if you know me, i've played my handful of management sims so i went into this expecting a nice, high-budget management sim and came out of it with:

- a crippling horsegirl addiction
- a membership at my local racetrack
- a supporter tote bag from the japanese retired horse association
- a designer collab t-shirt (special week design)
- an elevation chart spreadsheet of every major race for each distance (made by yours truly)
- countless acrylic stands of my favorite characters (mostly the symbolis)
- a new shelf (for the starting gate/winning live cds)

AND
- a game that's pretty fun too : )

so yeah this game may or may not be life-changing but more than that i think it's also pretty neat! 🐱👍🐴

"unapyoi"/10

a chain can always be broken...as long as one has the will to break it.

as a longtime ff fan, it's been a hot minute since the last mainline title was released with the exception of xiv's numerous expansions, but it's been an even longer time since a mainline game has been this good!

fear not, i won't spoil anything but the story here was probably the aspect i was most worried about going into it, and after all is said and done, i'm glad to say that i really enjoyed it, loved it even! it starts out fairly riveting given the revenge story motivations it's got going out for it and despite the dark fantasy aesthetic the tone is handled so well that it never feels needlessly edgy. so for those going into this expecting game of thrones with chocobos, you'll be sorely disappointed to find that it's very much an entry that's in touch with the legacy of final fantasy and its conventions.

a lot of the narratives i've come to love are often those concerning human relationships and while the game might present itself as a revenge story it becomes so much more than that over the course of the game. contrary to a lot of people it seems, i think the cast here is pretty well written! sure some characters inevitably get sidelined but i really enjoyed both clive ( literally me ) and jill's ( i love you queen ) journey and i found their dynamic really engaging and heartwarming. there's also a dynamic in here between clive and another dominant that i found really riveting and both the english and japanese va's really go all out and sell you on the rivalry with some riveting va work!

it's tackling a lot here and while it can be a bit lopsided at times i think it handles a lot of interesting perspectives on identity, loss, and what it means to be human without shying from the darker aspects of the human experience as well. it's such a life-affirming perspective on human willpower in dark times and for that, i can't help but unabashedly love it for what it's going for.

of course, much like other mainline titles, this one is not without its faults as i've found the rpg elements to take a fairly large backseat in favor of the more character action-focused gameplay. in regards to the gameplay actually, it does really feel a bit button mashy in the beginning. still, once the game opens up a bit and you have access to more abilities it feels great pulling off devastating combos since a lot of the game does actually reward you for risk-taking! a lot of the side content like hunts are fairly enjoyable as with previous entries that had those as well but the sidequest content can vary between being pretty fun to feeling like fetch quests entirely unfortunately. thankfully, it's more of the former in my experience!

another thing i'd like to mention is that the eikon fights in this game are not only really fun but also breathtakingly beautiful at times. final fantasy has long established the power of summons within it's narratives but never on a scale like this before. it's really such a visual feast for the eyes (which most of the game is already to be fair save for the motion blur at times) that truly feels like a next-gen experience and a step forward for the series. people discounting this as a purely dark fantasy aesthetic really have no idea what they're missing out on given how much this game is very clearly inspired by the older final fantasy games.

besides being a visual feast, the soundtrack in this game is phenomenal. so much so that after finishing, i've already ordered the soundtrack ! this isn't really a surprise though since soken has done incredible work on xiv and the way he's continued to showcase his sound with different instrumentation from usual is really a joy to experience! the main motif here is also so so good and comes into play at the perfect moments. the usage of it within cutscenes is really tasteful as well given that it plays appropriately to establish a mood and it elevates the overall game. easily one of the best soundtracks in recent years!

it's been such a long time since i've played a triple a game like this where the amount of passion and work put into is permeating through almost every aspect here. i went into this fairly apprehensive given my lapsing appreciation for square enix over the years but this is an especially strong case that with enough time and proper planning, they've still got people who are truly in tune with what makes the series special for so many. it's a game i'll be thinking about for a while and one i hope i'll continue to revisit in years to come.

