Spyro the Reignited Trilogy

0:16 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Other Castle. The Other Castle, I'm Andrea. And my name is Tom. And we are a video game podcaster. We talk about the plot, lore, and more behind all the games. And that means that we're gonna cover production, creation, and then eventually the actual plot of the game we're talking about. Yes, thank you so much for joining us. If this is your first time joining us, you can check out other episodes that we have. We have our website, theothercastlepodcast.com. That's theothercastlepodcast.com. And if you've been listening to us for a while and you love us, you can join us over on Patreon where we have exclusive episodes to the Patreon that we drop every month. We've got a newsletter. It's just $2 a month. Come over and join us there. And when you do, you can also join our Discord.

0:58 Hell yeah. I like to play Pokemon Go with people on our Discord. We drop memes and you can fight with me. That's fine. That's completely valid. But we're not talking about fighting with me today. Today, we are covering the original Spyro Trilogy. Spyro Trilogy. So I missed this one growing up. Really? I did, yeah. I felt like you were just on it from day one. I was the right age for it and everything, but I don't know. Something about the dragons, which is funny, because you don't like anything with dragons. I assume if there's a dragon, this is Lord of the Rings. Right. So we're watching Lord of the Rings right now. Except you love Spyro. I do like Spyro a lot, because I too was the right age for this.

1:39 The series started in 1998, which was like prime kid time. And I had a PlayStation One that was a hand-me-down, and I had the Spyro Trilogy, also part of that hand-me-down. And I played the shit out of these. And perhaps it's nostalgia goggles, because I didn't have a lot of games growing up. I didn't have access to a lot of games. So I played the shit out of these. Yeah, I was in my final fantasy age during this time. So I think Spyro was just probably looking a little too young for me. I fully understand that, because yeah, it's a tiny fucking dragon just flying around causing mayhem, which is great, but I totally get that you were more mature at the time. I was not, I was a child. So it was perfect.

2:20 Well, the commercials were really funny back then for Spyro. They were insane. But just to give you some context, Spyro is the second title out of one of my favorite studios to watch right now, Insomniac Games. Insomniac. Right, so Insomniac has done the recent and the upcoming Spider-Man games for PlayStation, and those are absolutely incredible. That's jumping ahead in the timeline. I just want to gush about how much I love the fucking Spider-Man games. Right, this is the same company that did that, though. Right, but we're going to take it back. Actually, we're going to take it back a lot. The year is 1977. Even, okay, we're starting over.

3:02 There's a young boy named Ted Price, and he is nine years old. He immediately becomes infatuated with the Atari 2600, and then, in his child mind, said someday he's going to make video games. 17 years later, in 1994, Ted Price goes on to be one of the founders of... Insomniac? Extreme Software. Using his writing degree from Princeton. It was the 90s. Everything was extreme. Right, like this was a really cool name in the 90s, I promise. It's not just like, you sound like a chip. Like, no, calm down. Price's mommy was at lunch with a friend, talking about, oh, my son is starting a video game company. I'm so excited.

3:43 And the friend she's with is like, oh, wow, my son's roommate at Princeton loves video game stuff. They should meet. They have one thing in common. I assume they'll be friends. Like, anybody that knows two gay people? Or, I'm pretty heavily tattooed, like, oh, my daughter is a tattoo. Like, cool, do I know her? I don't give a fuck. Don't do that. Don't ever be that guy. Right, so these two do meet, and they do become best friends, because sometimes that works out. And Ted Price gets into business with both Alex and Brian Hastings, two brothers who shared a passion for video games. Due to some copyright issues, reasonably, they were forced to change the name of their company and landed on Insomniac Games, because it had a better vibe.

4:29 Okay, and you know, they were college students. They probably suffered from it. Oh, yeah, and this was like a pre-energy drink era. So they were just like, ah, cocaine. Drinking that new coffee shit. That new coffee, that bean water. Right. Now, because it was the 90s, and these guys were just kind of figuring out their shit, you know, their first game was not quite a splash. You can't expect everyone to just come out the gate swinging. No, not everybody's gonna make their first game be a banger. Right. They released what they themselves have admitted is just a Doom clone. It's a first-person shooter called Disruptor. Now, Disruptor came out in November of 96, and while it wasn't, like, particularly groundbreaking, it did get good reviews.

5:14 Well, you know, so did System Shock 2. Just nobody played it. Right, but we all know what happened after. Right. It was solid in terms of gameplay, and Disruptor was really fun, but it was the debut title from a new studio. It just didn't get a lot of press. Ted Price did call it the best game that no one had heard of, which I love. Yeah, I never heard of that. While the team knew they could put out a solid product, they were sad that their project didn't get a lot of love. They had the option to make a sequel to Disruptor, but they were like, well, if we do that, would anyone give a shit? Right. No, no one would give a shit. No. So they went on to create a new IP that would be positioned to perform stronger, and they looked at what was making sense in gaming at that time.

5:56 So in the 90s, you were there, you know? Video games were predominantly focused on kids and family-friendly properties. Nintendo had this crazy chokehold from the early 90s, and this silliness of kid content was kind of everywhere. It was a very goofy time for pop culture. Right, gaming hadn't really matured yet. That's a perfect way of putting it. I was like, this shit's silly. Yeah, it was still the medium for children. Nobody was thinking of older gamers yet. Yeah, as the team looked at the scope of media, they made a tonal shift to create a game that would be enjoyed by the whole family and opened themselves up past their, like, pew-pew audience from Disruptor.

6:39 One of the development partners from Universal had a meeting with them and discussed creating a mascot, creating a character that people could recognize, rally behind, and that they could sell a whole bunch of toys for. With all these elements around them, the team landed on working on a story around a little dragon named Pete. Pete. Of all the names, it was just gonna be Pete. Like, that's too much of a ripoff of Pete's Dragon. I know that wasn't the name of the dragon, but that's what you think of. Yeah, you got there because he wasn't named Pete for long after they remembered that Pete's Dragon exists. Yeah, and also, how do you Google that? You don't. It's the 90s. Oh, shit. How do you web crawler that?

7:19 How do you ask Jeeves about that? So, they were like, oh, shit, right, Disney exists and has lawyers, so let's not attempt a Pete Dragon moment. So, let's go back to the drawing board. Look at this dragon. It was green. Let's make it purple. And then they were workshopping names, and someone pitched Pyro, which did feel a little aggressive, so someone in marketing, hell yeah, marketing teams, put an S on it, and Spyro was history. Now, to ensure that this game would stand out, the team actually built the code to allow for Spyro to glide, which wasn't something common in games at the time. And I'm not just talking about, like, creating some interesting capabilities for a baby dragon.

8:02 I'm talking refined flying and floating. That's true, because I think to, like, the Mario Brothers games, right? And from Mario Brothers 3 into Super Mario Brothers, they had flying, but once they went to 3D with Mario 64, they took out the flying. They were like, oh no, this shit hard. Yeah, that was the one thing they couldn't really do, so they went back to just the hopping and jumping kind of shit. Yeah. So this was like one of the first games to really maneuver into flying in a 3D world. Yeah, and this is also the team that would eventually go on to do the swinging in Spider-Man. True. So the lineage is kind of clear to see the innovation from Insomniac from day one. Good for them. And you know, when I'm talking about the innovation, this team actually worked with a literal rocket scientist to create the game's glide mechanic.

8:49 Damn, that's really impressive. Yeah. Insomniac worked with Matt Whiting, a rocket science for literal ass NASA to help them program the flying controls of Spyro so Spyro could fly as smoothly as he could. It's a literal fucking rocket scientist. Holy shit. Was it the person that helped design maybe their simulator and shit? That makes sense. I'm not quite sure what his full scope of NASA was, but they were like, yeah, we brought in a rocket scientist. And how funny for someone to be like, oh, got a clock out at NASA and drive down to Insomniac to work on The Dragon Game. The Dragon Game. What a wild moonlight. People usually just door dash now, but back then you could just be like, fuck it, I'll go make a game.

9:32 I love how they were afraid of Disney suing them over the dragon situation, so they made it purple, and yet they do have a purple dragon at Disney too. They do? Yeah, Figment over in the Imagination Land or whatever. Oh, but people aren't like, dicks out for Harambe about that, right? Extraordinarily. Really? To like an uncomfortable degree. I'm not a big Disney adult person. I don't know the lore or the excitement of it from the crowd, but yeah, sure, okay. But Spyro's little. I think that one's a big dragon, right? No, actually, it's a pretty little dragon, to be real. They beefed it. They really did, but you know what? Disney didn't go after him for it, because Spyro breathes fire and figment breathes science.

10:17 Baby breathes science. I love that. I'm sure the rocket scientists appreciated that. So speaking of the talent that worked on this game, Spyro himself is voiced by Carlos Lazarichy, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, who at the time was Rocco on Rocco's Modern Life. Wait, really? This is the most 90s shit we could talk about. That is a great get, in my opinion. Now you may recognize his face from Reno 911, but he's also been in tons of vocal performance work. If you were alive in the 90s, he was the Taco Bell dog. Really? Yeah. Yo, Kiero Taco Bell. You did not say it the way he did, but he delivered the shit out of that line. Yeah, I would not do that properly. It wouldn't sound great coming out of you.

10:59 And he said that he based his Spyro vocal performance on being a kid at camp that everyone liked. That's really cute, because, yeah, I've heard the voicelines and stuff, and he is just very happy, because the other games that I think of from an era similar to that was like Gex, and everybody was always sarcastic. And this was kind of a return back to friendly. Right, just charisma for days. And he was actually the first person to audition for Spyro. And they were like, yeah, we're good. Get in the booth. Now, as we talk about how the game sounds, outside of the vocal performances, the music to the entire game, it was done by a pretty serious musician for some reason.

11:41 Really? The composer for the entire Spyro game was the two time Grammy Award winner, 2003 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Stuart Copeland, the drummer for The Police. What the fuck, really? Sting let him off the hook for a couple months to work on a Dragon video game. How did they get so many, oh, they had Universal, that's right. They put on the red light and he came running. Yeah, Universal brought in some fucking talent. Right, so this was a partnership with Universal, which is also Universal Studios, Universal Hollywood, that whole world, it's great. Now, Stuart Copeland would play the level of the game and then like vibe with it and compose music for it.

12:22 So he actually played the game and like that's pretty fucking cool. Yeah, he loved doing this and he's even praised the PlayStation team and their work for how much attention to music came through in their projects. It's Sony, they have a whole fucking music department. Right. I'm sure he's aware of that. Right, he's been in it. Yeah. Now his oldest son, Patrick, loved the Spyro games once he got to play them and he was so proud of his dad for doing the music, which is just the sweetest fucking thing. That's cool. I love when kids are proud of their parents. Right? I don't know why, but that always gets me where I'm like, you're so fucking cool, you broke through the dorky parent, like wall.

13:05 So because of his actual affinity for music and his son's love for the game, Stuart Copeland was like, I fucking love this, let's go off. He loves this music and so much that he's actually toured with it and done Spyro music in concert. That's so cool. So this wasn't just a work for hire kind of thing for him. He really like put some shit into it. Yeah, he gave a shit, which you gotta fucking love. Now, the game was marketed for people who want to unravel an adventure and rescue dragons. But in a snarky twist, the marketing campaign would show off some actual gameplay and then a live action sheep puppet talking shit about how much he hates Spyro.

13:51 There would be this fucking puppet sheep. And first of all, it's horrifying because it's way too big. It's just a little too big for what you would consider safe to be around for a sheep. And he runs around being like, boycott Spyro. He breathes fire. Fuck this guy. Like, don't support this. It's like a Jim Henson nightmare. Yeah, very much so. He's just declaring that he's an anti-Spyro activist. He tries to defer people from buying it by standing in front of game stores. And in the 90s, there was also an accompanying website, which is pretty early for its time, called Sheep Against Spyro. And we've talked about how the This Game Stinks campaign may have contributed to Earthbound not doing well.

14:35 Right. But this was actively campaigning against the game. He made signs that said Boycott Spyro. This little sheep. He doesn't have thumbs. How did he make them? It's amazing. You know, the 90s were wild. Let's just boil it down to that. It was a hit. In the end, this game was a fucking hit. So in May of 1998, at E3, Spyro was officially announced to the world. It kind of was bundled in other PlayStation fun, family-friendly genre games, like Crash Bandicoot, and actually kind of lined up with the release of the third Crash Bandicoot game, Crash Bandicoot Warped, also very good.

15:16 PlayStation worked hard to position themselves as a contemporary to the Nintendo 64, especially as we got into the holiday season. And for what it's worth, Crash and Spyro were often talked about in the same breath. It was like having a new show and an earlier time slot to a popular show, you know, that kind of lead-in. Spyro benefited a lot from Crash's success. That makes a lot of sense, because I do remember from that era, because one of the big things about PlayStation was that it didn't have a mascot. Right, not at the time. Right, where Sonic was for Sega, Mario was for Nintendo, and then there was just Sony. Yeah, and then Sony was like, we're gray, isn't that cool? For a long time, Crash Bandicoot was kind of considered the default Sony mascot.

