Ours was a Nintendo household back in the days when collectathon platformers reigned supreme, and so Spyro and Crash were eschewed in favour of Mario, Banjo, and Kazooie. It was a few years after its prime that I first got to play Spyro, and along with it the sequel (I don’t think we ever got the third one, bu it was a long time ago). So, I go into the Reignited collection not with nostalgia exactly, but some memory of how the whole thing goes.
First and foremost- this is one hell of a remastering. I don’t quite have the technical chops to tell for sure, but it seems like the entire game was remade from square one (and, speaking of Square, releasing in the same timeframe as FF8 Remastered puts the latter to absolute shame). It’s more beautiful than my not-too-shabby computer can handle at its best, but even on the toned-down settings Spyro’s still a visual treat.
Unfortunately, the controls still feel a little archaic- I’m not familiar enough with the original to know if they’ve been updated at all, but the camera is very slippery and needs only the gentlest of inputs to careen wildly around Spyro. Still, the level design is basic enough at this stage of the genre’s development that you don’t need fine control to get by.
That’s not meant to sound like a sleight against the game; the original game came out before every platformer had seven hundred different collectibles to find and a slew of awful minigames which didn’t work correctly, and in some ways it’s refreshing that Spyro The First avoided all that clutter.
Fin or Bin:
Well, there’s technically three games here, but they all likely play similiarly enough that I don’t need to Fin/Bin each one in turn. I’m having fun with Title One, but remember Title Two being far superior, and I want to know how Title Three compares. Fin!
(Steam)