" clive is literally me "/10

additional notes :

- it's also been such a long time since i've really played a game " all day " so thank you for those sleepless four nights ffxvi i'd do it all over again in a heartbeat 🐱👍

- a little tidbit for the film students but the visual direction of some of the cutscenes are pretty beautiful too with some tasteful usage of pans and other stuff framed as practical camera setups. there's a lot of rack focuses in here too that convey meaning beyond dialogue and the lighting in these scenes are really great in creating these warm/cold tones when they're required. very lovely stuff indeed :p

- english va was exceptional as was the script ! haven't finished the entirety of it with the jp script yet but the little that i've heard so far is really great as well so the loc team headed by koji fox did a good job as always ! a lot of it here feels pretty close to tactics ogre or matsuno's stuff in general so i definitely loved it !

hii everyone MITSTHONY URUTANO here ! the internet's least active backlogged user and it's time for a review of radiohead kid a mnesia exhibition !!!!

okay so despite being a huge fan of radiohead ( yikes !!!! ) i actually took forever to get around to this and after an exhausting week, i actually think this was probably the perfect thing to play ? i don't know exactly where i'd rank kid a and amnesiac on my personal album ranking but this little audiovisual experience certainly makes a case for both being intense and emotionally rich experiences throughout .

knowing that this was intended to be an actual exhibition that couldn't work logistically because of covid is such a fascinating thought when going through this because if anything, this is also an incredibly strong case for the strengths of the medium in its ability to transport us from place to place in a visually interesting and immersive way that otherwise couldn't work in real life . ( the pyramid room exhibit is PHENOMENAL )

there are some really gorgeous visuals paired with stellar sound design that make this glorified walking sim way more compelling than it should be despite it being mechanically limited as an experience . while i do think radiohead fans will definitely get the most out of this, i also think this could be a good way to introduce someone to their music ???? there's a lot here that reminded me of stuff like lsd dream emulator funnily enough but i think it's also just a really good visual representation of how it feels to listen to these albums in general . definitely something i'll be returning to from time to time as an excuse to listen to the albums again !

overall, i give this a " radiohead live at mtv beach house 1993 " / 10 !

ERRANT THOUGHTS :

- arbitrarily good productions is a fantastic name for a company

- the first two minutes of this game had an audio bug that played unbearably loud static and my brainrot genuinely made me think it was intended until i remembered that probably no song on amnesiac sounds like that .

( you can fix this by going into your control panel ----> sound ----> select your hardware device and go into its property tabs ----> advanced ----> select a bitrate that isn't above 24 )

- the lighting in this sometimes looks like a horror game and it's really cool in a freaky way lmao

- i wish more walking sims looked like this and i genuinely think this is one of the most beautiful things i've seen out of a smaller scale project like this

- i love how easy it is to get lost in this game but often times following the sound of thom yorke's voice will lead you where you need to go which i find really poignant lol

- in rainbows is still my favorite but yeah this is a pretty damn strong case for both of the albums included to be moved a bit higher in a personal ranking

obligatory " y'all know this is just my opinion right ? "

Good fucking lord.

My expectations were not high, A new beginning, while mediocre, showed a lot of promise, It had a decent story and good world building while looking great and sounding fine. Combat showed some potential as well.

But my god does Eternal night throw most of the decent foundation down the drain, it became one of the most miserable, insufferable beat em ups I have ever had the displeasure of playing.

I’ll get the good out of the way first, Eternal night looks fantastic, with detailed textures that have a lot of depth, excellent looking god rays, detailed particle effects, strong gameplay animations, and expressive faces during cutscenes to make up for stiff models. If you are insistent on playing this, play the Wii version, as it has extra particle effects and a much more stable frame rate.

The art direction is still stellar, with heavy uses of purple and dark blue (sans the awful pirate section) conveying the dark atmosphere well. The high European fantasy look of the first game is maintained well.

That’s where the praise ends.

The plot in Eternal night is the epitome of a rushed mess.