16:00 Right, kind of just because there's no one else to fill that void. Which is why it makes it crazy that Microsoft now owns Crash Bandicoot in its entirety. Now at the time, Crash was a Naughty Dog project, which somewhat ironically, Sony has still adopted Naughty Dog mascots in using Joel and Ellie to represent the PlayStation. Yeah, so Naughty Dog kept that title of like, we are the mascots, but we're just going to change the character. Yeah, we're eventually going to upgrade here and there. You'll get Rashed and Clank eventually, calm down. Yeah, because you could say Nathan Drake too was the mascot for a long time. Absolutely, they were also the mascot for Subway for a second. So shit's crazy with Naughty Dog, but you got to love it. Now I also bring this up because Crash is very similar.

16:42 It's a platformer, there's friends involved. You can kind of be this silly protagonist. It does well with kids and adults alike, just a family-friendly crossover. It was totally kismet, and not the only time we'll see Crash and Spyro moving in tandem as franchises. Spyro was officially launched in North America on September 9, 1998, and the following month in Europe. The team said that sales initially were a little slow, and this was the era prior to pre-sales, so it's hard to have that day one pop like you do now. Right. But as we got closer to the holidays, sales did pick up. The pick up may also have been due to overall positive reviews of the game. It was heralded as this fun, great 3D platformer with wonderful graphics, and at the time the graphics were on par with any computer animated film, so it did feel groundbreaking and immersive at the time.

17:33 I mean, good for them. Within the first year of release, Spyro, which is just the name of the first one, it's just Spyro, sold one million copies. For a debut game? It's the second game from Insomniac, but it's the debut of the franchise. Yeah, it did pretty well. Again, this is the 90s. A million copies is a whole lot, because we didn't have as many gamers as we do now. That's pretty impressive. So with that all in mind, let's get our adventure started. There's dragons to save. This is Spyro. The game opens up with a little green frog monster. He's at the top of a mountain, planting an Insomniac Games flag.

18:13 This little fellow gets knocked off the mountain by Spyro, who flies in and lets him fall to his death. What a little scamp. I know, off the bat. Spyro flies a little bit and lands down at the menu screen. The player opens up their save file, and the game screen states, In the world of dragons. So this is fully voiced? No, that's just me. We cut to a film crew interviewing some dragons. We hear, off screen, someone say, Okay, rolling. And then there's a boom mic in frame. An elder dragon, much bigger than Spyro, begins to say that it's been peaceful here in the five or six worlds. He says there have been 1200 or 1400 treasure, and you know, things have been good.

18:58 The producer asks, What about this nasty Nork character? He says he heard that nasty Nork has found a magic spell to turn gems into warriors for his cause. Another large dragon comes into frame and explains that nasty Nork is a simple creature who has been contained in a remote world and is no threat to this world. And the dragon is also like, and by the way, he's so ugly. The scene cuts to nasty Nork, who is the same kind of that green frog monster we saw in the loading screen. Nasty Nork is furious at these claims, that he's not dangerous, and especially that he's ugly. Also, was this being broadcast live? The boom mic is in frame, or did they just not edit it?

19:42 I don't understand what kind of production this is. Also, I really love that it's just the opening of The Incredibles. You're right. Damn, Spyro. Like, I guess this, I guess this area just didn't understand pre-recorded content. Anyway, as this apparently happens live, Nasty Gnorc raises his stick, and far away, the dragons that were being interviewed get zapped and turned into statues. All of them, except for Spyro. Spyro sees this happening and goes, well, I've got some work to do. I don't know why Spyro wasn't turned into a statue, but that's not important. Seriously, that's not explained? Nope. Ever?

20:22 I think it's just because he's little. He was the tiniest little one? He's little, so they're like, fuck it, not worth it. Why is this suddenly Centipede? Like, our first fucking episode. Is this derivative? I can't tell. We have never had to reference, like, the story from Centipede for any other game, but this is almost exactly what happens. Like, nearly beat for beat. So the game begins and Spyro is in the land of dragons and runs directly into Nestor, a dragon statue. Spyro comes up to Nestor's statue, puts his foot on it, and Nestor is released from the statue. Nestor tasks Spyro finding dragons and releasing them throughout all the lands.

21:06 Spyro is like, yeah, cool, but I want to find Nasty Gnorc. Where is he? And Nestor is like, shut the fuck up. Go save the dragons. So now Spyro is free to roam about the world. It's lush, and there are those protesting sheep that aren't protesting. They're just chill right now. You can run into them. You can set them on fire. There are some small gnorcs patrolling lazily, but they're pretty easy to knock off if you flame them or your headbutt them. It's fun. This game is a 3D platformer that is kind of a collect-a-thon. So a lot of the fun in this is just unleashing all the dragons, capturing all the treasure, and, you know, killing everyone you can from nasty norks all the way down to the lowly norks below.

21:48 So it's for people that like to Platinum games? Yes, which is not me. But I had fun with the platforming. I don't care about Platinum. Right. Now let's talk about the norks. So they're green, they're bipedal, and they kind of look like frogs, but they sound like Gruff. They are everywhere, and they do not like Spyro. They look more frog-like in the original art, but in the remake that I played, which is the Reignited Trilogy, they do look a bit more like a big green monster. You know, a nork. I was going to ask what a nork was, but that explanation still doesn't really clear it up, but that's fine. You don't get a lot of history. Right. I'm trying to drop all the lore I can.

22:30 Now, Spyro is accompanied by a little dragonfly named Sparx with an X because it's cool. He follows Spyro around and is the indicator for how much health Spyro has. When he's full on health, the dragonfly is gold. When you're at death's door, he's completely gone. It's kind of a fun way to avoid the HUD, which I can't appreciate, but it can be annoying because to refill your health, you have to kill small creatures like sheep or whatever you can find, whatever that level is giving you. Oh my god. The dragonfly eats the spirit of whatever you killed and grows healthier. This is a pretty cool dragonfly. Yeah, so like you run up to a sheep, you set him on fire, he's dead.

23:11 His spirit comes out of his deceased corpse. The dragonfly eats it, and you feel better about yourself. This game's wild already. We haven't started. Does the dragonfly talk? Not in this one. No, oh, not in this one. He can get chatty later. He eventually does get his own spinoff game as well. Really? Like way down the line. I am not covering that one. We are only covering the original trilogy. Okay. So actually, one last beat on the dragons. So in the original version, the 90s version, the dragons are mostly the same and would just say, thank you for rescuing me, once Spyro releases them from their statue. This gets really repetitive, as you can imagine.

23:53 So in the Reignited Trilogy, they got different voices for each dragon. Oh, wow. So that was something that was unique to the new one. Yeah, for some reason, the old one was just like, we got it. We're gonna use that clip. We're good. Let's move on. Holy shit, that's pretty impressive. In the Reignited Trilogy, they can also give you some game tips, but that just ends up being repetitive and annoying, frankly. They'll be like, hey, you don't know how to swim. Don't go in the water. And Spyro's like, I know. I've died in the water. And he's like, yeah, don't do that. There is one dragon in the first game named Delbin that you rescue twice. And each time you rescue him, he has a different voice, but I guess that's just some oversight because fuck me.

24:36 Of course, the only name they repeat is Delbin. Obviously, they didn't use any other names aside from Delbin. Jesus. So Spyro is in Artisan Land, which is loosely Renaissance-themed. There's some painter dragons, a lot of green hills and sheep. So actually, I think that makes it Scotland. Okay, so kind of medieval. Yeah, or Scotland, I assume. Each land has some portals where you go to similarly themed levels where Spyro can find more dragons to release. There's some light platforming, some jump tricks, kind of little things to get you through the world. Each world typically has one level that's all about flight precision or is a time trial of some sort.

25:20 You know, just some fun things to shake up the monotony of gameplay, which is kind of nice, actually. Yeah, the Crash Bandicoot games had those. Yeah. Not flying, but they had like the time trials and shit. Right, I'm glad you bring that up because a lot of people were like, this is Crash Bandicoot with flying. And, you know, it's 3D, it's fun, it's silly, all that good stuff. You know, there's such a big reason why these two mascots had such a chokehold on the PlayStation players in the 90s. It makes sense. A lot of the same people were playing them. Right. Now, the goal of each land, of course, is to save all the dragons in that world. But as the dragon Nevin, Nevin, warns you, Nasty Nork has sent his henchmen to patrol the lands.

26:04 In Artisan Land, there is a boss named Toasty. Toasty is a scarecrow that you flame down little by little to reveal a dork on stilts. After you rescue ten dragons through the portals from Artisan Land, a balloonist, first of all, there's a balloonist, a balloonist will be so impressed with you, he will offer you a ride to the next land to save more dragons. Oh, I thought I was going to give you a $20 red balloon. Oh, no. He's not a balloonist like in Heavy Rain. He's a balloonist like in Red Dead Redemption 2. That kind of balloonist.

26:44 You know, wicker baskets and all, which, like, how do you justify using wicker next to fire in the sky? Core concept, I don't agree with it. You can't make me go on one of those. Yeah, the kind of people that are really into that, I don't think are thinking rationally all the time. It's weird to think that other people are really into balloon... balloon artistry? No, because that would be like balloon animals. This is just ballooning. Yeah. Hot air ballooning. Good for you, not for me. Yeah. Now, this balloonist will allow you to travel to the Peacekeepers world. In the animation of Spyro riding the balloon to the New World, he is completely alone, so I don't know if this balloonist is like a remote pilot or if he's like, you can just take my balloon.

27:32 That's not explained. Also, why does he need a balloon? He can fly. You've done the flying levels. We talked about it. It's more of a glide. It's probably pretty far. Maybe he needs to be able to take a nap. So I would at least be like, okay, so I guess the balloon can take him up high and then he jumps out and glides away, but no, the balloon's just going to take him. Yep. Lazy ass. He's little, Tom. Peacekeepers is like a desert, war-torn land with militant-sounding music versus the last land, the arson land, where it was peaceful and renaissance-y and cute. In this land, there are cacti and casual warlord norks everywhere.

28:15 What the fuck? They've got fucking cannons and shit. It's ridiculous. This world is overseen by Dr. Shemp. Now, I don't think he's a real doctor. He's actually a naked orange nork with metal armor. Oh, goodness, no. And when he turns to show you his butt, you fire at him. He's a very ineffective leader. Do you get full butt? You're not looking at, like, some cheeks clapping, okay? No one enjoys this. Now, when you're done with this world, a different balloonist pilot will give you a ride to Magic Crafter's world. Is there, like, a union of balloonists?

28:56 There must be. There absolutely must be, and we stand by unions here on this show. That's true. Now, this new balloonist will give you a ride to the Magic Crafter's world. Which is all about fun in the snow, and I don't know why it's called Magic Crafters if it's the snow. Well, there are magic gnorcs, but they also made it snowy, which feels like two things. I'm starting to feel like gnorcs are whatever they need them to be. Oh, yeah. You've unlocked that puzzle real quick. Okay, so they're like the heartless. Yeah, they're just everywhere. They're kind of fucking around. They've got different themes. It's fun. Take many different shapes. Yeah, now some of these gnorc baddies can raise and lower platforms and shoot magic at you, so this level does get a little more fun.

29:42 The warlord of this area is called Blowhard. Blowhard. Blowhard is guarded by a bunch of gnorcs who can send lightning bolts at you. And Blowhard himself is a magician powered by the wind who moves in tornadoes. I don't know what to expect from these names and from anything at this point. It's giving a little cuphead energy with that. Yeah. Of like, I'm just going to be a thing, and it's going to be weird, and we're going to have a good time, and you're like, yeah. Let's roll with it. All right. After annihilating Blowhard, Spyro heads up to the Beastmaker's world. Beastmaker's is all around jungle and electricity. How are those two things linked?

30:23 Yes. It's this super lush world with like spooky jungle ominous noises, but the Norks here can electrify the ground and zap Spyro with electricity. Well, good thing you got wings. Right. Some also have backpacks and like an electricity stick, like those... A cattle prod? Yeah. I was going to say something a little more crass than that, but yes, a cattle prod. Oh, my God. Some have also like a metal case that they sit in and shoot electric volts out. It's fully just electricity gremlin from Gremlins 2. You know, it doesn't make sense, and it doesn't have to. One of the dragons here also has a Cajun accent.

31:05 I don't know if that's a clue or a nod to the swamp shit, but I thought it was worth bringing up. Yeah, I love a Cajun accent, too. Yeah? Yeah, there's something really cool about a real Cajun accent. Yeah, good shit. It's also rare. It's true. It's dying out like gingers. Yeah. There are also loose warthogs going full Pumba out here just running at you. Like, it's a very loose, electricity-themed swamp. Anyway, the boss here is named Metalhead, and he sucks. Is he electricity? And like metal and swamp. Okay. It's weird. He's all the dove. Now, following Beastmakers is Dreamweavers, which is a flouncy, floating cloud city with some kind of medieval-inspired norc surrounds or kind of bringing it back to that artisan fucking Renaissance light theme.

31:55 Kind of ran out of character models. After you've beat all the guys out here, gotten your dragons, you come up against Jacques, the local baddie. So Jacques, did you hear his reputation before getting there? I mean, no. Okay. You're kind of just like, ah, you're the big one. I got you. After you take down Jacques and get all the dragons, the last Balloonus, you know, the guy at the bottom end of the Union, will take you to Nasty's World. Nasty's World is in an alley in the sky with rats and trash everywhere. It's fucking gross. Why do we have to go there just because there were dragons there?

