway the point is the games in the original Spyro Trilogy are collect-a-thon masterpieces and they're always a joy to play but you know sometimes the familiar can get stale and the magic wears off the more time you spend with it which leaves you craving something new it happens with jobs it happens with marriages and it happens with video games you end up wanting something you've never seen or experienced before in your life up until recently the first three Spyro games in their remakes were the only ones I'd ever played but I was aware that there were plenty of other Spyro games that followed them so I thought why not give them a try enter Spyro enter the dragonfly the only thing I knew about this game going into it was that it was pretty much Spyro for that's it that's the only thing I knew and I was excited I was looking forward to trying out what was for me at least a new Spyro game the only thing I was hoping for was that enter the dragonfly was just as fun as the original trilogy and was it no not even close Spyro into the dragonfly is an absolute trash fire this game takes underdeveloped mechanics half-baked ideas and performance issues and combines them into a steaming hot pile of dragonfly I have a lot to say about this game so let's just get stuck into it ah the beginning of the game seeing this opening cutscene takes me back to an innocent time before this game ruined my life forever oh how naive I was back then I had no idea what I was in for I went into this game with a positive and optimistic mindset and I was genuinely excited to play it but even within that frame of mind the first thing I noticed was that it looked terrible particularly the character models Spyro and Sparks look okay I guess but that's about it the rest looks crap Hunter looks like the love child of Alex the lion and May mcchees and ripto is just a pulsing blob of red Play-Doh I would comment on Bianca but you never see her after the opening cutscene anyway so it doesn't even matter after the opening cut scene makes a half-assed attempt at setting up the plot of the game you get to start running around meaning you will very quickly notice that the environments in the game also look crap and before you say something like come on mate the game came out in 2002 cut it some slack I just want to mention that Ratchet and Clank and Sly Cooper both also came out in 2002 and they look great so this game has no excuse anyway the plot of enter the dragonfly boils down to ripto stealing the dragonflies away from the dragons because dragons I guess and the whole aim of the game is to travel across the dragon lands to rescue the dragonflies not really an interesting plot but it's better than nothing you don't play Spyro for the plot anyway you play it for collecting as soon as you gain control of Spyro you get to start running around collecting gems and finding those dragonflies or at least you would if you weren't bombarded with tutorials every 10 seconds seriously this game has a tutorial for everything from using your bubble breath to picking up gems to gliding to Jumping to walking it's Relentless I'm not even exaggerating when I say that Sparks probably has the most dialogue in this game out of any character purely from his constant tutorials Spyro is a game designed for children it's not that complicated some things are self-explanatory you don't have to make a whole song and dance about how to walk and talk it's not that difficult if I have to hear Sparks go again just for him to teach me to wipe my ass I'm I'm gonna kill someone I'm actually just gonna end someone's life I mentioned something called Bubble breath just then bubble breath is one of the elemental breath Powers you can unlock in this game along with electric breath ice breath and of course Spyro's signature flame breath the elemental breaths are the main gimmick of enter the dragonfly and they're also one of the half-baked ideas I mentioned earlier they sound cool conceptually and when I was first introduced to them in game I thought to myself oh I like that that's neat I'm looking forward to see what they do with this Unfortunately they don't do anything with them nothing interesting at least the flame breath works exactly the same as it does in the first three games so nothing exciting there the bubble breath only has one function which is to catch loose dragonflies but the tragic thing about that is it can't even do that very well catching dragonflies with bubble breath is extremely inconsistent and will only work if you get really close to the dragonfly which makes catching dragonflies that run away very very irritating it feels like trying to pick up sand with a fishing net or trying to kidnap a child without using your arms why can't we just walk over to the dragonfly and collect it like every other game electric breath is pretty much exactly the same as flame breath but it can be used to power up certain machines and Ice breath is also the same as flame breath only it can freeze certain enemies and objects this is what I mean by a half-baked idea the idea of the elemental breaths is actually really sick and it has a lot of potential but the execution of the idea is just lame so much so that it doesn't really add anything of value to the game throughout the whole game I can only remember three instances where the elemental breaths were required one time was in the level cloud 9 where you needed to power the generators with electric breath to get The Hourglass working again another was opening the two gates in the hub world that required electric breath and Ice breath respectively and of course you need bubble breath to collect dragonflies for the entire rest of the game the elemental breaths may as well not be there at all because they add literally nothing else and it's a shame because there's so much they could have done with it instead of making every breath a short but wide ranged attack with varying effects why not Shake It Up what if the electric breath was a long but narrow ranged lightning bolt that could hit things from a long distance almost like a sniper rifle in Spyro's mouth what if you could blow giant bubbles with bubble breath and then freeze them with ice breath to create mid-air platforms what if he had some sort of