Despite the game setting up from the beginning that the Dark Dragon Malefor will return, there is zero urgency from anyone to either stop it from happening or prepare for when it happens.

Spyro is more concerned with saving Cynder, until he isn’t, then he’s casually trying to find an ancient tree spirit (all the while Spyro gains the ability to slow down time that he never uses during cutscenes, more on that in a bit), then he gets kidnapped by pirates and shows no urgency in escaping, then he casually searches for a map to an island (when he could have just asked the person who told him to go there where it was) while during all this Cynder was kidnapped, but he doesn’t seem shaken up at all. And shows zero anger or even annoyance when his time is wasted by the Chronicler telling him to just stay on the island. His non concerned and aloof attitude reaches the boiling point of hilarity when he finally confronts Gaul and casually taunts him, you would think someone meeting the person responsible for nearly exterminating their race would be a bit more abrasive, but Spyro has not a care in the world and seems to be doing this simply because he was told to.

The majority of the other characters are either much blander and more plot deviceish, or in Sparx’s case, insufferable.

Cynder shows little to no signs of trauma despite the game explaining how she was enslaved by Gaul since birth, and has the same causal attitude to the world being on the brink that Spyro does. With all but one scene in the beginning when she runs away equating to “ok let’s do what we should now”.

The Dragon elders were a highlight of new beginning, and rescuing them felt a little rewarding due to their fun personalities, here, you only interact with them for around five minutes, then they fuck off for the rest of the game, apparently preparing for the invasion, yet we get zero updates or clues as to what they are doing.

Sparx is even more insufferable this time around. His constant quips and jokes even annoying Spyro on many occasions. Every two lines during cutscenes you’ll have his peanut gallery comments about how he really doesn’t want to do what ever Spyro has to, how he hates being in danger, “well that happened” tier quips when something breaks or falls over, or making certain convos about himself when he really should just shut up.

You’re introduced to a new character named the chronicler, and while he has potential to contribute to the world building, he serves as little more than a plot device, randomly pulling Spyro into tutorials to restore his powers that he lost from the last game. And later wasting Spyro’s time by pulling him to his island to wait out Malefor’s return. When Spyro says he won’t wait it out and will save Cynder and stop Gual, the chronicler shows zero resistance in helping him, despite stressing that it’s imperative that Spyro waits with him seconds earlier.

Earlier in the game he tells Spryo he should only use dragon time when he really needs to, but Spyro never thinks to ever use it in cutscenes, he could have easily used it to save Cynder from being kidnapped, or to get his map then leave with out getting caught, but this never crosses his mind.

Despite the game showing that the apes are now the main antagonists with Gaul at the helm, none of them show any personality or eagerness to wipe out the dragon race sans the initial attack on the temple. There is no indication that they are trying to find and kill the elders, nor does Spyro act angered when he learns of what they did to his kind. Gaul is also an incredibly shallow antagonist who is purely a plot device to waste time till Malefor returns, Ironically Spyro does a much better job of that, as stated above.

After Gual’s defeat, Spyro encases himself in amber and the player is supposed to feel some sort of defeatism due to being unable to prevent Malefor’s return. Of course as I mentioned several times already, Spyro’s lack of urgency makes this demand moot and unearned. And brings the games hollow, rushed, trash fire of a story to a merciful end.

Eternal night’s music isn’t very memorable, but for what it’s worth, it’s at least inoffensively bland. You’ll hear mostly dark orchestral tracks, with some heavy of use of strings to try and convey a dark atmosphere, but given you dick around on a pirate ship for half of the games length, this falls on its ass.

The voice acting isn’t very good this time, ranging from ok to awful, Elijah Wood phones in his lines heavily, sounding bored out of his skull, Billy West’s performance as Sparx is simply Fry but very annoying, Gary Oldman sounds like he’s about to doze off, and Cynders VA has no emotion beyond mild annoyance. Gaul’s va does an ok job, but the growly tone makes him hard to take seriously. Martin Jarvis is clearly phoning it in as the chronicler, but his general smooth normal speaking voice does make up for the shallow writing his character was built around for what that’s worth.