32:36 There's like two dragons up here. And we also have to beat Nasty Norr because he's being a prick. Let's say the whole game has like, what, 30 dragons to find. More than that, but yeah, ballpark, whatever. And so you missed two. You got 28 dragons to help you beat Nasty Norr. Oh, they are of no help. You release them, and they just fuck off. They're not even going to help you in the final battle? Why'd you got to find them in the first fucking place? Oh, goodness. You're a little dragon. You're committed to this. You're on it. I imagine you're leveling up, too, though, right? There are no levels. There's no, like, power tree. There's no skill tree. There's no... You're just baseline.

33:18 Good to go. So you're the same character through the whole game. Yep. See, that is not common in modern games at all. There's no real, like, unlockables. Let's just go for it. So he doesn't run faster with upgrades. He's just the same character at the beginning that he is at the end. Yeah. You just don't see that anymore. I know. Okay, so when you're ready to take on Nasty Gnorc himself, he does these tricky laps, and you have to chase after him, it fucking sucks. And I remember doing this as a kid and was like, yeah, take a couple tries. Did this in my adult years. Fucking sucked. I was like, how did me without the fully formed brain do... I wouldn't say my brain is fully formed at the moment, but as a child, I knocked this shit out of the park.

34:03 Just not even thinking about it. So Nasty Gnorc himself is the physically biggest enemy we've seen in the game so far, and he's full of armor and he's super fucking fast. He is a huge pain in the ass to catch up to and is kind of... He's just a son of a bitch. It's a good final boss, huh? He also has very small legs, like he definitely skips leg day. And he'll make you chase him through lava, which is very bad for dragons, until you corner him down an alley. One flame, and he's down. Spyro says, you're toast, Gnorc! As he falls, which is very funny. And then the scene cuts to the artisan world, that first place where we started, and we see one of the sheep from the opening level.

34:48 The camera cuts up, and we see Spyro returning home. The camera crew from the beginning are still there, because they're committed, I guess. And they ask about nasty Gnorc, and Spyro says, he's toast. Did you not hear me the first time? Now, the sheep keep interrupting Spyro's interview, so he kills them, and then he says, the sky is the limit, which is some manic as fuck behavior. I feel like they just had extra voice lines. That they just like cut and paste and dropped into things? Yeah. Oh, entirely. I would not be surprised if that's the case. And that's Spyro 1. But a year later, in November of 1999, Spyro 2, Ripto's Rage, would be released.

35:33 In the very short year between Spyro 1 and Spyro 2, Spyro himself would actually be recast to legendary voice actor Tom Kenny. Hold up. Ariana Grande's boyfriend. I'm kidding. But if you get why that's funny, it's because Tom Kenny is known for voicing SpongeBob. Which is crazy because the last person was the voice of Rocko, right? Right. So they're just moving around from other kid mascots. But that's the same team that made SpongeBob. And the same team that's going after Spyro, clearly. Damn. This guy just took the lead role over from the same guy twice.

36:14 But Tom Kenny, I mean, he is a legendary, legendary voiceover actor. I've met him a couple times. He is very kind. He is wonderful. We've seen him in a restaurant once. We did. You're like, I love SpongeBob. And I was like, what the fuck do you watch SpongeBob? And you're like, he's a great performer. That is Tom Kenny. You put respect on the man. In the Reignited Trilogy remake, Spyro is only voiced by Tom Kenny. Oh, really? For all three games? Okay. Now, in the same marketing campaign strategy as Spyro 1, Spyro 2 was announced at E3 in 1999 and then released later that year. Like, this is a really tight turnaround, guys. That is really fast. Is it the same engine and everything?

36:55 Basically, yeah, they did some obvious quality of life upgrades, but essentially all the same founding blocks, most of the same team, different voice actor. I wonder, did they just keep working straight through after the game's release? I think they have to. Yeah, you have to, entirely. Because it's a dragon, and like Lord of the Rings, they just fill all of them at once, they're just powered through the full trilogy. Yeah. Oh my God, is this Lord of the Rings? Now, this is also the year we got Crash Team Racing, which would end up being the last Naughty Dog project in the Crash Bandicoot franchise. And that game went fucking hard as shit. I loved it. Yeah, that was like your Mario Kart. I was really good at it as a kid.

37:37 I'm not anymore. I don't know what happened. Yeah, because we've played that since it was like released as downloadable on PlayStation. Mm-hmm. Not good at it. Well, it's not a really great game by today's standards. That's fair. You can't put it up against like Mario Kart 8. Is that the one that's out right now? Yeah, it's the one that's out right now, yeah. I totally get it. I'm not good at that either. I don't think I'm good at racing games, guys. Mario Kart 8 is kind of like the GTA V of the Nintendo era because it has now gone on to two different systems. And they're going to try and squeeze another one if you're not looking, you know? Right. The next Switch is going to also have Mario Kart 8. Hell yeah. Anyway, this team, building on their learnings from the original Spyro, wanted to build on the world and story and add more characters to the narrative.

38:23 So, you know, it was really just Spyro and Sparx. You occasionally run into other dragons. There are fairies throughout all the worlds that act as your save points, because again, this was the 90s. Save points were a thing. There's no auto-save in this. Oh, there are so many save points to come to this season. Yeah, that's how games worked, Tom. No, I know, but the manual ones. Yeah, I get you there. But they were like, what if Spyro had friends, you know? Go for it. So, with a majority of the same team and a new voice for Spyro, this is Spyro 2 Ripto's Rage. We open on Spyro talking to Sparx in the Dragon Kingdom. It's raining and it's gray and it sucks, and Spyro is complaining about the rain.

39:08 They are, they're just miserable. You know how it is. In the game world, several years have passed since Nasty Nork. In the real world, it's been one year, but Dragon years are different. Spyro asks Sparx if he's up for a trip to the beach. They hadn't been to Dragon Shores since their days with Nasty Nork, but they're like, you know what? We need a break. Let's go to fucking Dragon Shores. Let's have a nice vacation. Let's get the fuck out of here. It's grown since the days of Nasty Nork. Yeah, Sparx is stoked, and together they run off to the portal for Dragon Shores to start their vacation. On the other end of the portal is a world called Avalar, which is in a region called Summer Forest.

39:50 Elora, the faun, Hunter, the cheetah, and a little bitty hedgehog professor are worried. They stand around a regular portal like the one Spyro is very familiar with. The professor is trying to get a dragon to come to their kingdom to free them of their tyranny under Ripto, who is clearly some sort of evil leader. Elora and Hunter are supportive, but they're a bit nervous. They haven't had a dragon in this land for a long time, so there's a lot riding on this. The professor is using green orbs to power the portal. Hunter is like, I don't think this is a good idea to bring a dragon over here, because it could make Ripto more angry.

40:32 Elora tells him to shut the fuck up. I'm sorry, these are like family-friendly kids games. This is just how I interpret things. Yeah, absolutely. We always add a lot more cursing to a lot of these games. The only one that was like accurate was South Park. Right. We toned that one down. Right. Hunter is afraid of fire-breathers, and he's afraid of sharp nails and all the dangerous bits of being a dragon. Elora is like, hey, dipshit, that's the point. We need a dangerous dragon to get rid of Ripto, who's ruining our lives. The portal starts to shine, and the professor is happy, and he's like, oh my god, I think it worked. I think I got a dragon. Suddenly, Spyro comes through the portal, and is like, what's up?

41:15 Where's the beach? Like he's fucking Snooki getting arrested in Jersey Shore. God, that's a very specific reference. It's just for me. Where's the beach? Spyro kind of grabs his bearings, and looks around and is like, this isn't a fucking beach. What are you looking at? Hunter looks at him and says, are you a dragon? Spyro goes, yeah, I'm a dragon. You got a problem with that, pussycat? Pussycat. You know, they're used to the beefy boy dragons of lore. They're like, Spyro's short as hell, and it's like, okay, it's short King Summer. Let him live. But shouldn't he kind of be a legend right now? This is a different world. Oh, that's right. They don't have Twitter or X or whatever the fuck.

41:57 They don't know what's going on. And then a tiny red scaly creature riding a dinosaur comes in with another dinosaur at his side. He screams at this group for keeping something from him, and then he puts his eyes on Spyro. He is enraged that the professor brought a dragon to Avalar, and he raises his scepter to cast a spell. As he does, a fairy flies in and takes his scepter and tries to fly away. But as she does, Crush, one of the big dinosaurs, eats the scepter. Oh, shit. This is where we meet Ripto. Ripto looks at this dragon who's named Crush and calls him a Dum Dum, and tells the other squad and Spyro that he'll deal with all of them later.

42:43 Ripto, Crush, and the second dragon all head off. I like how we can tell also which ones are our own words and which ones come directly from the game, because you would have never said Dum Dum. Unless I'm referring to a lollipop, yeah. Now, Spyro, who's been in this world for a minute, is like, who the fuck was that? And Elora explains that that was Ripto, and he's been causing drama since he got in about a week ago. Elora then runs off to tail Ripto to see what he's up to. Now, Spyro is stuck in this world and has to help this group of people he barely just met to get rid of Ripto, someone who has done nothing wrong to him except for be a little rude.

43:23 He's supposed to be on vacation right now. But the professor was able to intercept him in the portal and bring him to this world and not Dragon Shores. So Spyro is like, I'm kidnapped. Yeah. What's happening? So you got to fight your way home but also rescue people? Yeah, they're like, well, we'll let you go if you rescue us. And he's like, do you appreciate irony? I feel like that's the second Indiana Jones movie. Oh, shit. Now, Spyro goes off through some lands and discovers more and more that this land had no dragons for a really long time, and Ripto came out of fucking nowhere and took over all of Avalar. In the Capitol building, he's removed these local Avalar flags and replaced them with flags of his own face.

44:09 We actually see him do this, and as he does, a bear in a full suit gets kicked out of the castle forcibly. Ripto is a fascist. So Ripto is just coming in, Gestapo style, kicking in doors and just taking over. He is the Gestapo. That is a perfect, perfect thing. I mean, not for us, but for the analogy. Spyro sees the fairies that helped them earlier, and they serve as save points throughout the game, just like they did in the last one. They will also slowly tell you how to play the game, and honestly, they get really tedious. So you hit a save point, it automatically checks you in, and the fairy is like, did you know that you can fucking jump if you press this button?

44:51 And you're like, yeah, this is the second fucking game. And we're two hours in, of course I figure that out, and they're like, yeah, you're welcome. You can't skip them, it's just annoying. Oh, they don't even do it in the loading screen where they usually put all that repetitive bullshit. No, they throw it in the save points, of which there's a handful across each level, so every few minutes while you're going through a level, you have to stop. It stops the entire game, you have to look up, you get the text box of them being like, to double jump, press the double jump button, and you're like, fucking, I know. I've been playing this for two hours. I am very familiar with this. This is going to happen again this season. It's just some 90s shit, you know? So like off the bat, compared to the last game, when we look at the story, this is already way more compelling and interesting.

45:34 First one, collectathon, Norks are bad. This one, someone is fucking forcibly taken over an entire world. You are their last hope. They spent all their resources trying to get you here against your will, but whatever. And we have to save all these wonderful... All these people... We have to save the creatures from Ripto. You know who you are? 27-year-old Dr. Gordon Freeman. My boyfriend. That is exactly the plot of Half-Life 2. So Spyro picks up a crowbar. I'm kidding. He just does fire. But anyway, the stakes are crazy high. We have to stop a dictator from taking over a war-torn world.

46:17 Fun. Now, in this game, Spyro is not allergic to water, which is fucking amazing. He got over his allergy. That's great. Yeah. He can access power-ups. He can fly for an extended time. There are also some places around the world where if you go through them, you get boosters that are temporary, so you can run really fast for 10 seconds. You're able to climb up walls. Like, your capabilities and ability to explore things and unlock puzzles is much more dynamic. Okay, so this is a much more upgraded Spyro now. Yeah, which is great because also, again, this came out a year after the first one. The turnaround was so fucking tight, and they were still able to, one, create a better story and, two, create better gameplay.

46:58 That's a win. Win. Win. Echo. Echo. Echo. Now, Spyro is dropped into this world where small mice are being terrorized by lizards. Their treasure has been stolen, and they are being abused by local assholes. So Spyro fires up a bunch of lizards and gets down a bunch of treasure. Now, Spyro doesn't return the treasure, even though it's very clear that the treasure is being stolen by whoever asshole is running the town. But the town is like, whatever, you killed all the lizards. And when he does kill all the lizards, they give him a talisman. Spyro's like, that's fucking sick. What is this? And they're like, yeah, it's a talisman.

47:38 He goes, I don't know what that means. They go, you're welcome. Now, Spyro makes it to Alora again, who calls him a dork for asking if she's a goat. She's a fawn. This was a valid question. This bitch has hooves. Yeah. Spyro mentions that, hey, you know, those mouse people gave me a talisman. And she's like, are you fucking kidding me? That's amazing. And Spyro is like, I thought it was just like a souvenir. It was cute. I don't know what the fuck this means. And Allura says that there are 14 talismans in Avalar with magic, and if they collect enough of them, they can use that magic to defeat Ripto. So he's like, oh, shit, this is the collectible.

