After finishing Spyro 3 Reignited I felt very conflicted. Content wise, I think Spyro 3 is probably the best of the original trilogy, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I played the worst version of the game after finishing it.

I took a break from the reignited trilogy after finishing Spyro 2 back when the game released in 2018. I remember hearing about all the performance issues and glitches with 3 specifically and figured I could take a break and wait for the glitches to get patched since I was feeling some burn out after completing Spyro 1 and 2 back to back. Based on what I had heard about Spyro 3 when the trilogy originally released, I think a lot of those original glitches and performance issues were fixed, but I still experienced a lot of really annoying glitches and performance issues even now in 2024. My game's performance slowed down to a crawl multiple times and the skateboarding races ended up being really annoying since I experienced multiple instances of Spyro trying to half pipe of the middle of the race track, completely killing my speed and making me wipe out most of the time.

To focus on some positives, I think Spyro 3 does a better job of balancing the new ideas introduced in Ripto's rage with the core collectathon gameplay from Spyro 1. I think most of 3's minigames are better than 2's. I'm really glad the spirit particles from 2 are gone and think that it makes the levels feel less repetitive and formulaic than 2's.

I think Spyro 3 also has the best story and villain in the original trilogy. The cutscenes with the sorceress are great and serve as a great motivation to take her down.

I know the different characters tend to be hit or miss with people, but I generally liked them. I think they provided a nice variation to the gameplay while mostly staying true to spyro's core gameplay. I think Sparx's sections are probably the weakest since the controls never fully clicked for me and it probably has the least to do with the core gem collecting of the trilogy.

Overall, I think Spyro 3 is alright. I think I can say it's my favorite of the trilogy, but I can't help but feel I would have had more fun with the original. I was shocked with the lack of polish still present in Reignited's Spyro 3, and while none of it is game ruining, it was still really annoying to deal with and ended up sticking with me more than the stuff I liked about the game.