wind breath that could create an updraft to help Spyro reach higher elevations or an earth breath that could create ground for Spyro to walk on to help him cross an enormous lake of lava or something or how about doing anything even remotely interesting with this concept the novelty of getting Spyro to burp in different colors wore off pretty quickly I think it's the missed potential that makes this gimmick so disappointing it could have been something really cool and interesting but it's just nothing it's funny that I use the word nothing just then because the levels in this game are full of it in fact I'd say they're absolutely overflowing with nothing I've never seen so much nothing in my life enter the dragonfly has a total of eight levels nine including the Hub world and they all suffer from the exact same problems every level in this game is too big and that's a major issue it may not sound like it but I'm telling you size matters if it's too small you're going to be disappointed and think to yourself really is that it but if it's too big even though that might seem like a good thing it's often overwhelming and I can only fit so much in my mouth wait what was I talking about again oh right the levels all the levels and enter the dragonfly are structured like so they're a bunch of large flat open planes with gems and enemies spread out very far apart leading to an overabundance of empty space connecting those large flat open planes are long wide and usually empty hallways often containing nothing more than a handful of gems that are again very spread out why is this a problem well I'll tell you Spyro is a collect-a-thon the whole point of the game is to go around collecting everything gems dragonflies absolutely everything having those Collectibles spread out so far makes them a nuisance to pick up it's unbelievably tedious having to scour every corner of those open planes and zigzag through those enormous hallways just to collect everything it's ridiculous the way the game is designed is so damn annoying it discourages you from actually playing the game in the way you're meant to the appeal of Spyro games is to collect and enter the dragonfly collecting sucks balls does no one else see how stupid that is even if you don't design the levels in a way that utilizes the new breaths you could at least design the levels in a way that makes the main appeal of the game enjoyable I realized how big of a problem this was by the second level crop circle country and I was already starting to get fed up with it but I didn't kill myself I just kept on going I wanted to see what else this game had to offer that's my friends was a mistake suicide is never the answer but by continuing to play this pissing game I ended up in hell anyway every level and enter the dragonfly also has some side challenges you can do to get some extra dragonflies and most of them involve the use of a shitty vehicle when I think of terrible vehicles in video games my mind instantly jumps to Crash Bandicoot the Wrath of Cortex a game that literally has more vehicle gameplay than Crash Bandicoot gameplay in Wrath of Cortex the vehicles are in enter the dragonfly the vehicles are worse I'm never going to complain about Wrath of Cortex ever again especially not after the fuckness I experienced in enter the dragonfly this game has tanks and turrets and planes and spaceships and even manta rays and they are all terrible every vehicle challenge is either boring tedious or both and none of them are even remotely fun to use and to make things worse there's so many of them there's at least one in every level and most of them you have to play twice for an extra dragonfly and combine them with the slide challenges memory games slow as platforming challenges and Speedways these boring ass side challenges make up at least half of the game and this is what I don't understand why would you waste all that time and effort putting together shitty little vehicle mini games and filling the game with them when you could instead spend that time and spend that effort fleshing out the elemental breaths a bit more or fixing up the level structure or trying to salvage This Disaster of a game I'm going to use an analogy to explain how stupid this decision was any person who has anything that even slightly resembles a brain would see a clogged toilet and go I should probably unclog that toilet the developers have entered the dragonfly did not do that instead they looked at the clogged toilet and set fire to it that's not fixing the problem that's just adding more problems it's a shame because conceptually some of the levels are really cool thematically at least dragonfly Dojo is a cool idea giving some significance to the dragonflies and how important they are as Dragon companions that's pretty cool thieves Den is also really sick giving the thieves from the first game some background and having treasure that's alive and tries to run away is a neat concept too so it really is unfortunate that they just aren't fun to play because of the way the levels are built I think that's a common theme throughout the entire game it has the potential to be decent the ideas are there but that's all they are ideas ideas that weren't fully developed into something that could make the game fun someone on the development team came up with these Wicked ideas and then went yep that'll do I'm gonna take the rest of the year off and that was it I mean why else would every Concept in the game feel so shallow and incomplete after all this complaining I've done about how disappointing this game was with its half-baked ideas and painfully tedious level design you'd hope that at the very least playing the game is a smooth experience and I'd like to tell you that the game is capable of functioning without any issues but that would be a lie this game can barely hold itself together enter the dragonfly is like a house of cards if anything is even slightly out of place the whole thing comes crashing down and crash it did on multiple occasions it crashed twice when I tried to leave a level once in Monkey Monastery and again in Jurassic jungle it crashed once when trying to load one of the three cutscenes in the game it also crashed when I tried to enter a level through the