There's no penalty for dying (beyond having to replay through some sections, which can also mean killing the same enemies over and over again), but thanks to a tight double-jump window that sometimes won't register the second button press, I became intimately familiar with what it sounds like to hear a dragon plummet to his death. When the game does venture into platforming territory, it's almost always filled with more than a few cheap deaths. For a game that has its roots in platforming, it feels odd to spend more time mindlessly tail-whipping the same few enemies for hours at a time. Prone to blackout sessions that gradually unlock the fire, ice, earth and lightning powers from the last game, much of The Eternal Night is spent playing catch up while slogging through wave after wave of enemies using a battle system that boils down to button mashing (or, if you're like me, you'll discover early on that using Spyro's new time dilation powers to slow things down lets you just roast enemies because it hardly consumes any of your special attack meter). It doesn't help that Spyro starts the second chapter of his new adventure effectively powerless. Clearly there was some effort at crafting a story (even if almost all of it is revealed in an expository sequence near the end), but the production values in the cinematics were squandered on a game that just doesn't click in any one area and outright offends in others. The Eternal Night eventually ends up being too difficult for a young audience, yet too pedantic for older gamers - and satisfies neither. Specifically, it's ridiculously difficult in areas, suffers from sloppy controls, tons of cheap deaths and lacks some of the polish that Krome is more than capable of. The first game, A New Beginning, surprised plenty of folks with its higher production values and Hollywood voice cast, and while those elements remain to some degree, the second game has taken a major step backward in terms of how the game actually plays. Conceived as a slightly darker trilogy, The Legend of Spyro is trying to inject a little more in the way of mythos and lore into the pint-sized fire-breather's world.
A few different developers stepped up to carry on the franchise, but it wasn't until Krome Studios came on board to give the series something of a reboot that the franchise got a proper identity. Of course, we know now that Spyro's success wasn't a fluke, as Ratchet & Clank was a bona-fide killer app for the PlayStation 2, but the little purple dragon was left with Universal as the IP holder and no clear developer to continue a series that had sold millions of copies. When Insomniac opted to part ways with the mascot that was as much a figurehead of the developer as it was the original PlayStation, it was a gutsy move.
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