48:19 Got it. Got it, got it, got it. This is the collectible. Yeah. It is better. It's not perfect. Right. Then Hunter comes in like a dumbass, and Allura announces that Spyro will help them get all the talismans and defeat Ripto. Hunter and Ripto are confused at this new information. Hunter's like, why can't Spyro just run up and flame Ripto? I can go get the talismans. He's a fucking dragon. I feel like there's a better way to do this. Allura is like, you're literally not even wearing shoes right now. How can I trust you to go get talismans? Hunter looks down at his bare feet and is embarrassed. Fair point, though. She's like, hey, dipshit, you're useless.

49:00 And he's like, oh, man, I am. The self-awareness sets in. Yeah. Allura explains that the portals to other worlds, like the one that Dragon Shores where he was heading, don't work now because Ripto went in and broke everything. So Spyro is like, cool, I defeat Ripto, I get all these talismans, we go home. That's fucking great. Let me at him. So now your mission is to get all the talismans and get through all the worlds so Spyro can go home, which is fucking great. Now the portals to other worlds aren't all working because like we said, Ripto has taken over and fucked everything up, pulled the magic, hidden things, and magic is sparse in this world.

49:40 To unlock portals, Spyro has to bop around, unlock talismans, and get orbs. Now orbs are those little green balls that the professor used to turn on the one portal that Spyro got snatched out of. So we also have to grab these orbs while we're at it, because collect-a-thon, let's fucking go. Additionally, Ripto apparently stole all the treasure that's hidden throughout the world, so if you get the treasure, it's reclaiming it, but he doesn't really give it back, so if you steal from the person who stole, but you don't give it back, you're kind of a two-thirds Robin Hood. You almost got the point, but you didn't. Not to take it back to Indiana Jones, but that belongs in a museum. Yes.

50:23 Now, each small world level has locals that are being terrorized by something. All of this is Ripto's fault somehow. Ripto brings out the worst in people. He's like, what if we all just terrorize smaller beings? And everyone went, hell yeah, let's fucking do it. Now, there is some Polynesian-inspired islanders who are being terrorized by a big Easter Island tiki head-looking thing, for example. So it's all very thematic, but they're all very silly. So just to kind of recap where we're at right now, because I know there's a lot more going on in the first one. We met the Professor, who's a small little hopeful hedgehog, Elora, who's this focused leader. She just wants to get shit done. She's a fawn.

51:03 And Hunter, who's this dipshit, almost fuckboy energy. But there's one more character that is perhaps burdened into most brains of gamers who experience the Spyro titles. This game is the introduction of capitalism. What? Now, Spyro 2 Ripto's Rage introduced a big brown bear in a full suit and monocle who speaks with a Robin Leach accent. Champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Exactly. Very lifestyles of the rich and famous. If you're old enough to get that reference, and if you're not, you get it from the vibe. It's Cribs, which is still old. He's an older Britishman that's just goes, ah, I love luxury.

51:45 This bear's name is Moneybags, and we all fucking hate him. Okay, good. He is spread throughout the entire game and is literally just a paywall. You have to bypass to be able to swim, access portals, access areas. He's just the fucking worst, and I hate that this is happening. He's literally pay to play. Yeah. So it's not an EA situation, but you do have to give him gems that you find the world to unlock certain things. Okay, you're not doing real world currency. Right. Thank God. It was the 90s. Right. We couldn't figure that out. Not a modern game at all. There is one area early in the game where he's blocking a portal with a big wall. He tells Spyro he could take the wall down, but he forgot how to.

52:30 He then extorts Spyro for many, many, many gems and treasures. And shockingly, after Spyro is extorted, Moneybags remembers how to pull the wall down and let Spyro access this portal. It takes all your treasures. I fucking hate this guy, and he's the worst, and I'm glad he's the bear that Ripto kicked out of the fucking castle in the beginning. We hate him. We hate him. He fucking sucks. And it is rare to hear you say you hate a bear. I love bears, but this bear sucks. But that means it's a good performance, and Moneybags is played by Milton James, who was an incredible voice actor in games with over a hundred listed acting credits on IMDB. Hell yeah. Who did pass in 2018.

53:11 So thank you for your service. I hated this character because your performance was so good. Spyro bops through themed lands, releasing villagers from tyranny, like a freak of the week, hour-long sci-fi drama. And honestly, I'm just thinking of that Firefly episode where the villagers worship Jane, because as he does, Spyro gets orbs, and people are praising him and giving him presents for releasing them from their tyranny and shit. It's cute. There's one that I just want to talk about for a second, where it's a bunch of monks on a mountainside, and a yeti is terrorizing them. Oh, no. It's like a yeti, abominable snowman thing, crossover. They're basically, they're not interchangeable, but basically interchangeable.

53:54 Yeah, kind of the same thing. The yeti has a big roar and is like, and as he does, a building collapses on top of him. He kills himself by accident? Yeah, and Spyro doesn't even have to do anything. I was actually really excited to fight the yeti, but regardless, they give Spyro a talisman as a thank you for stopping him. Like, it's the fire dragon versus the ice being. Right. And they take that away from you? I know, I really wanted to do it. It's kind of hilarious. But within that area, there's also a side quest where you play hockey to earn an orb. Like, there's really fun ways that they made new gameplay elements and areas for you to explore and activate and earn your collectibles without just being like, jump to this platform, jump to this higher platform.

54:41 No, it really elevates the gameplay and it also, like, speaks to that Canadian audience they were looking for. Yeah, they finally locked them in. Now, these worlds are really full and feel lived in and are vastly different from each other, unlike the first game where they would have, like, a general theme, but, like, not as much life in them, you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. There are a few fewer worlds than in the previous game where Spyro 1 had about 34, Spyro 2 had about 29. Holy shit, though. That's still a lot for both. Yeah, but the lack in quantity is okay due to the rise in quality. You know, it's not a big differential, but they're so much better that this is fucking great.

55:22 Would you say that they take about the same amount of time to complete? I think they may take a little bit longer, but not much longer. The second one? Yeah, you're going to do between six to eight hours for each title. Ish, ish, don't come for me. Depends on your ability to platform. Right, right. And some of these I was just like, I'm just not going to fucking do this. But I'm not a hundo kind of person, so I'm like, I want to have some fun, leave me alone kind of person. I want to finish the game. Yeah, I want to see what happens in the story. All this to say that the levels overall, huge quality of life improvement, except for aquatic towers. Fuck aquatic towers. Aquatic towers is a horrible level where bad guys have, one, drained the ocean, and then two, they start taunting seahorses with glasses of water.

56:09 That's fucking maniacal. Oh my God, that's evil. See, when you said the aquatic towers, I was thinking rapture. Oh, I mean, kind of. But this is horrifying. Spyro has to go and release the valves and let the water back into the world, which is fine until you get to these like crazy robot sharks. And there are robot sharks that are like nearly impossible to bypass. They are huge. Their AI is way more attentive to you than any other fucking enemy. I threw the controller. It's a one hit kill because the sharks don't just bite you. They swallow you whole. It fucking sucks. I got eaten by a lot of sharks. Fuck aquatic towers.

56:50 And that's how you know it's a true 90s game. If it makes you throw the fucking controller. If I'm this angry about it. Yeah. Oh, that is the sign of a true 90s game. If it makes you so mad, you throw the controller. There's another water level where the sharks come back out, and money bags will like... If you pay money bags enough, he'll put you in a submarine vessel kind of thing, so you can just go buy them without hitting them. Just bypass it because they know it sucks. They know it sucks, so there's like, if you really fucking hate it, money bags will get you through. Now, Spyro gets all the talismans in the summer forest section of Avalar, and this unlocks a door that Ripto had put up. Because you have all the talismans, you have all the magic.

57:30 It's fucking great. Yeah. Elora is there by the door, and she's like, hey, go this way. Spyro goes through the door, down into a dungeon, which is Crush's dungeon. Ooh, Crush. Now, as I talk about, Crush is one of the dinosaurs that works for Ripto. So he's huge, he's big, he looks like a dragon without the wings. Big boy. I was gonna say, not a dragon, a dinosaur. Right. Now, as Spyro goes down into Crush's dungeon, Elora comes in and is like, hey, Spyro, I want to give you some lore. You know how we just do that as people. Here, let me just exposition dump on you.

58:11 Right. It's like a first date. A first date is just an exposition dump, right? That's true. Now, Ripto got there, like I mentioned, about a week ago. The Professor has been using his orbs to work on a super portal technology with Elora and Hunter, his two friends. The Professor did his portal checks and said, well, now all I need are the coordinates. Hunter hears this and snatches all the devices out of the Professor's hands and starts button mashing numbers in as the coordinates. Turns out, much like how people pick lottery numbers, Hunter punches in his birthday. Elora says, hey, dipshit, don't do that. Hunter then does that and then hits the button to make it go. So they were teaching like proper password creation in this video game.

58:55 Right. That's great. Some serious shit. Now, through the portal, a small red dipshit is flung into this world. This is Ripto. Ripto is Hunter's fault. This is hard confirmed that Hunter made this happen because he's a dumbass. His birthday is the coordinates to evil. The coordinates to evil. Yeah. Following Ripto are Crush and Gulp, who is the other dinosaur, and they land on top of Ripto. Ripto calls them useless buffoons as he crawls out from under his dinosaurs. He begins to yell at them and then sees the Professor, Elora, and Hunter in a fairy who's just now here. They've all entered the scene.

59:36 In shock, Hunter drops the device. Ripto asks where they are and then sniffs the air, realizing there are no dragons in this world. Ripto turns to Crush and tells them to go pack his bags. They're moving in. Ripto tells our group of friends to say hello to their new king. Elora tells the Professor to turn the portal off, but his glasses are shattered and he can't read the device to turn it off. Thinking quickly, Elora tells the fairy to take the orbs and scatter them throughout the worlds to hide them, because that was the power from the portals. Now Ripto can't bring more assholes over if all the powers gone, right? This shuts off the portal and Ripto starts freaking out and runs off.

1:00:19 Elora is like, Oh my god, this is so bad. Hunter, why didn't you chase him? You're a giant cheetah. Hunter has no excuse, but he's useless. Hunter is like, Well, Ripto doesn't like dragons. Can we get a dragon to do it? The Professor is like, Oh my god, yeah. Okay, no, that's a good idea. Let's find a place with dragons. And that's how they started working on getting a dragon to Avalar. Because of Hunter being a dumbass. Fucking dumbass Hunter. Anyway, back to present, Spyro lands in Crush's dungeon and has his first boss fight. It's fun. It's on par with Crash Bandicoot. We fucking love it. Now, the boss levels in the first one was a little bit more platforming than some arena play.

1:01:04 This is all arena play, which is very fun. Oh, good. After Crush is defeated and crushed under the rubble of the arena, thanks to Spyro kicking the shit out of him that fucking hard, Ripto comes out saying, No, Crush! He is angry at Spyro and tells him that Gulp will be more than enough for him. Spyro calls him short, and Ripto gets angry and tells Gulp to destroy Spyro. And Spyro is not tall. No, he's a short king. He is tiny. The dungeon begins to collapse, and Ripto is like, Ah, fuck it, Gulp, get me out of here. They escape, and Spyro calls him a wuss. Spyro's a little shit talker.

1:01:44 I love him. I know. He's like, fuck you. But like, as a kid, he's like, heck you. After this, we see the Capitol building remove the Ripto flags and replace them with the region's original flags. Mr. Moneybags returns to the Capitol building saying, he was bled dry by Ripto, and the only reason he was able to stay afloat was Spyro. Taking advantage of Spyro, this whole time is how he lived. Fuck this guy. Mr. Moneybags is on the balcony of the building talking about how much he hates Ripto, as Ripto and Gulp quietly show up behind him. They spook Mr. Moneybags, who takes the step backwards and falls off the balcony, landing on the hard concrete, stories below.

1:02:31 This should kill him, but he is capitalism, so he can't be destroyed. The Avalar flags roll up, and the Ripto flags come back down. Now, Spyro is in Autumn Plains, the new area of Avalar that Ripto is terrorizing after getting kicked out of the Summer Forest. These areas are all essentially the same, so like, Spyro goes through more worlds to get eight more talismans here. We're like, oh, hey, we won. No, you didn't, Ripto just moved fucking east. It's fine, fucker. It's a little bit like the same. Yeah, same but different. Right, but you're saying during all this stuff, though, like, you're getting different power-ups, you're doing different moves, meeting new bad guys and stuff too, though, right?

1:03:13 Not really, there's just some temporary power-ups. It's not like you unlock a lot world to world after you unlock being able to swim and being able to climb. So that part, there's still no skill tree. We're still not in skill tree territory. No, and we're not going to, so you better let go of that right now. I'm just hoping for more. It was the 90s. Now after getting these talismans and helping out the people of Autumn Plains, Spyro is ready to face off with Ripto again. He sneaks up on Ripto and Gulp in a dungeon. Ripto is talking to Gulp, this big green dinosaur thing. He tells Gulp that now they've taken over this world, he's earned a special reward. Ripto is holding out a fairy for Gulp to eat, which is horrifying, because we know they're sentient.