atlas to pick up some more dragonflies I'd like to mention that I beat this game in roughly 5 hours and across those five hours the game crashed four times so about once every hour and 15 minutes that is atrocious never in my life have I seen a game itself that frequently even babies have that under control more than enter the dragonfly does that's also not counting the times I had to manually restart the game because it's soft locked this happened twice once in Jurassic jungle when Spyro was trying to talk to a mouse scientist but was having a lot of trouble walking up to him but the big one happened in Monkey Monastery when I say the game broke here the game broke here there was a moment where I flamed a firework in the level that activated a cutscene but during the cutscene Spyro fell off a cliff and died for some reason when Spyro respawned the game was still trying to play the cutscene the camera was locked in place but I could still move Spiro around and play the game I could pick up gems and defeat enemies but the camera wouldn't move and I couldn't pause the game because it was in cutscene mode after about a minute Spyro froze in place but I was still able to play the game I could tell by the control of vibrations and sound effects the level then started to Disappear Completely it was one of the biggest cluster I've ever experienced in a game and I've played Sonic 06 so I've experienced my fair share of clusterfunks I thought it was bad enough that at times the environment would just randomly disappear for a moment so you could imagine how stunned I was when I saw this but that's not all there were times where there weren't any major glitches fingers just decided not to work for example the slide in Honey Marsh it was a simple enough objective reached the bottom of the slide before the beat easy no problem at all I got to the bottom of the slide long before the beat did so naturally I was expecting a dragonfly but the Hokey hillbilly Straw Hat alligator would not talk to me no matter what I did I'd run around at the bottom of the honey slide trying to get his dialogue to activate until the bee finished the slide 30 seconds later at which point that crocodile bastard told me I lost the race what in tar nation is that and and the frame rate my God I usually don't care about frame rates 30 or 60 not fast as long as it doesn't interfere with my gameplay experience I don't give a damn what the frame rate is but here it is offensively bad end of the dragonfly's frame rate is consistently inconsistent and by that I mean that the game will be running somewhat smoothly for a few seconds then you turn a corner and it tanks it's like the moment something in the game happens it freaks out and can't handle it anymore and it gets really bad in certain minigames like the tank mini games although to be honest it could just be that I was so sick of looking at the game My Brain couldn't take it anymore and my eyes started to lag in real life so far I've done nothing but about this game I think all that bitching is Justified and I stand by everything I said but I don't want to spend this entire video mercilessly all over this game there's already too much negativity in the world so let's look on the bright side for a bit and talk about some things I actually like about this game and so the dragonfly is actually pretty funny not on purpose of course but it did make me laugh on several occasions there were obviously moments of unhinged hysterical laughter that I used as a coping mechanism to get through the pain of playing the game but funny things did happen throughout the game things like voice lines being randomly cut off or playing when they're not supposed to although I may be practicing compassion money still has my soul thanks Spyro these gems are music to my ears and will do wonders as inspiration for my poetry some of the dragonflies have ridiculous names like ice boy duckweed and Tashi station that made me chuckle I can just imagine some guy introducing his kids these are my children Luke Sally Tashi station it's so ridiculous even some of the animations made me laugh like the pathetic explosion effect when you let the cows out of the barn in crop circle country that's a positive the game was unintentionally very funny and to be honest there was a silver lining to suffering through this game experiencing everything this game got wrong has given me a much greater appreciation of the first three Spyro games before I enter the dragonfly I would have whined and complained about things like vehicles and other playable characters clocking up Spyro free but now that I've played this crap I can play Spyro 3 and enjoy myself a lot more because hey at least it's not enter the dragonfly and hey I have to admit I'm at least glad that it feels like Spyro it does play like a Spyro game and gives off a similar vibe to the original trilogy albeit a bootleg version of it Spyro definitely controls like Spyro and I didn't have any issues with that so I have to tip my hat and acknowledge that they did pretty well there it's just everything outside of Spyro's body that I have a problem with so to sum it all up Spyro entered the dragonfly is bad really bad there's nothing that entered the dragonfly does that the original trilogy doesn't do better unless you count being a video game in which case enter the dragonfly blows the Original Trilogy out of water poor level structure unfinished Concepts and the inability to properly function for more than an hour at a time all conglomerate into a horrific dumpster fire of a game that I wouldn't even wish upon my worst enemy the only reason I can think of for why anyone would want to play this game is if you're a hardcore Spyro fan but even then I think you'd struggle the game finishes off with this quote at the end of the credits your work is you don't let you down a very bold move by the developers to start preaching their philosophies of hard work and determination considering the state of this game Spyro entered the dragonfly is an absolute show and I can't wait to never ever play it again [Music]

Channel: Torran2Glitchy

Views: 4,076

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Id: XxMU3i1f6A4

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022