Platform: Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, GameBoy Advance, PlayStation 2

Genre: Action

Number of Players: 1 - 2

One of the single most important things in the video game industry isn’t necessarily the games, though that is a fairly high ranking item, but having a character that can act as a mascot or two. Nintendo has Mario, Zelda, Samus, and a list of others, Sony has Ratchet and his pal Clank, Jax and Daxter, and a few others, Microsoft has Master Chief (lamest name for a character ever) as well as . . . . I guess that’s it. Outside of the main console manufactures though, third parties have their own mascots as well.

Then there’s Spyro, a mascot who in many ways, doesn’t have a home to call his own. While the purple dragon was originally the creation of Insomniac Games, he eventually found a home with Equinox Digital Entertainment and Vivendi, and now he’s living with Krome Studios and Sierra Entertainment. The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning was an attempt to reboot the series, something that had a drastic amount of waning interest and now The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night follows up the events of the previous game.

Spyro, along with some help from Sparx, was successful in his efforts to defeat and rescue Cynder from the Dark Master, and they have returned back to the temple of the dragons, but she’s not feeling comfortable in her new home. She’s decided to leave in fact, and while Spyro tries to stop her, the temple itself is suddenly attacked and Spyro then finds himself in a dreamlike realm and in the presence of the mysterious Chronicler who teaches the dragon of his untapped powers. Spyro is going to need every one of them, and not just to find Cynder, but to defeat Gaul and his forces that have sinister plans in store for the dragons.

I played the first three Sypro games and in fact, after searching through previous reviews, I apparently played 2002’s Enter the Dragonfly as well, but apparently it didn’t make much of an impact on me. I’m one of those who did in fact have a loss of interest in the series, but maybe someone else can do something new and interesting with Spyro, right? Well, that’s what I thought, but The Eternal Night falls short of being memorable, inventive, or even fun. Instead, this is just another platform game that is simply trying its best to work with the Wii controls.

Giving some new powers to the little dragon isn’t a bad thing, and that’s a definite plus for the game. Spyro has normally been relegated to simply using his ram attacks and linking them into crude combos to defeat his enemies, but that all charges, and quite early actually showing that at least there was some thought at doing something a bit different. Spyro can now breathe fire, though it’s limited, and you can use short bursts or long streams of fire. These can be upgraded as well with blue gems that you will find by defeating enemies or breaking apart large clusters of gems. As Spyro’s powers increase, he will get the ability to breathe ice, electricity and even earth attacks. Aside from the usual combo attacks, there is also a more powerful charge attack that can deal some heavy damage as well, something that helps the purple guy out quite a bit.

There are other gems you will find as well, such as purple gems that are used to fill your fury meter. Spyro has in fact had his fury attacks in pervious games, so this isn’t a huge change (he may have had breathe attacks as well, but honestly, the game has left that little of an impression on me.) Using your Fury attack will unleash a destructive elemental barrage on your enemies that should pummel most of them into quick and easy defeat. Spyro can also slow down time, though only temporarily, but this will become a huge part of passing through some of the more difficult areas and once your time meter has depleted, you merely need to wait for it to charge back up again.

My first issue with the game is that the Wii controls are inventive, but there are often too many different movements to perform. The combos, done simply by moving the remote back and forth, are fairly simple, but then they start adding in new things that too often, I know that I was doing but they just wouldn’t work as they were supposed to. If you want to knock an enemy back, something that’s used to push enemies through walls which you’ll need to enter other areas at times, you’ll first need to hit an enemy and boost them into the air. Once that’s done, you’ll need to jump into the air and thrust the remote forward. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t. The breath attacks are easy with the Wii set up as you just use the C button, but after dealing with too many frustrations with the remote, I decided to fall back on an old standby; the classic controller. It’s not often I used this save for virtual console games (since it’s required with many of them) and Geometry Wars Galaxies simply because the dual analog makes shooting and firing much easier, but Spyro is one of those rare instances that I found the remote just wasn’t making me enjoy the game.

The Eternal Night doesn’t really offer much variation in the long run. You end up simply moving from place to place, fighting off more bad guys, using breath attacks and combos, charge attacks when necessary, collecting gems and trying to find hidden quills and relics as you go from stage to stage. It’s all just run, jump, attack, repeat, and while that’s true of most platform games, the problem with Spyro is that it really doesn’t offer too much more save for the Dragon Challenges, but there are only accessible after beating the game.

While every character needs a voice, Spyro just doesn’t have the right one. Elijah Wood may be a name that is now recognizable thanks to his appearance in the Lord of the Rings films, but in the role of Spyro, his delivery of the dialog is flat, uninspired, and rather bland. There’s no real life found here, it’s just Wood saying his lines with a large amount of unenthusiastic glee. Billy West taking on the role of Sparx isn’t bad, but there are a few things that I hear in his voice and now Sparx make me think of Stimpy, Phillip J. Fry and the red M&M more than anything else.

The game doesn’t look bad, but it does suffer from some rather uninspired level design. There isn’t much that really stands out nor will you find anything that is visually overpowering and makes your jaw drop. It also seems to lack the more vibrant and comic book style that was originally seen in the previous games. There’s a blander, flat look in my opinion, not something dark, but not something that is colorful either. The developers decided to try and showcase the look of the game at times through cut scenes that are meant to show you where you need to move next, but these tend to be a bit too tedious and often utterly pointless. Even the story portions of the games feel like they take an eternity to work though, and I think that this is again because of Wood and his rather lackluster acting for the Spyro character.

Spyro really has lost his magic over the years, and this latest game isn’t helping matter much. I’m starting to think that it might be best if he’s retired, at least for a while, and let someone really do something amazing with the game. The Eternal Night is eternally forgettable and isn’t something that is poised on winning back fans to the series. If nothing else, it will probably push more of them away and that’s a shame for a title that at one point did have a lot of people enthralled only to now become just another third rate platform game that seems like its true goal is to make a quick dollar based of a name and nothing more.

-mike-