1:03:59 Spyro sneaks up and flames Ripto just as he goes to feed the fairy to Gulp. Ripto is mad that Spyro singed his cape in the middle of this, and tells Spyro to say goodbye, flame breath, and then tells Gulp it's lunchtime, and to eat Spyro. Eat Spyro? Just eat him. The fight on Gulp is genuinely really fun, because these boss battles respect the power creep and familiarity the player has with navigating the landscapes in a respectfully fun way. So Gulp will charge at Spyro. You gotta get out of the way. He shoots electricity off of his backpack while pterodactyls fly around overhead. Spyro flies around bouncing bombs and hits them back at Gulp, and avoids his tacks.

1:04:44 Shit, honestly, this is just so much fun. So it really lets you utilize your bag of tricks, but also in new ways that you haven't used them before. Yeah, it's a very small bag of tricks, but the mix of how you work with them is different, correct? It's so much fun. That's cool. After defeating Gulp, Gulp falls over, exhausted. Ripto watches, and as Gulp falls, Ripto falls out of the chair he was watching the fight in and starts screaming. Elora comes out of fucking nowhere and is like, shit, yeah, Spyro, you did it. Spyro's like, where the fuck did you come from? Why weren't you helping me? Right. Elora's like, oh, I was nearby, and honestly, now there's no sign of Ripto.

1:05:24 He's gone. You fucking did it. She's also like, since you've been bobbing around the worlds and untangling people's issues, everyone's getting along, and the worlds have never been better. You're bringing fucking world peace. Thanks. Yeah. Spyro's like, well, you kidnapped me, so I don't have a choice. Might as well make this place better for everybody. Behind her, some fairies come in holding a beach chair and a beach umbrella. She says, hey, I know you wanted to go on vacation. Sorry about the kidnapping. I appreciate you coming in and making our lives better, so we kind of wanted to do something for you. Spyro's like, wait, oh, this is great. He sits in his little beach chair with his beach umbrella over him.

1:06:07 He's like, oh, look at me go. That's great. Does he get a little cocktail with a little fucking umbrella in it, too? He does not drink alcohol because he's a dragon. He's like, honestly, this is really sweet. Do you want to like hang out and be a friend? She goes, no. She has to go to the winter tundra to check on the professor who's working on the portal to get you home. As she says this, Spyro gets in the chair immediately half asleep, like on the beach chair, like, cool, cool. I'm going to take a nap, then whatever. I don't give a shit. I just liberated an entire existence. Yeah, he is snoring before his head hits the back of the chair. Oh, he's a tired little dragon. Yeah. He wakes up about a minute later and is like, wait, where did she go?

1:06:51 I should follow her. He's tired, but he is also dumb. Yeah, you should never follow. Take the win, man. He's like, ah, she went to Winter Tundra, so I'm going to go to Winter Tundra, and we know it's Winter Tundra because it's snowcapped. In Winter Tundra, the Professor, Hunter, and Laura are all just like together. The Professor says, I think this should work to get the dragon back to the Dragon World because this is a super portal. It has a ton of the orbs you've collected on it and then one big red gem at the very top. The big red gem is a power crystal, and the Professor believes it should give the portal the extra boost it needs to get Spyro back home because it's not a local portal.

1:07:36 This is like a cross-country portal to the Dragon World. Right. Then a bomb is thrown into the farm and knocks the crystal out of the portal. From the fuck where? Ripto. Ripto, you son of a bitch. Ripto enters the scene and goes, so you think you got rid of me? I think not. I thought so. Elora, Hunter, and the Professor are all on the ground from the blast, and they're like, holy shit. Ripto says he got that fat bear moneybags to sell him some bombs. So not only is moneybags extorting Spyro, an immigrant, but he is also a warlord selling bombs to the enemy. So he's playing both sides.

1:08:17 He's the fucking worst, and I hate him so goddamn much. So he always comes out on top. It feels like he's against us. It does not feel like he's on Spyro's side at all. You know, he's extorting him. He's treating him like shit. He's literally gatekeeping certain things from him. And then Ripto comes in and he goes, you want to buy some bombs? I'll sell you weapons. I don't give a fuck. We hate him. Fuck this bear. The professor starts to crawl towards that red power crystal to retrieve it, but Ripto holds a bomb at him and says, don't even try it, book boy, or you'll be the world's smartest pile of ashes. I fucking hate kids' games. Smartest pile of ashes is pretty good, though. Like, I do like this game.

1:08:58 The writing is meant for children. For children, yeah. And that's rough. Ripto walks over and scoops up the red power crystal, saying it's going to be used in his new scepter. You know, because the last one got, like, stolen and almost eaten and shit. Hunter does nothing, and then after he is like, well, I tried. Ripto said he's going to kill everyone with his scepter and rename this place Riptonia. Ripto laughs, walks into the town center castle, and we see money bags go flying. Oh. Once again, the local flags on the town center castle go up, and the Ripto flags go back out, flying in the wind. Here we go again. Son of a bitch.

1:09:40 I know, right? So Spyro is then in Winter Tundra, and we know what he has to do. It is what it is. We don't need the talismans this time, since we're like in the end game section, so we just need the orbs. The orbs are what powers these portals, so the more orbs we get, the better. Okay, so it only feels like we're starting over. Yeah. We're not actually starting over. Yeah, but we still have to go around to the little mini worlds and help everyone figure their shit out. I was going to say, now you need to get eight trinkets. Yeah, instead of the talismans, like they made it dumber. Yeah. Elora comes up on Spyro and is like, hey, Repto's alive. He stole the power crystal for the portal, and he locked us out of the castle.

1:10:21 So obviously, we're doing more of the same, but make it winter. There are six areas in Winter Tundra, as well as easy access to Summer and Autumn worlds. So it's kind of nice to bop around if you're like, man, I need 20 more orbs. I can go back to old levels where I didn't hundo everything, grab them. They try to make it pretty easy and accessible. Here, money bags can also charge you to learn how to head bash, which can destroy big rocks. Very helpful, but still very bitter that's behind a paywall thanks to capitalism. Fucking capitalism bear. A handful more worlds, get more orbs. You know the drill by this point. With more than enough orbs to power a major city, Spyro is ready to take on Ripto once and for all.

1:11:02 We hope. His stupid dinosaurs are dead. He's just a little man not worthy of being a short king. Honestly, we should be taking on capitalist bear too while we're at it, but, you know, we're going to just ignore the fact that he was complicit in a hostile takeover. Well, because he helped us once, but we had to pay for it. Yeah, I don't love that. If I haven't made that clear, I'm not a fan of the functionality and character of Moneybags, but go off. Spyro, armed with guts, glory and orbs galore, goes up the town center castle steps to confront Ripto. Elora is at the top of the stairs and is like, Hey, Spyro, you got all the orbs. Let's kill this motherfucker.

1:11:43 Hell yeah. Spyro comes up on Ripto, waving around the power crystal in his scepter, and he's talking to himself. He's like, hell yeah. I did this shit. There are three sheep in his arena, and he shoots his scepter at them. And out of the scepter, this powerful blast of light and energy comes shooting out at the sheep. They thankfully saw this and got out of the way, and Ripto is like, Ah, you useless animals, come back. Ripto, why would they? I was thinking the static electricity from these sheep would actually be pretty high. Oh yeah, they would genuinely explode. Spyro comes in, calls Ripto short.

1:12:23 He's also short. And then tells him to get over here. Ripto is like, what, you again? Are you fucking serious? Let me do a hostile takeover. We feel the same way about you, buddy. You again? Right? Spyro is like, hey, dipshit, try that scepter on me. Let's fucking go. Which is so badass. Ripto is like, oh, absolutely, let's fucking go. Let's do this. So now we have the big boy boss battle we've been waiting for. And this battle is genuinely so much fun. Before it starts, a fairy comes in and tells you that Elora and Hunter are trying to help from the sidelines. For the first time. You know, kind of shitty that they've just decided now to help, but it's always appreciated.

1:13:07 They're going to take some of the orbs that you collected, power them up, and help you defeat Ripto through the battle. These orbs will unlock more abilities in the game that are kind of the same as those boosted power ups we've seen earlier. So like super headbutt running, cool shit like that. Just to really hone in all the different fun pieces of gameplay you've experienced throughout. That's a good boss battle. It is. So these orbs fall on the battlefield. Ripto also has the ability to grab them and can start attacking you too. So as they drop, you have to run and haul ass to get them. If Ripto gets enough, he can attack you like a motherfucker, but if you get enough, you can attack him like a motherfucker. And I love that you're both sharing resources in this boss battle.

1:13:51 It's actually quite rare to have kind of that NPC boss fucking enemy and yourself sharing resources. And there's kind of this tug of war of resources, which is so fun. Yeah, I see that very, very rarely. That's really cool that Spyro, of all games, did that. You know, Ripto, he doesn't always have to have orbs. He can just shoot you with his scepter regularly throughout, so you have to get your orbs to activate your power-ups, avoid his scepter, grab the orbs before he can get them. It's honestly, it's so much fun, and I forgot how fun it was. And I was playing, it was like, I want to do this again, actually. It's really cool. I didn't. I have so many games to play.

1:14:32 Anyway, whenever you get three orbs, that's when your power-ups activate. And as you get your third orb every time, Ripto goes, what? And he'll stop attacking you because he notices that you have enough orbs to kick the shit out of him, and he'll run, which makes it a great opportunity to kick the shit out of him. Oh, it's so good. Is it a classic three hits and he's done? Almost. So after phase one of killing Ripto, when you get down to a certain point, he uses his scepter to summon a magic metal bowl. It's not alive. It's just a mech that he's riding almost. A bowl? Yeah. Okay. Like horns and shit. Yeah. We haven't had several part boss battles yet, so this is really great to kind of turn on its head and say, no, no, there's more.

1:15:15 It's not just singular fighting styles. You have to be really creative. Before you celebrate. Now, Spyro is fast where Ripto and his bowl are bulky, so this actually works in Spyro's favor to a certain extent. Spyro terrorizes Ripto and his metal bowl looking ass mech shit, and once it breaks down, the mech explodes and a bunch of orbs are released. Ripto is like, God damn it. And now we enter the third stage of the battle. Ripto now summons a flying mech, and the arena becomes engulfed in lava. Now we have to fly and cannot touch the ground because the ground is lava. The floor is literally lava.

1:15:57 That's amazing. It's so cool because the arena is, this is the third arena battle we've encountered in this, and it's just, you know, it's a circle. It's a classic arena with a river of lava around it. So now the whole fucking arena is eaten by lava. We've taken to the sky. Oh, it's so good. But you're actually flying, not just gliding. Correct. Yeah, you are flying. Spyro eats one orb before the floor becomes fully lava, and it gives you the flying booster for unlimited flight, and now there's no time cap on it, so you can just fucking fly. Nice. Oh, it's so good. So Spyro flies around dodging aerosols, and he starts trying to get Ripto down into submission. There are no orbs being thrown on anymore because of the lava, for obvious reasons.

1:16:40 Right. So Spyro has to spit fireballs and rocks to Ripto in the air. So fucking cool. This sounds like a great boss battle. It is. And this battle alone, I think, is more fun than entire sections of the first Spyro. Entire worlds. Once Spyro gets Ripto and his stupid fucking flying bastard down, the flying bastard falls into the lava. He goes down, and it's like the goddamn Terminator 2, because so does Ripto. Instead of a thumbs up, he's just being a bitch. Oh, I thought I was going to flip you off. Oh my god, that'd be so funny. He falls right into the lava, and after he does, we see the Ripto flags on the castle roll up and go away, replaced with the regular Avalar flags.

1:17:26 God, I hope he's dead. Spyro comes out of the lava arena to see his friends, I guess friends, kidnappers, whatever. Elora, Hunter, the Professor, and also that fucking capitalist bastard Moneybags. Like, you ate it and abetted terrorism. You shouldn't be here. Yeah, is this Stockholm Syndrome? Like a little? Because Elora approaches Spyro and then kisses him on the head and says, thank you so much. That's not appropriate. And Spyro's like, I'm not even supposed to be here today. Spyro's a temp. I went on vacation and got kidnapped by you.

1:18:07 Right, like in Taken. But here we are and you're thanking me. Okay. Sure. And Laura's like, I guess you have to go now. And he's like, I can't even fucking hang out. I just saved this entire world. Can someone bring me a pizza or a sandwich or something? What the fuck? And it's not I have to go now. It was I was never supposed to be here. Right. It's not just I'm not supposed to be here today. It's I'm not supposed to be here. Period. Period. Yeah. Ever. So Spyro's like, I think the dragons are going to miss me, and I really need that vacation now, man. What the fuck? At least earned one. Right? Laura's like, okay, before you go, Moneybags has something he wants to give you.

1:18:48 He can go fuck himself. Moneybags frowns and says, no, I don't. Hunter tackles him and beats the shit out of him in the first useful thing Hunter's done all game and takes his bag of bunny, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's like a brown burlap sack with a money sign on it. I've seen one only once in real life. Was it at like a Western reenactment of a bank robbery? No, so I've talked about how I've worked at a GameStop before. So I worked at a GameStop that was in a mall, and across the hall in the mall was a rare coin collecting place. Oh, cool. And somebody brought in a literal bag of gold coins in a burlap sack with a giant money sign on it.

