《斯派罗：英雄之尾》

Cover art (done by Drew Struzan)

Shortly before Enter the Dragonfly exited its tumultuous development, Universal started making plans for another studio to develop the next main Spyro game. They ended up going with Eurocom, a much more experienced developer with plenty of work on licensed projects, and it would eventually release after a relatively healthy production as Spyro: A Hero’s Tail. This wouldn’t simply repeat past glories, instead attempting to shake things up aesthetically and mechanically with a solid if unremarkable open-ended platformer.

The Dragon Realms and other places are being corrupted by Dark Gems, life-sapping crystals of immense power which are being planted by Gnorcs under the command of the evil dragon elder Red. Accompanied by a variety of pals to help him out along the way, it’s up to Spyro to travel the worlds, destroy the Dark Gems, and defeat Red and his forces.

A Hero’s Tail carries over the same basic platforming formula and moveset seen in previous games, but the actual details differ in both the controls and the overall structure. The charge and flame buttons have been swapped for whatever reason, moving around generally feels floatier, and you have considerably more air control with the ability to double jump and even grab ledges.

Much like Ripto’s Rage, you’ll need to acquire more abilities to further explore the world. Some of these are taught to you by other dragon elders, such as swinging from poles, jumping between adjacent walls, and headbashes that destroy the Dark Gems which cleanse and open up areas. Defeating bosses also earns you new breath types that can be used to further damage enemies and activate switches, including electricity, water, and ice. These new abilities flow quite nicely into the main gameplay through their ease of use, which is much appreciated given how levels have been reworked.

Instead of a series of self-contained stages, each homeworld is now a group of interconnected areas where you must hunt down and destroy all 10 Dark Gems before you can face the boss. While collecting isn’t as important, it’s still worthwhile picking up gems, since they’re now used to buy items from Moneybags’ various shops like chest keys, projectile bombs, and smaller upgrades. You’ll also stumble across Dragon Eggs, which unlock concept art and minigames, and Light Gems to power up the Professor’s various inventions such as supercharges and a giant rolling ball.

Spyro isn’t alone in his adventure, as you’ll find a handful of friends to control in a variety of smaller solo stages. These include Sgt Byrd taking on the Speedways, exploring underground caverns as Blink the mole, controlling Sparx in rail shooter-style levels, and using Hunter’s newfound agility and archery to reach more perilous areas. They play quite decently, with Blink and Hunter being versatile enough to have some impressively elaborate stages. It’s annoying that you have to beat them twice to get the more crucial Light Gems, but they make for a nice change of pace in what can sometimes be a fairly slow game.

Part of that languid pace comes down to the floatier movement and slower charging speed, which takes away some of the immediacy that earlier games had. But it’s also affected by the level design, where areas are much larger, full of different directions to go and secret areas to find. It’ll take some time to fully clear out a single area, and that often depends on whether you have the required abilities to explore them. Sometimes the more ponderous feel works against the game, mainly during the decently designed but overly long boss battles. Thankfully they place checkpoints after every three hits, so you don’t have to start over upon dying because bosses take an eternity to unveil their weak spots.

There’s a surprising amount of variety in how you tackle each of the homeworlds. The first one leads you around the main area as it introduces the general structure, while the second lets you loose to explore at your own pace, and then the latter two worlds put you through more linear tours of their stages. It helps to keep things interesting throughout, and the open-endedness breathes new life to Spyro‘s freeform exploration. Whether you’re opening up more areas, using new powers to explore hidden nooks and crannies for collectibles, or running around for its own sake, A Hero’s Tail makes for a compellingly different take on the Spyro style.

Unfortunately, it’s dragged down enough in enough spots that it ends up being merely good. Backtracking is sometimes tedious due to the numerous corridors or mandatory elevators that slow you down so the next area can seamlessly load in, though you can choose to teleport between Moneybags’ shops for a small fee. The floatiness of the controls makes more challenging platforming sections troublesome, especially when jumping between swinging poles that move around. You have no invincibility time when hit, which makes it easy for enemies and bosses to gang up on you. This becomes more common as the difficulty escalates around the halfway point, enough that the more linear homeworlds can become a slog.

Along with the gameplay, the overall tone’s seen a notable shift thanks to the presentation. The story has a cheekier personality, even dropping a handful of fourth wall-breaking gags, and is convincingly brought to a life by a brand new if small pool of voice actors led by Jess Harnell (best known as Wakko from Animaniacs). These are complimented by appealing character designs and nicely animated cutscenes, though they sadly can’t be skipped. The graphics are quite good overall, running with a consistent framerate (30fps on PS2, and 60fps on GameCube and Xbox) and showing off a variety of colorful locales full of flora and fauna.

The soundtrack was handled by Keith Leary, David Marsden, Paul Lawler and Craig Sharmat of Game Audio LTD, a production company who mainly did bouncy music for various licensed kids’ games of the early 2000s, and this is perhaps their best work. There are plenty of upbeat tunes which vary between pleasant and annoyingly chipper, but there’s a handful of atmospheric tracks that capture something close to earlier Spyro games.

While development proceeded smoothly enough that the team at Eurocom were initially approached to create a follow-up, they instead moved on to work on the tie-in game for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. With decent reviews but declining sales, this seemed to convince Universal (now owned by Vivendi) that more drastic steps needed to be taken to keep Spyro going. What resulted was a complete reboot of the gameplay and universe, in the form of the attempted fantasy epic trilogy known as The Legend of Spyro.

LINKS:

A Google document featuring interviews with members of Eurocom who worked on A Hero’s Tail, discussing various aspects of its development – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aj7qyaBELgIY-eoBMpr308pdgsv-bF8zF3tUYhuYR-M/edit?tab=t.0