A new beginning had pretty bad combat and basic level design, but you could tell there was potential for better there. Eternal Night is not that example of better. Not even close.

Having played the Wii version for this review, I tried both controller options. The Wii mote and Nunchuk map most of the functions to regular buttons, but they also double up some with motions, like flicking the Wii mote up to launch when you can hold B or waggling for melee when you could simply press B. There was zero attempt to do anything substantial here with this control scheme, nor is there any sort unique exclusive mechanics to the Wii version that would have made the gameplay at least more admirable from an effort standpoint. You’re better off using the classic controller. Unfortunately there’s also no Gamecube controller support, despite the mapping on the CC being the same as New beginning.

The melee combat went from annoying to barely functioning this time around. Enemy attack animations are now faster and deal twice as much damage, this is to account for Spyro’s new dragon time ability, but said ability also slows Spyro down too, to an unreasonable degree. I understand doing this for balance reasons, but when enemies hit so hard and so fast as a way to cheaply pad out the difficulty, it feels as if just like the story, the combat is trying to waste the players time as much as possible.

Your breaths do have different functions this time instead of just being a short spray. Though the only one worth using is Earth breath, as it’s a gigantic flail like weapon with insanely fast start up. Using the hold and aerial version offers good crowd control as well. Relying on the other breaths is suicide as their slow startups are not worth it due to the extremely powerful attacks from mooks. Your general combat loop before and after you get earth breath will be relying on air combos, then holding down or mashing Y till a dead enemy refills your magic with dropped green gems. It’s astounding that they made this worse than it already was.

It doesn’t help that the input reading can be outright random at times, several times when I was doing a ground combo, Spyro would use his launcher instead, this happens semi frequently and is infuriating.

Enemies still drop generous amounts of gems after defeat, so the combat saves itself from being insufferable to being monotonous instead, given how often you’ll be killed from either unfair ganks or off screen projectiles.

The game incentivizes air combos even more this time, as every hit will give you a gem. This is clearly a band aid solution to the unfair amount of damage enemies deal out, since even if you refill your health by doing an air combo, you’ll still fall straight down or slightly away and get wailed on regardless.

Your heavy attacks for your breaths have slightly more variety this time, but you have the choice of a shitty fire dash with no i-frames, a stronger, broken version of your launcher, a slower version of that, and an invincible electric tornado to melt HP bars. Much like the breaths, only earth, and in some situations electric is useful. Meaning for 98% of the time, you’ll hit X to do double damage and fire out an air combo, get refilled with generous green gem drops, and repeat.

The screen nuke furies from the last game return, and they interrupt the flow even more this time due to a lame slow mo charge up and slow spin cam every damn time you use them. These are completely unskippable and they make the combat even more boring than it already is.

Eternal night does make the effort to have more to its level design than straight hallways, but the horrible platforming quashes any potential good will from the player for this effort. Spyro’s jump arc and momentum are completely random. You can never tell how high he’ll jump or how far his double jump will move him forward. Half of the time the game misreads your second B press as a hold input and Spyro will glide instead. Leading to dozens upon dozens of infuriating deaths, most of which place you back at the start of a combat encounter due to the manual save feature not working and the autosave cheaply placing you at loaded up mobs.

Sometimes you may need to use Dragon time to slow down moving platforms, but this does nothing to fix the fucked momentum and jump height, so you’ll still die constantly.

There are collectables this time around, with feathers unlocking concept art and green and orange relics increasing health and magic respectively, but the latter two are pointless to collect as mooks drop enough red and green gems to make the upgrades pointless. And actually going for them means you’ll have to suffer the awful platforming and risk possibly falling to your death and reloading at an enemy mob. So the incentive is not worth suffering the terrible mechanics.