1:19:31 Was he a time traveler? I fucking thought so or something. I like sat there and just watched it happen. I'm like, there's no fucking way this is really happening in front of me right now. Did he look like a prospector? I didn't even look at the person. I was so mesmerized by the money in the burlap sack. I fully imagine a man with a big white beard, overalls, like a hat with a hole in it, and a piece of wheat sticking out of his mouth. That's fucking hysterical. Anyway, that's Moneybags. So Hunter beats the shit out of him and takes his bag, and Elora tells Spyro that Moneybags is very sorry he extorted you and you can have all your gems back, which isn't helpful now.

1:20:13 No, it's the end of the fucking game. I don't need my goddamn gems now, but thanks. I guess you have some spending money for this vacation, but I don't know if the currency transfers between worlds. I don't know. It's a whole thing. Is there an interdimensional currency exchange that's going to be there? For the multiverse? I'm not sure. It would be useful. It would. The professor says he got the portal working and he can get Spyro back to Dragon Shores. Spyro is like, Hey, do you guys want to come with me? Like, why not? And all of them say no, which is also very embarrassing for him. You just fixed our home. We don't need to leave now. Yeah, they're like, honestly, we do have a lot of cleaning up to do after Ripto.

1:20:53 Like, you did fix most of our interpersonal problems with like fixing shit and earning orbs, but, you know, there's like a tree over there I have to replant. I can't go. And none of us will come corroborate the story you're about to tell. Spyro's like, all right, anyway, bye. And dips. We get the credits, but after the credits, Spyro has returned to Dragon Shores and he's met by a Dragon Gatekeeper and can play some silly Carnival games, which is actually really cute for like post-game stuff. There's a dunk tank. There's a roller coaster where you like pop balloons on the track. There's a shooting gallery. There's a tunnel of love and a theater.

1:21:34 Wait, this is like a whole ass level. Yeah, and it's so cute. There's no one mean. You're just having fun playing Carnival games. That's actually pretty cool. In the tunnel of love, you see these heart-shaped boats going around a moat. Spyro gets in an empty heart-shaped boat, but when he comes out of the ride, there's a blue goat-looking ass bitch in his boat. What? With him. So he picked up someone along the way in the tunnel of love, which is wild. Which means that person might have been in a boat with somebody else. And dipped for Spyro? And he swooped. Yup. He did the robbery. Oh, man. In the theater, Spyro can watch all the cutscenes from the game, which is also kind of cute.

1:22:15 Okay, well done. And that's it. Now Spyro 2 Ripto's Rage is complete. Thank goodness, because fuck Ripto. Fuck Ripto. Ripto sucks. All my homies hate Ripto. Facts. Now, the reviews for Spyro 2 were largely positive, mostly citing that if you like the first Spyro, this will 100% be your shit. And I fully stand by that statement. It was just everything you loved about Spyro, but better. Yeah, it's just Spyro 1 bigger, better, and more engaging. The structure itself is repetitive, and it's still a collectathon. But the gameplay does push itself to be more creative and find new ways to drop puzzles and create different strategies for gameplay specific to whatever the circumstance is.

1:22:59 So it was really great. The fact that they also turned that out in a year. Oh my god, can you believe? Unreal, but good for them. Yeah, and speaking of that, the team celebrated a very tiny bit, but then immediately jumped in to working on the third Spyro game of this trilogy, Spyro, Year of the Dragon. The third game came out in 2000, which in the Lunar New Year calendar is the Year of the Dragon. Well done. So it worked out. Do you know what your Lunar calendar animal is? I think it's the rat. You are a pig. I'm the pig? Yes. Okay. I checked. Okay, thank you. I am a horse. You're a horse? Okay.

1:23:40 Now, I mentioned Ted Price, the co-founder of Insomniac. One of his favorite things about Spyro, Year of the Dragon and the release was that they just launched a feature where if someone is just like beefing it, eating shit on the levels, the level auto adjusts to make it a little bit easier for the player. And part of this was to make it so the game could be accessible for anyone who picks it up and not just like end up in a trap or like rage quit or I don't know, throw the controller across the couch and go, I fucking hate this shit. Why is this hard? And Insomniac has kept that feature through every fucking game. They have. It's fascinating to see where the lineage still lies in certain titles, you know?

1:24:21 Yeah. This was called auto-challenge tuning. And like you said, it's been used in a lot of Insomniac games and a lot of non-Insomniac games, frankly. I was going to say, Naughty Dog uses it a lot now, too. That's true, and they're buddy buddies, so it's great. The team got more and more ambitious with this title, which is incredible, considering the generational leap from one to two within a year having so many quality of life upgrades and more challenging ways to play the game. This one is all about keeping the individual levels and worlds more engaging and make people want to replay it more. Okay, they wanted higher replay value. Yeah. Now, contextually, in the year 2000, the PS2 was released, and it was a major moment in the gaming world, and just the world, actually.

1:25:08 It truly was groundbreaking of a system. While the PS2 came out in late October 2000, this title, Spyro Year of the Dragon, was scheduled for release in early 2000. This title was only built for PS1, but because PlayStation was so stoked on keeping the good times rolling, Sony still backed a major ad campaign focusing on this title, which is kind of interesting to be pushing a new console and then titles for the current generation. You know what I mean? It's true, but they also know that the previous generation will still stick around for at least four to five years for a lot of people. Right. Adoption of a new console takes a lot because that is a very pricey piece of equipment.

1:25:48 And just because they're moving on to a new system doesn't mean the consumer necessarily is. Yeah, and again, this was Gen 1 to Gen 2 of PlayStation, so people weren't used to what this evolution felt like yet. They were like, no, I got the thing. I'm done, right? I mean, shit, it's still prevalent today. Red Dead Redemption is coming out on PlayStation 4, not on PlayStation 5. It's on PlayStation 4 because, yeah, more people have that. They get it. Insomniac would publish Spyro Year of the Dragon on October 10th, 2000, and it's straight up, this is the best of the trilogy. It goes out on the high note. It's the last one Insomniac did in the franchise as well. And honestly, I'm just so happy they went out on top.

1:26:28 Ugh, so good. That's really good that the final one was the best one. It's one of those things where you hope that they get better with age. Oh, absolutely. You want to believe that they're improving their skills. And they are, they absolutely are. And not that it was like they made a final game because the final game was the fucking worst. Yeah. And then they go, Ah, shit, we should bail. Now, this came out in tandem with the first Crash game that wasn't done by Naughty Dog. This was called Crash Bash. Crash Bash is a Mario Party-style game of minigames by Eurocom Entertainment Software. So with Crash ending the year prior, Insomniac took that note and pushed their last Spyro game this year.

1:27:08 Oh, okay. And now, for the last Spyro game in the Insomniac trilogy, here we go. This is Spyro, Year of the Dragon. The game opens back in our home world, the world of dragons. The dragons are all asleep across the lush hills surrounded by dragon eggs. Everyone is calm. It's basically a silent night in this bitch. All the dragons we met in the first game are here, and they're snoring. Then, from out of the ground, a beige rabbit wearing a hood comes out. She looks around. More soldiers that look like rhinoceroses. Rhinocer? Rhinos? Rhinos. Rhinos. More soldiers that look like rhinos pop out of the ground after her.

1:27:52 Silently, she gestures out the dragon eggs. The rhinos take all the dragon eggs and disappear back into the earth. The rabbit picks up an egg and starts to walk away. As she does, she steps on a tail, Hunter's tail. Hunter wakes up and screams and awakens all the other dragons. In a panic, Rabbit Lady runs off with the last egg and all the dragons come to realize the eggs are gone. Spyro is disappointed. I can see why. We get to another scene that's in a castle with eggs on pedestals in this great grand like stained glass window moment. We find out that the rabbit's name is Bianca, and she has come to a throne with an egg in her hand, and she offers it.

1:28:38 She says, They managed to capture all the eggs, your highness. We then meet a turquoise alligator, the sorceress, the ruler of wherever the fuck we are right now. I love that Spyro is the only mythical creature. Everything else is like a rabbit. Yeah, and there was like the hedgehog in the last one or the porcupine, whatever. Yeah, it's the professor, yeah. Yeah, and the fawn and just, yeah, we get all these like real animals and then dragons. Yeah, there's no like Pegasuses or anything like that. They're like, fuck it. Right. Animals and dragons, it's fine. You're really picking the hardest words to pluralize. Yeah, I'm not good at that either, clearly.

1:29:18 I'm fucking this shit up. This is also our first female villain, so like progress? All right, go Spyro. The sorceress is happy the eggs are here and tells Bianca to close off the tunnels. A fairy was at the window watching all of this and hears it and is like, oh shit, they got the dragon eggs. I gotta be a save point though, fuck. What do I do? Back in the world of dragons, all the dragons are trying to figure out how to get down the holes left by the rhinos. The fairy we saw earlier comes out of one of the holes and reports to Old Man Dragon Argus. He asks where the eggs are, and the fairy says they're on the other side of the dragon world. So apparently, this is one of those, like, I can dig the way to Australia or China or whatever kind of thing.

1:30:06 They burrowed through the earth. It must have been on the outer edge. Right. The fairy was like, I saw eggs, but I couldn't lift them. They're gigantic. It's a fucking dragon. I'm tiny. I can't do this. And it's a very, like, Tinkerbell fairy. So if you can imagine something small and flying, you're like, yeah, you wouldn't be able to pick up a dragon egg. I get that. Yeah. Argus tells Spyro he's got to go after them because he's the only one who can fit down the holes. Hunter hears this proposition for Spyro, not for him, and goes, hell yeah, we got to go save them. Let's go get those eggs. Hunter was not involved in this until he made himself involved in this. Fucking Hunter. He's the worst.

1:30:46 Hunter dives face first into a hole and immediately gets stuck. Argus hits him really hard with his tail, and Hunter goes flying down into the other side of the world. This Winnie the Pooh ass. Spyro jumps down the hole with ease, because he's little. He just trots down it. Right, he's like, all right, bye. On the other side of the world, we see lush mountainside village called Sunshine Spring. Spyro runs around a bit, and as he starts to go through a portal to look for eggs, Bianca shows up to intimidate him. She tells him she hid all the eggs all over the world and to leave it alone, because they're her eggs now. I'm sorry, hold on, the rabbit hid the eggs?

1:31:28 Oh, no, I didn't catch that until you just said it right now. Oh, I fucking hate this. Bianca is the Easter Bunny? Easter Bunny confirmed. See, it's not all just animals. That's a mythological creature, right? The Jesus Rabbit? Yeah. Okay, yeah, that is a mythological creature. You're right. I win. Anyway, she tells Spyro to go fuck himself and ends her whole sentiment with, you won't like me when I'm angry. Ma'am, that is copywritten. That's the Hulk's phrase. You can't use that. Why are you just stealing other people's catchphrases? Now, if that's her thing, is using other people's catchphrases, it's pretty funny.

1:32:11 No, it's not, but that would be a very funny trope for a character to just steal other people's lines. But just in this case, no, you're not the fucking Hulk. No. Hunter is also there helping no one. He serves as this game's tutorial dropper, but other than that, widely useless. He'll be like, hey, Spyro, I bet you can glide over there. Let's do it. And then he's like, press fucking X or whatever. Yeah, it's Hunter. I'm not expecting much from him. As you can imagine, you have to go visit different worlds and collect the eggs that have been scattered through the lands. Well, this is a very similar structure to the last games. There is one big, big improvement in this game that came in the level design. Levels here have minigames within, or places where you could play as different characters.

1:32:56 This would be the first in the Spyro world where you don't have to play only a Spyro, and some of the minigames are genuinely really cool. Okay, what kind of characters do we play as? We meet some friends along the way, and they have their own thing, and we'll get there, but I actually want to talk about the minigames first. So growing up, my favorite minigame was the skateboarding one, because my parents wouldn't buy me Tony Hawk Pro Skater. That's the closest you got, huh? The Spyro Pro Skater. That's great. Now remember, the year 2000s, skateboarding was a personality trait, and that was acceptable in society. So true. I genuinely really loved it, and in the skateboarding levels, you get a lot of challenges to score points or do tricks, or sometimes skateboard around with others and beat them in trick-a-thons.

1:33:41 It is genuinely so much fun, and I mean, I haven't played Tony Hawk because my parents never bought it for me because I was a child, and then I grew up, had my own money and was like, why would I buy this game? But I really love these, and playing them now, they still fuck. It's such a good fucking level set, and they show up a couple times. It's great. So they did a pretty good job with the skateboarding, huh? Yeah, I love it. Okay, good. There are a handful of characters you can play as in this game, including Spyro, obviously. But let's meet a couple of them, starting with Sheila. Sheila is a kangaroo who's got, like, some serious hops and bouncy movement, and she's available to unlock here in future Hoppy minigames with 300 gems.

