Spyro - Enter the Dragonfly

The loading screens are the thing people remember, and that is a grim legacy for a platformer. Drop into a world here and you wait, sometimes for the better part of a minute, for a hub that runs at a framerate the PS2 should have handled without complaining. It is the clearest evidence of a game shipped before it was ready, pushed out for the 2002 holiday window after Insomniac had moved on to Ratchet & Clank and the dragon changed hands.

What the new team built on top of the old formula was genuinely reasonable on paper. Spyro gains elemental breaths beyond fire: ice to freeze enemies solid, electricity, and a bubble breath used to catch the scattered dragonflies that give the game its name. Swapping between them at a moment's notice turns some encounters into small puzzles, and collecting gems and freeing dragonflies retains the gentle compulsion that made the PS1 trilogy work. The charge, the glide, the hover at the end of a glide — all of it is still here and still feels correct in the hands.

The problem is everything around that core. Camera control fights you in tight spaces, collision is unreliable enough that falls feel arbitrary, and there are fewer worlds than any previous Spyro, padded out by backtracking rather than new ideas. Slowdown arrives in open areas where nothing especially demanding is happening. Several minigames feel like placeholders that nobody got back to. You can see the outline of a full game in the seams.

There is a case for it anyway, mostly for people who grew up on the series and want to see where the transition to 3D-era hardware went wrong. The art holds up better than the code: Dragon Realms has warmth, the lighting is soft, and Spyro himself animates with the cocky bounce he always had. Play it with patience and it is a short, mildly pleasant afternoon of collecting things.

Mostly it stands as a warning about what happens when a beloved character survives a studio change but nothing else does. The bones of a good Spyro game are in here, buried under a schedule that never gave them room to set.