Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage! is a platformer video game developed by Insomniac Games for the PlayStation original. It is the second game in the Spyro franchise, following Spyro the Dragon, and like its predecessor, Spyro 2 received much praise and critical acclaim. It expanded quite a bit on the original with new abilities, characters, and powerups. Yet it still managed to maintain the charm, vibrant colors, and it’s childlike appeal. This is a bit important to note because at that point is video game history almost all games were pushing a much darker and grittier mood and that thinking dominated the video game landscape (and arguably still does today). The Spyro series was a welcomed break from all of that and because of this the Spyro games really stood apart from the rest of the crowd. It was released in Europe and Australia as Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer and in Japan as Spyro X Sparx: Tondemo (meaning “outrageous” or “preposterous” in Japanese) Tours…which is a ridiculously awesome name.

Pros:

This game came out only a year after the first game, and I don’t know how accurate this is, (I did the research and couldn’t find much about it) but I feel like they kind of rushed to do another Spyro game off of the success of the first one. Its pretty much the exact same game; fun, chill, explorative, easy, etc. so if you liked the first one here’s some more for you. However, you can really tell that they went out of their way to expand/fix some of the of the limitations of the first one. They introduce some new characters that help you out through the story, which is ok… I guess. You can swim now, which is a great new dynamic that they play a lot around with, but if you think about it its pretty much the same dynamic as flying, which they got down pretty good in the game already. I do kind of miss the rather grouse drowning sequence in the first one though. You can also climb, head smash and there is a hand full of fun new powerups too. They added lots of fun mini-games throughout which are pretty well done and quite varied. hockey, roller coasters, riding plain and animals, etc. They also added cut scenes which back in the day was a huge thing, but looking back it really does little to help the game and they are definitely one of the weaker parts of this game.

Like the first one its a bit on the easy side, but I feel this game was built with you achieving 100% as the goal, instead of it being an almost unreachable option for just dedicated players, like its treated in most games. And if you play it with your goal being to reach 100%, the “right” level of challenge comes back a bit. Finally, Once you do reach 100% you unlock a fun kind of minigame theme park called “Dragon Shores”, which is great because it’s just for fun, so I appreciate that the developers took that extra step as totally unnecessary as it arguably is.

The music was created by Stewart Copeland again (same as the first Spyro) and its the same kind of fun ambient songs, with a few extra bells and whistles. No song really stood that far out to me as being amazing or anything, but generally, they are perfect for what they are doing and they do it well. Aa few songs he has now added like chants and growls and such, which are fun but I have to admit kind of off-putting (like “Colossus” or “Magma Cone”) … so maybe more a neutral on that point.

Cons:

The most annoying thing about this game is if you replay any level you have to play it all over again. This is compounded when you need to get to a specific mini-game, but in order to you have to beat another mini-game as well… That’s just bad design and it really makes that whole process fell more like or chore and/or a real waste of your time. This isn’t really an option if you are trying to 100% the game either. This game requires you to go back to some specific levels to fully complete them since some of the abilities, like climbing and the headbutt, you only have access to later in the game and some earlier levels require the knowledge to get further.

That being said its still an easy game, in fact arguably too easy, even easier than the first. I remember the first one had two are three things that were almost impossible to do without the help of the internet. There was nothing like that in this one, which is probably a good thing for some, but the challenge level is the game is built with kids in mind, I would have still loved to at least and like a hand full of almost impossible to push you to get that 100%. I mean the original NES was like nothing but that and “us kids” managed to find our way through still. Also in the last world, you don’t have to beat a single level to gain access to the final boss if you have been pushing to get all the orbs up to that point… If you at least had to beat one of the world’s levels before you were allowed to face the final boss the WHOLE WORLD wouldn’t feel optional. It gets so easy sometimes it almost feels like a waste of time. One of the first “mini-bosses” gets killed by the rock falling on him before you even get a chance to fight him. They poke fun at it in a small cutscene joke, but it was still pretty lame. I was looking forward to kicking his ass. In the video below the player beats the whole game is less than 10mins, using some glitches of course, but this should show you how easy it can be, and at the end, you can see how the cut scenes are pretty badly orchestrated.

The cutscenes in general (though a good addition) are pretty badly done and I don’t mean the graphics, though those are not fantastic either. As an example, when you beat the final boss there is a scene where he crashes into the lava and burns up (see it at the end of the video), and that’s it. You kind of just watch it happen from a weird camera angle and you’re done with the game. Maybe they could have tried making it into like… ANYTHING else? maybe having him screaming “NOOOoooo!” with like a close-up angle from the lava…? at least the Terminator in T2 gave us a thumbs up when he is going down… so awesome. Sadly, this happens with pretty much all the cutscenes in the game. Just watch the following one in the video where Hunter “gets Money Bags” but then it just shows Hunter sitting on top of Money Bags… They all feel like someone said “just get them done!” in development.

Finally, I usually don’t hold older games to any kind of graphics standards, but I actually think the graphics seem a bit worse in this one than the first one. I do think it’s because they pushed so new things into the game that they probably didn’t have time to really refine much of it. Seriously, Spyro looks and talks pretty normally, but ANY OTHER character’s face looks like a melting nightmare out of a Picasso painting.

Best Spyro Game?

This is a better than the first one, no question. I mean just given all of the upgrades here, the first one is going to have a hard time competing. However, I do feel like the first one had a bit more depth to the key parts of the games that makes them both so fun. Don’t get me wrong they really did a great job here, but to me, I would have loved to have seen a bit more work on pushing the fun, chill, open world type levels that you can just fly around and explore for hours and keep finding new stuff. I might be a bit alone on this one, but Spyro kind of taps into the same feel that Pilot Wing for the N64 kind of did for me, but you still get to enjoy the classic fun of a platformer too. I think that’s probably why I like these games a bit more than some.