1:34:26 Oh, no. No, no, this is a character you have to pay to unlock. You know what that means. The return of Capitalism Bear! God damn it, Moneybags. That's right. Mr. Moneybags will unlock Sheila for you for 300 gems. I was going to comment on the diversity of animals they use in this game, but then you ruined it with fucking Moneybags showing up. Oh, Capitalism ruined the party? I'm sorry, Tom. Once again. Now, there are a few levels with minigames where you play as Sheila, so if you want to hundo the game, you do need to pay to play, which really sucks. I mean, you're not using the gems for anything else. Like, there's no in-game store.

1:35:06 It's the only place you can use your gems, but it's still like, fuck you, moneybags. Yeah, but you didn't get to keep the gems that you got at the end of the last game. Yeah, it just... it feels bad, and it never stops feeling bad. Capitalism bear is like, the sorceress was paying me to imprison this war criminal, but if you pay me 300 gems, I'll just be super chill about it and let her out, because he is aiding and abetting war crimes. It's because jail doesn't exist for people with money. He should be reported to the UN. Spyro starts checking out some worlds to recover eggs, and eventually, Bianca will roll up and tell you to back off. Spyro and Hunter are like, no, fuck you.

1:35:50 She's a boring baby, and Spyro is not interested. Although Hunter kind of thinks she's cute, which is really gross and annoying, because she's also a war criminal. So back to the levels in this world. When you defeat a level, an inhabitant of that world will follow you out and help you travel to the next kind of section of the game's map. So this is like the Balloonman. Yeah, in this specific one, it is actually also a balloon. Once you have a representative from each area to help with your balloon, you're able to travel to the next world area to keep saving the eggs. It's kind of a nice gesture that Spyro continues to bring communities together, and they're really rallying behind him now to be like, hell yeah, get your eggs, man.

1:36:33 Yeah, at least this time he didn't get kidnapped. Yeah, this time it's like, all right, I was just told to go by Argus, my elders. Yeah, I'm fighting for the cause of the dragonhood. Yeah, and the dragons are the ones that got kidnapped, and he's like, I've been there. They're still useless. They're eggs. No, but the other dragons. Oh, well, they can't fit down the hole to get to the world. They're too fat. Because they're useless. With the balloon labor fully sorted out, Spyro hops on to go to Midday Gardens, the next world to have eggs hidden. Sheila also tells you it's closer to the sorceress who's behind all this bullshit, so that's fucking great. As Spyro leaves, we get a cutscene of Bianca the Bunny being yelled at by the sorceress.

1:37:13 The sorceress is mad that Bianca hasn't killed Spyro, but Bianca's like, he's not afraid of anything. I can't fucking get under his skin. The sorceress is like, get over it. Here's a spell book. Go fucking kill him. Bianca is like, you want me to murder him? The sorceress says, I don't give a shit if he's murdered or not. Just kill him. And she's like, okay. Nearby, there's a rhino that Bianca kind of waves around, does some magic on, and he turns into a little bunny. So she's like practicing her magic? Yeah. And she looks and she's like, oh, that's not scary at all. Shit. So then she turns it into a giant bug that's like 10 feet tall to fight Spyro.

1:37:54 Yeah, fuck that. It looks like a frog with teeth. Does it still have the personality of a rhino? What is the personality of a rhino? Angry? I don't know. Yeah, he's angry. He's a boss fight. Okay. So this looks like a frog with like shark teeth. It's fucking horrifying. And his name is Buzz. Frog with shark teeth. Fuck that. Right? And he's huge. Because then he can use his tongue to like pull you in. I think that might actually happen. It's been a minute. I played all these back to back to back. So they're kind of blurring a little bit. I apologize. I imagine so, because the new trilogy also, they all look exactly alike. Right. Which is the one that I played, so it's hard. Anyway, Spyro flies right into Buzz's molten lava arena and is met with Sheila.

1:38:37 Sheila says she heard about an ambush, and she's here to help you out, because Sheila is a down-ass bitch. Hell yeah, Sheila. You only play as Spyro, but it's this great battle of headbutting the frog into the molten lava and avoiding its attacks while Sheila actually helps and stomps this frog the fuck out in the lava to help you get through the level. So you're like, yeah, you're not useless. You're not Hunter. You're not a lore. You're actually down in the trenches fighting with me. Fuck yeah. After you stomp this frog monster out, which is such a great sentence to say out loud, Spyro continues to midday gardens. It's the same shit. You go through levels in this world. You rescue some eggs. Bianca shows up occasionally to be like, hey, stop doing that.

1:39:21 I'm doing a thing. You should leave it alone. Spyro's like, shut the fuck up on getting the eggs. She showed up at the beginning being like, haha, I hid them. Good luck finding them. That's basically a challenge. Right? She's an Easter bunny. What do you expect us to do? Moneybags also has another friend under captivity that you could pay to unlock. And you should because this is Sergeant Bird. Now, he can fly, but I think he's a penguin. Like, I'm 90% sure he's a penguin, which don't typically fly. No. Anyway, he likes to blast shit. So once he's out of the cage, he hits moneybags with his blasters. Moneybags is thrown off of a building, and it's the best I've ever felt about it, because fuck moneybags.

1:40:04 Fuck moneybags. And that's where they got the idea of throwing people off from Spider-Man. I don't know. Where Spider-Man pushes people off a building as just a fucking thing he does. Yeah, and we're supposed to believe that he has this special web shooter that brings people back to the side of the building. Yeah, right. You killed so many people, Spider-Man. Even if he does, all those necks are snapped. Yeah. Don't play like no one's dead. Who's going to get them down? As you can imagine, after Spyro helps out the locals in their little portal world, a representative comes to help him with transport. So once he's gotten all the fucking eggs, he can move on to the next area. Once Spyro is ready to move on, he gets into what they keep calling a whirly gig, which I do not trust.

1:40:47 It's just kind of a platform with a propeller. We head on over to Evening Lake. Between these sequences, we get treated to a cutscene of the Sorceress screaming at Bianca to get her shit together. She is like, I am so let down by your incompetence. Bianca says the eggs cannot be worth all this trouble. Like, let's just fucking give up. Lazy. The Sorceress tells Bianca that the eggs are what brings magic into the world. And if there's no magic in the world, she'll die. The Sorceress pulls over a lowly goon and turns them into a gigantic monster, even bigger and fatter than Buzz to fight Spyro. Once again, Spyro lands in an arena with the monster.

1:41:29 But this time, Sergeant Bird is here to help. With this guy, he can shoot you with his big-ass ray gun. But it's okay, because Sergeant Bird is dropping ammunition from Spyro. Hell, yeah. This one is even more fun than the last boss battle, and it's continually changing and evolving and adjusting how you have to play and make it a little harder. Oh, it's so much fun. This is why this is the best game of the series. Really, just every boss battle is really fun? Yeah, there's just more and more sections of boss battle where it just gets incrementally harder and trickier, and you have to be watching these kind of angles, and it just adjusts how you have to adapt to play, and it's so much fucking fun.

1:42:09 Okay, cool. Anyway, Spyro takes his ass out and carries on to Evening Lake World. Do you want to know what you do in the Evening Lake World? I feel like it's going to be a Friday the 13th situation. No, you just go around getting eggs. It's the same shit, Tom. Over and over again. When you do, the locals come together to help you expand your search and figure shit out. Go figure. It's not great by today's standards. It's a little repetitive. It's no last of us. I'll give you that. But it's very fun. We've just grown so much as storytellers and gamers and everything. Yeah, entirely. So of course, at this point, Bianca comes in and is like, for real, for real, you need to stop.

1:42:53 The Sorceress is going to kill you. Just let us have the eggs. We'll take care of them, I promise. Just like turn around and go home. Also, can you take Hunter with you? He's creepy. Like Hunter doesn't hasn't done shit. We've had two boss battles with strangers we barely met helping and like kicking ass. We've known Hunter for what is now the second game, and he's done nothing. Yeah, Hunter is completely useless, but I've also just been noticing like with Bianca, I got the feeling like right out the gate. She wasn't doing this like maliciously maliciously. She wasn't doing this by her own volition. Like she had to do this for somebody else. Yeah, that she's under someone's thumb. I get you. It felt like she was showing the rhinos where the eggs were more so than going after them.

1:43:37 Yeah, she doesn't have that killer instinct. Yeah, definitely. So she is probably very much like what Spyro was under. I feel like already that she was kind of kidnapped. Yeah, anyway, at one point, Bianca was able to capture Hunter and puts him in a cage. She goes over to Hunter to give him an apple and apologizes to him for all of this happening. Bianca tries to appeal to Hunter and tells him that the magic will be lost in the world if they can't keep the eggs. She tells him about how the sorcerers banished all the dragons to the other side of the world, but didn't realize she needed the magic to sustain her life as a sorcerer. It's so fucking messy. Hunter is like, damn, that's crazy. Hunter's so dumb.

1:44:19 He also has a big crush on her, which I really don't like, because that's straight up Stockholm syndrome. You mentioned that in the last one. This one, he's like, she kidnapped me, but she cute. What's up? Well, he was saying that from the beginning, though. Yeah, he fucking sucks. So in this world, when you get everyone together, instead of a balloon or a whirly gig, you get to ride a rocket. This game is nonsense. It's the 90s and it was the year 2000. I love this. We survived Y2K for this. Now, Spyro is taking to the sky like a billionaire on his fucking rocket to get to the next land, which is so much fun.

1:45:01 When the rocket is ready for launch, Spyro hops in and goes to the fourth and final world of this game. You know, fun shit. Now, naturally, like we were expected, there's a cutscene and a sabotage. Let's fucking go. Oh, no. In this cutscene, we see the sorceress again being like, what the fuck? All of you are so incompetent. She's sick of everyone's shit, and she says she's going to create the monster to end all monsters and destroy all the dragons. She is pissed. Bianca is scared of this and is concerned with killing dragons. The sorceress doesn't give a fuck, and she says all she needs is the wings. Bianca is like, wait, what?

1:45:41 And the sorceress is like, you see, the magic is stored in the wings. Bianca is like, are you fucking serious? Do you just need their wings? So like, why are you killing them? Can't we just like pop a wing off and chill? Oh my god, that's still really dark. Yeah, the sorceress is like, no, I need them to make a spell to make me live forever. And Bianca is like, are you fucking kidding me? This is ridiculous. I'm over it. Switching sides. Definitely need to, because it just sounds like she keeps moving the goalpost. Yeah, entirely. The sorceress is like, well, I'm going to kill the dragons, and then I'm going to kill her afterwards. I hate everyone. It's so hard to get good help these days. No one wants to work anymore.

1:46:25 No, nobody wants to work for you, you fucking lunatic. None of them will ever understand that, Tom. No one who has ever said that sentence understands that sentiment. That's fair. Anyway, the sorceress grabs one of her goons and makes a big-ass monster, but we don't see what the monster looks like until we hit the arena, which is kind of cool. Well, that's good. Here we're met with kind of a yeti snowman guy that we met earlier and still no other friends. So Sheila helped once, she's out. Sergeant Bird helped once, he's over it. Now there's this yeti that we've unlocked at some point, and he's like, what's up, dude? I'm gonna help with sending over rockets so Spyro can shoot at the monster. So the yeti's on our side?

1:47:07 Damn, so we still don't get to fight a yeti. We see one yeti unalive itself, and then the other yeti's are homey. So no, we never get to fucking go full Matterhorn on anyone. It's the perfect matchup, and they just kept dropping the ball. Snow and ice, not in this one. Now this monster is big and can fly and has a force field around it between rounds. Which is so fucking cool. Like truly an amplification of each boss is why this is the game people remember playing. They're like, this is so much fun. Let's fucking go. This boss's name is Scorch, and he looks like a manbat. Not batman, but if you don't want to talk about manbat.

1:47:47 Hell yeah, manbat's fucking terrifying. Manbat's the scariest shit ever. If you haven't seen manbat, it's like a six foot tall bat. And it was a contemporary to Batman for a little bit, but is so hideous to look at. I don't think they've committed him to any of the films. I'm sure he's been in the cartoons. I know he's in some of the Arkham games. Yeah, he's terrifying in the Arkham games. Yeah, oh, it's so good. We hate him, but damn, we love fighting him. Yeah. He can also at one point shoot crabs at Spyro, which I think is very funny. The bat shoots crabs? Yeah, little red crabs. They just don't fucking care. They were like, if it looks cool, let's do it.

1:48:28 What are the kids going to do? Not play it? They're going to fucking play it. It's the rule of cool. Yeah, there's no real Naughty Dog Crash game this year. We got this, guys. Once you get scorched down to a certain level of HP, he'll actually do something really fucking sick. He releases Buzz, the first boss monster you fought. Really? So you have a mini round revisiting the first boss of this game, which I fucking love, and you knock him out to get back to Scorch, the main boss of this level. It's so good. And once he's down, that's it. Like, it's so satisfying. And then you get this little surprise of like, oh, shit, it's you. You kill him, and then you're fucking happy. It's so good.