Like the last game, each area has a hidden gem cap that is reached after you’ve gathered enough after dying and retrying enough times. This is the only way to get enough gems to upgrade your breaths to not do chip damage at the end game, as trying to play the game naturally will fuck you over. Ideally, if the player is severely under powered, the game should compensate the player enough blue gems (A reasonable amount) to get through the section, but no effort is made for that here, so if for some reason you want to play this, be prepared to intentionally die over and over again to farm blue gems so the game doesn’t become hell later.

All but two of Eternal night’s true bosses (will be explained later) are reskins of New beginning’s. You’ll simply wait for them to open them selves, activate dragon time, then wail on them with earth breath and ground combos. Waiting for an opening in a boss fight is standard game design yes, but the attacks here are poorly telegraphed and even after getting an opportunity it’s highly likely the boss will get in a cheap shot due to dragon time expiring and them having insanely fast start up. Bosses suffer from the same inflated damage values as regular enemies so you’ll be getting 2-3 shotted from cheap hits constantly.

The telegraphing on boss moves is as mentioned rather poor, since the animations aren’t detailed enough to judge what kind of attack is coming, and audio cues will often be random, making the fight much more frustrating.

Hilariously, after you defeat Gual’s second form, the game is supposed to present a prompt to you to finish him off, thing is, that prompt never shows up on screen, (It’s ZR/R2) so it’s likely the player will fail this and have to start over. It’s a hilarious and sad stamp on what a rushed, horribly designed mess the game is.


Eternal night also features some god awful gimmicky strafe boss fights against ape pilots. You’ll be spending half the fight trying to figure out how long to charge your fire ball, other wise it will hit the ground or soar over the pilots head. Add to the fact that you have to constantly interrupt your rhythm with activating dragon time to dodge incredibly fast fire balls, and you have a trash fire of a gimmick that wears out its welcome fast, and oh god does it ever do that, as the first three boss fights are strafe fights.

There is absolutely zero reason to play The Legend of Spyro the Eternal Night. It’s story is a hackneyed, overly contrived and poorly written mess with dumb characters, the music is bland, and the combat and platforming are straight up broken. It’s a shame the strong fidelity had to be tied to a game as bad as this, but much more obviously, it’s embarrassing that Spyro, an icon of the platforming genre, had been reduced to this try hard trash fire.

3/10.

From a financial standpoint, reboots make perfect sense when your IP keeps giving diminishing returns. Spyro was the epitome of this in the 2000s, plagued by a sizable chunk of mediocre to terrible games. Enter The Legend of Spyro: A new beginning, A darker, more serious take on the franchise with obvious Lord of the Rings and Avatar the last airbender influences. While ambitious, it falls short where it matters.


Before playing this, I read up on some interviews with developers from Krome Studios about any potential ideas they had to cut and compromises they had to make. One of them mentioned that they wanted gameplay to be more inline with the classic games. With some metroid/zelda esque exploration thrown in, and I can only assume here, better combat.

When you play A new beginning you find out quickly none of those gameplay mechanics were implemented. Instead you get a padded, linear beat em up that is an absolute bore to play.

Combat in this game mostly consists of one constant loop of punch x3, launcher, air combo, horn dive. Spyro only has one ground and aerial combo that you will be using nonstop. Other issues plague this however, your attack animation speed is generally just a little bit slower than the mooks you will be mowing down, and since you almost always fight mobs, you will constantly have your combos interrupted. You would think this would make the game unfairly difficult, but that couldn’t be more false. Enemies will always drop red health gems after death, making any damage you take inconsequential.

For what ever reason, the devs decided to include a slow motion effect when performing an air combo. This gets old fast so I recommend turning it off in the pause menu. Why this was included is bizarre, as it constantly disrupts combat flow when it’s on. I can only assume it was included to look cool to the target audience of young kids, but I can’t imagine anyone over the age of eight finding this cool after doing it once.

Dying to enemy mobs also holds zero consequence, as the game will simply plop you right back where you left off with your health and magic fully restored.

If there was punishment for you dying, the games dodge mechanics certainly would not help you in preventing it. You lock on to enemies with the left trigger, but your dodge covers such little ground it is completely worthless. Add to the fact that the lock on only hyper focuses on one enemy when you almost always fight mobs, and you wonder why such a useless mechanic was included.

Launching into an air combo is almost always unsafe because you will have at least 3 enemies waiting under you to smack you when you land. You can try and horn dive to a safe spot, but sometimes you’ll auto lock onto the nearest enemy instead, leaving you open for a hit regardless.

Given this is a Spyro game, you have access to fire breath, as well as electric, ice and earth breaths. Each breath also has their version of a grenade (sans ice) you can fire with the Y button.


Fire’s breath is only useful for interrupting enemy attacks and for partial crowd control because sometimes they still get super armour at random and hit you through it. It’d make more sense if certain enemies could super armour through it, as in the classic games armour enemies were immune to fire breath, but here it just feels useless.

Fire Grenades are a different story, they have a massive AOE and are the absolute best tool to kill bosses with. You will always be given green energy gems after killing enemies that restore your magic, so there is zero risk in spamming grenades if you wish. Further driving home how lazily designed the combat is.

Lighting breath is completely broken, by simply standing still and holding X near cliffs or 20 foot ledges, you can simply throw enemies off for an instant kill. You gain the same amount of gems regardless of how you kill an enemy, so there is zero incentive to play well. Simply spam your most powerful tools so you can refill on guaranteed green gems that will always drop.

Electric grenades will launch an enemy into the air for a guaranteed air combo, when upgraded it can even do continuous damage, so if you don’t want to bother with getting hit a little more than usual, simply press Y and begin the boring air combo loop earlier.


Ice breath is borderline useless, it takes far to long to freeze one enemy and you’ll always get hit before you can fully freeze one when fighting more than one mook, if you do manage to freeze an enemy, You can smash them for an instakill, but the method to achieve that is way more trouble than it is worth.

Ice is the only element with no grenade, instead you have darts, Spyro fires these like an assault rifle. It functions the exact same as the ice breath, with the same extremely slow method of freezing for an instakill, only this one drains your magic faster, making it even more useless.

Earth breath is as broken as Lightning breath is, but in a different way. When fully upgraded. It functions like a fully automatic shotgun. With an extremely high rate of fire and damage equivalent of a fire grenade, you’ll breeze through the final two levels with minimal issue, as if this game wasn’t brain dead easy enough.

Earth grenades are a more accurate, less powerful version of lightning grenades. Though unlike lightning grenades, they can stunlock a (in this case final, since you get them so late in the game) boss. And since you can refill your energy from crystals in that first phase, it makes said final boss even more of a joke than she already is.

Each breath has a Fury attack that is a basic screen nuke, all furies function the exact same and you never have to worry about using them sparingly as the game will always give you purple gems to replenish your meter, killing around ten enemies fills it and each encounter has you fighting at minimum eight mooks each. Fully upgrading an elements breath and grenade makes your furies even stronger, if you want another OP feather in this games broken cap.

On paper, the melee combat and breaths could be fun, with the added benefit of being able to switch the latter on the fly with the dpad, the combo potential could be immense, given the right amount of time and effort. There is none of that care here, the player is simply gift wrapped OP tools to deal with the nonstop mobs they’ll be facing for hours on end. You’ll be spamming Y and mashing B with none of that resulting in one iota of satisfaction.


While the bosses in classic Spyro were never mind blowing from a gameplay perspective, they served their purpose and were polished and fun fights. This is not the case in A new beginning, every single boss, including the final one, can be killed by simply spamming fire grenades. You can imagine just how riveting this high octane gameplay must be, causally running up to a boss and mashing Y nonstop, your screen glowing bright orange and your frame rate tanking to the high teens. Each boss has multiple stages, but this is moot, each of them have crystals clusters strewn about that you can smash for red, green, purple, and blue gems. Making these bosses simply pathetic from a gameplay standpoint. This is hammered in even more when you realize that even if you die, you keep all of the blue and purple gems you collected, and your health and magic are refilled, while the game reloads you to the beginning of the bosses current phase. It’s again, absolutely pathetic that a player can simply keep dying to stock up on blue gems to upgrade themselves, or purple gems for a free screen nuke. Some bosses, like ice king, throw projectiles that break open to gift the player even more gems. It’s absolutely disgusting that this is what passed for boss design.