1:49:08 That's great. I just felt like it was a lovely surprise to be like, let's just do this again. Because then you also feel satisfied of being like, that was a whole ass boss battle, and now it's just a segment of this boss battle. Like, look how I've grown. Yeah, I was gonna say, it shows you how far you've come. Yeah, which feels really satisfying as a gamer. Now, Spyro hops back in his rocket and goes off to Midnight Mountain World, the last world of this game, and the last eggs you'll need to bring peace to the kingdom. As Spyro travels around, Hunter is still in a cage and says, hey, Bianca, can you feed me? Bianca is like, no, shut up. We have no time. The Sorceress is gonna kill the dragons. We gotta get you out of here.

1:49:48 I gave you an apple hours ago. Shut up. Yeah. Hunter is like, wait, why should I trust you? Is this a trap? Bianca says, how can I trap you by letting you out of the cage, you dumb sack of shit? He is very stupid. Hunter is like, I don't know, you're kind of sneaky. At least he didn't be like, I don't know, you are kind of sexy. He didn't hit on her in this one moment. He will later though, don't worry. Bianca rolls her eyes and lets Hunter go. She says she never wanted to hurt anyone and grabs Hunter and they just like run off. So like, thankfully, he's freed to a certain extent. He's still stupid, so it's rough. He just doesn't understand that he's free still.

1:50:30 He doesn't. Spyro lands in Midnight Mountain Worlds, this gorgeous world with like purple crystal tones. Like aesthetically, this one's really pretty. Bianca shows up at Spyro's feet and says, hey, you need to get more dragon eggs and then we can work together to open a portal to the Sorceress and stop all of this. So now Baby Girl has just fully switched sides and is here for us. I'm like, okay. Still wants you to collect dragon eggs. Yeah, but I'm not going to say no to the help, you know? Moneybags is unbothered by this war-torn land and once again extorts you to unlock more prisoners of war. Probably extorting the fucking Sorceress too. I fucking hate Moneybags so goddamn much.

1:51:11 Just at my core, this is not a character I enjoy. When Spyro has enough eggs, which means enough magic, energy, and like vibes, Bianca is able to open the portal into the Sorceress' hideout, where Spyro can finally confront her and put an end to this bullshit. Spyro flies off alone to the Sorceress' lair and is met by Agent Nine, someone we helped save from Moneybags. Now, Agent Nine is a monkey with a gun. Is it like a secret agent? Yeah. Okay, good. It's fucking sick. It's not like a spacey looking gun, because you can't just put a regular gun in a kids' game. That's pretty fucked up. So it has to be like a space looking gun.

1:51:51 But yeah, it's great. So he's not double-O Sapien? No. Well, that would be fun. The Sorceress has no cutscene or intro or anything, which is really cool. We were just dropped into her arena, where she waves her magic scepter and shoots energy fire at you. Which like, we've dealt with scepters before. I got you. Yeah. Agent Nine drops full cannons down from the sky for you to use and hit her from afar. And this is so much fucking fun. You've been saying about every single one of these boss fights for this game. I love the boss fights in this game. He drops cannons from the sky. She is way more difficult than the other bosses, and she changed up her attack patterns and styles from pew pews to balls of energy.

1:52:37 And she can also take out your cannons with one hit. So you have to be very fast, careful, and specific with how you shoot her. Do you feel like Cuphead took a lot of notes from the boss fights in these games? I'm sure this did lead to a lot of that kind of running on boss world fighting, because this is exactly kind of the evolution that you like to see in Cuphead and in these other kind of games. It's impossible to say, but let's just say yeah. Okay. Once you manage to kill through her health bar, the sorceress falls into lava and is eaten up like the goddamn Terminator again, because Insomniac only knows how to end a game one way. Still flipping you off.

1:53:18 You know that scene where Doc Ock gets eaten by lava in Spider-Man? Same shit. Spyro is then back in the grassy knoll of the dragon world. He's being interviewed by the Yeti, our homie, who is praising him for saving the eggs and defeating the sorceress. He asks Spyro, Hey, what are you looking forward to next? Maybe a vacation at Dragon Shores? Spyro is like, I don't know. Jesus Christ. The Yeti like dies laughing. He's like, this is fucking hysterical. And Spyro is like, wait, have you seen Hunter? He's been missing, so that's like pretty concerning. Spyro hops away from the interview and is now talking to the professor and Elora.

1:53:58 The professor is like, I was over here, but now I'm here. Ah, Spyro is like, you know, shit happens. Whatever. Deal with it, man. It's called a glitch. Exactly. Elora asked Spyro when he'll visit her, but Spyro is like, hey, but for real, I don't know where Hunter is. Like, he followed me, and now I don't know where he is. Has anyone fucking seen him? Yeah, who cares? The Professor and Elora are like, I don't know, and they go off into a portal and leave. Not my problem. Spyro comes up on Sheila, the kangaroo, and is like, hey, do you know where Hunter is? Sheila is like, Hunter made me promise not to tell you where they went. What the fuck, Hunter? Spyro is like, they?

1:54:41 And then Spyro rolls up on a site of fireworks, possibly celebrating that the Sorceress is gone, where Hunter and Bianca are smooching. Spyro is like, what the fuck, man? His incessant hitting on her worked. OK, I don't want to push that narrative that wearing someone down will get them to love you. Oh, my God. But yes, it worked. Yeah, no, the whole situation is definitely she was genuinely interested in Hunter from the beginning. She just needed to get past all this bullshit before she could take time to go out with him. They were politics. But also, like, damn.

1:55:22 But also, what the fuck, man? I thought about it earlier. I was like, it'd be pretty funny if they did end up together in the end, but I did not think it would happen. Holy shit. That's hilarious. Do you think that's a ballsy choice? I think it's a great choice. OK, you're like, it's unexpected, but it is fun that they took it that way. Yeah, definitely. So Spyro is like, are you fucking kidding me? And then Elora comes up and is like, dude, relax. Enjoy the fireworks. Like, put your shit aside. It's fine. They are. She sits next to him, and Elora and Spyro kind of cuddle a little bit to watch the rest of the fireworks. And that is Spyro 3.

1:56:03 That's the end, huh? There were some fireworks, and that was it. OK, wait, actually, there's one last thing. What is there? So in Endgame, Moneybag sees Spyro and is like, what up? I just found a dragon egg. I'm going to sell it for a shit ton of money. And like walks away. And you're like, are you fucking kidding me? I spent hours saving every dragon egg, and you're just going to sell yours on like the illegal, illicit market? Fuck you. So you go up and you chase him and you fire breathe on him. And every time you do more and more gems, which are your gems that he extorted from you, you fall out of his pockets. So here you literally run around fireballing his ass to get all your money back.

1:56:47 Damn right. And I would do it too. Oh, it's satisfying. Spyro chases money bags for like a long time, getting hundreds. And sometimes if you paid up, even thousands of gems back from this capitalist piece of shit until he eventually runs out of energy and says he'll give up, he'll retire. He's going to move to the swamp and be a haiku poet. No, you are no Jin fucking Sakai. No. And as he does, Spyro is able to get that last egg that he tried to steal and flip. Okay, now that's the real ending of Spyro 3, when money bags gets his and gets shamed into the swamp to write poems.

1:57:29 I'm still mad Moneybags wasn't the big bad all along. I think he is, technically. Overall, yeah. Fuck RIPTO, like aiding and abetting a warlord who's hurting communities is just as bad, you know? Because you can't escape capitalism. So that's the end of the game, but I want to talk about kind of what happens with Spyro the franchise after this game. Please. So after this, Insomniac moved past the Spyro franchise after Spyro the third Spyro, like we talked about. Ted Price basically was like, look, we did everything we wanted to do. We can't push this character further, and the team has other stories to tell, which is super fucking valid. Following Spyro, Insomniac worked on Ratchet and Clank, the Resistance games, and of course the Spider-Man games and the upcoming Wolverine game that I'm just dying to hear more about.

1:58:16 Because at this point, as of this episode dropping, we've really only had like a clip of Wolverine in a bar. Right. And also, just you mentioned it, Ratchet and Clank hold such a near and dear place in my heart. Yeah, you played the most recent one as well, and it's pretty good, right? Yeah, I really enjoyed it. The No Loads was really incredible. Oh, I love that. They hide it in cutscenes and shit, but still, it was still really well done. Who's mad about that? No, I wasn't. I love that. So, you know, Insomniac is like, I'm over it, let's go. But Spyro as a franchise moved on. While Insomniac pivoted to these new projects, the Spyro fan base is like, we need more. So two years later, in 2002, Digital Eclipse put out Spyro, Season of Ice for the Game Boy Advance.

1:59:01 And after that franchise bopped around through like a handful of developers and publishers and platforms, it kind of started to fizzle, and it just never really had that same acclaim and love as the original Insomniac trilogy, which is kind of just anecdotally called the Spyro trilogy, which I love that it's kind of mean about the other ones, but... Right. This is the first big one, and it's great. Well, yeah, they were kind of built all together. You know, like you said, Lord of the Rings style. Any dragon property is Lord of the Rings to me, so you really can't get that away from how my brain works. Right, but I just mean the back-to-back-to-back nature of it all. Certainly. Now, nearly 20 years later, for 2018 Spyro's Reignited Trilogy, most of the gang came back together.

1:59:47 Tom Kenny, like I mentioned, came back to re-record some voice lines and do the voice for the first game. Even Stuart Copeland recorded some new music and gave his blessing on the remastering of his original music. Yeah, he really did just love this series and the music that he put forth with it. His entire family did. Because as of today, Stuart Copeland's son, Patrick, the son that loved Spyro, is now a game developer at Insomniac Games. Get the fuck out of here. Stuart has said he's very proud. I think it's a very sweet story about a boy chasing his dreams. No, it truly is. That's really fucking great, because, you know, he's using it to trace a real true passion.

2:00:29 Totally. Insomniac was not behind the development of the Reignited Trilogy, but they've clearly been very happy about it. So much of their original vision came back around for the Reignited Trilogy, and the team was happy to share as many assets as they could, but they were like, hey, you know what, if you want to do this, go for it. It's not impossible. It's totally doable. Here's all the tools we have. And twice for Bob, the developer who had been overseeing some previous Spyro franchises, like in the Skylander world, took on rebuilding these three games with the help of Insomniac. The Reignited Trilogy was announced and released in 2018 in tandem with their sister series Crash Bandicoot.

2:01:13 Now, Ted Price did an interview before the release of the Reignited Trilogy, where he talked about what a beloved franchise Spyro is, and that was very classy about the whole thing and actually wished them well. Ted Price said that the people at Toys for Bob were really good people. They are artists at heart and that his team was consulted and included as much as they wish the entire way through development. In its first week, Spyro, the Reignited Trilogy, sold over a million copies, a feat that took the original game a full year to complete. Damn. And the world was good again. And that is everything I've got for the Spyro trilogy. Thank you so much, Andrea.

2:01:54 Yeah, I really loved these games growing up. I also played Crash. I played both sides. You know, I can't pick a side. It happens. But Spyro just feels very close to me, and I really wanted to learn more about it, and finding out that, like, the whole Copeland family is involved with Insomniac, and how classy Ted Price is as a creator and a leader of this group really inspired me and made me really happy. And this game is silly, and it was very fun to replay it. I'm not going to lie. I had a really good time playing through these. A couple of frustrating moments, but overall, very fun. Yeah, it's one of the rare games that you played as a child, too. Right, like I said, I didn't have a lot of games.

2:02:36 I had a lot of hand-me-downs, which is why I'm like, well, I guess I'll just play this over and over again. I'm going to turn this into a skateboarding game now because I can't get the real skateboarding game, so we're going to do this. And I'm glad you explained for me anyway the whole Skylander thing, because I really didn't understand how Spyro went from the Spyro games to this whole Skylander stuff. I still kind of don't really get it. I'm not going to. These are the only three that I've played. I did not get into Fire and Ice. There is a game about Sparks, the Dragonfly. There's a whole Skylander thing that has kind of an amiibo-like toy structure with it. I was out of the loop.

2:03:16 I'm not trying to get back in the loop. I have other games to play, you guys. I'm busy. But yeah, that is Spyro. I was going to say, you just gave them three in a row. You haven't really done that yet. No, it was a lot of games. Yeah. But if you did enjoy and had fun with me, please leave a like and subscribe if you want to. I'd really appreciate it, because you can help boost this show and get in the hands of more people. If you want to see our other episodes or check out some of the backlog or learn about us, you can check out our website, theothercastlepodcast.com. That's the othercastlepodcast.com. And over there, you can also find links to our Patreon. You can also find links to our Discord.

2:03:56 You can find links to all sorts of different things We also stream on Twitch every Friday night at 8:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. It's very fun. And we usually let you guys vote on what we play, and we'll drop some extra knowledge, maybe some cutting room floor footage or fun facts that we just couldn't slam into the actual episode. Slam into the episode was a very aggressive way of saying that. I need like, I need some fruit. My blood sugar's low. It's all right. We can wrap up. But before we do, we just want to thank our patrons who help produce the show. Friends and listeners like you. Trevor, Molly, Brian. Krisha, Molly Mock, Jackie. Ellen and Tijen.

2:04:38 All right. Thank you so much, Goombas, for tuning in for another episode. We will be back next week with an all new one. Yeah, thank you all so much. I'm so excited for this season. I'm having so much fun already. All right. Until next time, this is Tom and Andrea reminding you. Don't skip the cut scenes. Hey, that's supposed to be my line. I took it.