When it comes to level design, A new beginning is also pathetic in that regard. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to make a linear game, the bare minimum is on display here. 99% of the game is running down hallways, fighting mobs, then repeating, you’ll have the occasional moment of pulling a lever, hitting a button to raise a platform, or gliding ten feet, but wailing on B and Y in monster closets will be the norm. Spyro’s iconic charge is only used twice the entire game, and the only areas where you’ll actually have room to use the mechanic are long narrow bridges in Tall Mountain. Since the hallways are so narrow it makes using it pointless.


After you complete an area and rescue a Dragon Elder, you’ll be railroaded into a tutorial on your new breath you found in the previous level, it’s the exact same tutorial tasks each time, but to the games credit, they do vary up how you do each task by teaching you the breaths properties. It makes sense from a story perspective, so I didn’t mind them, they serve their purpose, though some more variety in lessons would be welcome. You also don’t unlock your breaths grenades until you do the training sessions, so I appreciate that at least one area of the game had some attempt at balance.

You would think that with nonstop enemy mobs, blue gems for upgrades would be plentiful. The answer to this is both yes and no. If you play the game naturally, you won’t have enough gems to upgrade even three of your breaths to the fullest, but, there is a hidden cap in each level the player can hit, provided they know where to farm. Remember when I said bosses had respawning crystal clusters? A player can exploit this for several minutes to an hour by simply breaking all of them then dying, reloading the crystal clusters until they reach the blue gem cap. The ice fortress is the only exception to this, as you’ll instead have to exploit a tower that keeps sending skeletons at you until you choose to destroy it. Unless the player uses this exploit, they will not be able to max out their breaths, making the game artificially harder if played naturally.

A new beginning is seriously lacking in enemy variety. 85% of the enemies you face will be small, medium and large apes. Reskinned for each level. Even when you fight other foes, the strategy never changes, either ground combo then launch and wail in the air, or abuse your OP lightning or earth breaths.
A new beginning does feature some on rails flight sections, and they aren’t very good, simply holding the right trigger and avoiding over telegraphed cannon fire is enough, killing enemies is pointless during these segments, as you get no blue gems. There is also a train chase setpiece late game, but again, all you do is hold something, in this case forward on the stick, and mash Y when needed. The sections are a nice idea, but end up as pointless fluff.

Visually, A new beginning looks incredible. Textures pop with incredible depth, god rays pepper environments with high detail in shifting light shafts, particle effects like Sparx’s sparks, volcanic sparks, snow and pollen all fall constantly during gameplay and add great atmosphere to the stunning fidelity. There are some corners cut during cutscenes, characters animate with stiff, recycled limb animations, but for a game that looks this good, it’s a fine compromise, this is made up for with some excellent eye and mouth movements, showing dozens of different expressions.

Animations during gameplay look great as well, spyro has a different color trail depending on which breath you have selected, the game also helps these attack animations feel very weighty and powerful with some generous hit stun.

The overall artstyle of the game captures the European fairly tale aesthetic quite well, with some aspects of Tibetan and Scandinavian imagery as well. The starting forest has comforting feeling of safety and isolation with its towering mushrooms, the snow fortress gives the vibe of a war torn tragedy haunted by dead soldiers, Tall mountain has a great spiritual aesthetic etc.

As for the character designs, everyone but Spyro and Sparx look great. The dragon elders are faithful in appearance to the ones from the classic series, with some cool elemental themed spikes on their tails, like a flame tipped spike for Ignitus, or a rocky flail for Terrador. The ape army all fit within the story book style the game is going for and each areas unique enemies fit the theme, like rock golems in tall mountain. Bosses are all massive and convey a good sense of scale.

As I just said, Spyro and Sparx do not look great artistically, Spyro is incredibly ugly. While his over all look is mostly faithful to his classic appearance, it all goes downhill when you see his face. Spyro’s face was meant to resemble an alligator, but instead he ends up looking like a meth addict. He has a disturbingly human shaped skull dome, gigantic bulbous eyes and a creepy mouth that extends all the way back. Sparx meanwhile looks both like some furry’s OC and bootleg art you would see on action replay box art at the same time. His massive forehead, long gangly arms, and disturbingly human teeth look completely out of place.

Par for the course for 6th gen multiplats, the Xbox version offers the best performance and visuals, the PS2 version suffers from more frequent frame drops and is missing some particle effects and god rays, and the GC version, while visually on par with the Xbox version, has more frequent frame drops to the low 20s. The Xbox version only has frame drops during grenade spamming during boss fights, as mentioned a few paragraphs ago.


The music in A new beginning is more immersive than memorable, but I enjoyed every track featured. Krome nailed the lord of the rings vibe they were aiming for, with many songs featuring chanting and heavy use of strings. You’ll be in for a soothing, calming vibe for most of the run time and some epic orchestral pieces during boss fights.
The quality of the voice acting is quite high. High profile hollywood talent was brought in for the voice work, with Elijah Wood giving a great performance as Spyro, accurately portraying a brave hero on a journey bigger than himself. Gary Oldman is a highlight as Ignitus, playing the role of a grizzled veteran well. David Spade does a fine job as Sparx, even though most of the jokes and humour he was given is painfully unfunny at times, he did the best with what he had.


A new beginning’s plot has obvious lord of the rings and avatar the last airbender influences, with spyro being both a chosen one having to master 4 elements and having to wage war against a god like malevolent being that has pushed the once dominant peaceful race back to four islands. It’s the sole reason one would tolerate the terrible gameplay in the first place.

It was clever of the writers to convey that the apes pushed the last 4 dragon elders back to the four islands to hide the lack of towns or settlements. Each level shows that the apes are either in the process of creating a settlement, or using it as a work site. It makes the player think that if this small part of the world has been found and is just beginning the process of colonization after the dragon genocide, that the rest of the world must be even worse.

Cynder establishes herself as a threat early and your objective in each level to rescue a dragon elder sells this even further. She’s always one step ahead of you and lets each elder live after draining enough of their magic, giving you a feeling of helplessness as you keep scoring hollow victories. The ending also follows this pattern, as even after Spyro accomplishes what he has to, it’s to little to late.

Everyone in a new beginning is enjoyable to bland, with the exception Sparx. Sparx constantly ruins almost every scene he is in with lame jokes, riffing on what ever is happening with annoying sarcastic comments, and generally unfunny wink wink nudge nudge tv writer tier humour. Every time Sparx opened his mouth I wanted to slap him with a fly swatter.

Some of classic Spyro’s personality does shine through from time to time, such as when a hostage he saves is rude to him and he snaps back with “Sorry, you were clearly going to spring into action”. Otherwise he’s an enjoyable new interpretation of the character, being an enjoyable heroic adventurer who stands up to danger. The dragon elders are all memorable too, with them all having one dominant personality trait to make them feel distinct, Ignitus is calm and observant, Volteer is verbose, Cyrill is pretentious etc.

If you can tolerate sparx, you’ll get something out of the story here, the world building is excellent and the story proper is well paced and structured.

A new beginning would have been far better suited as a cartoon than a game, it has incredible atmosphere, solid world building and plot, enjoyable characters sans Sparx, high fidelity, stunning art direction, great voice work, and immersive music. But video games are an interactive medium, and the gameplay here has bare minimum level design, bland boring combat, terrible boss fights, and a poorly balanced upgrade system that demands exploiting it.

You’d be better off watching an LP if you’re really curious, no amount of other talents on display here make this even remotely worth playing.

5/10.