The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon (DS) - Review

A reckoning of childhood memories

Console: Nintendo DS

Recently, I was reminded of an old game from my childhood that I used to love but had completely forgotten about: the DS version of The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon. It’s the final entry in the reboot trilogy that put the purple dragon in a more action-adventure oriented title that tried to be more of a high-fantasy type of experience. The Eternal Night was actually the first of these games that I tried but it wasn’t until this game that I actually liked what I was playing and motivatied me to play the Reignited Trilogy years later. 

I remembered all that enjoyment again but those weren’t the only memories that popped back into my head. I also remembered its jaggy graphics and weirdly drawn cutscenes and that made me wonder something: is Dawn of the Dragon DS even a good game? After all, this era was known for its cheap and rushed titles and those are filled with all the stuff I just wrote down.  That question intrigued me enough that I decided to hunt it down. To play it one more time and see if it's actually a decent game or just a bad game that I just have a bunch of fond memories of.

Without further ado, let's talk about The Legend of the Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon for the Nintendo DS and answer that question. 

The young dragons Spyro and Cynder are freed from the crystal they were imprisoned in by a mysterious cheetah. He informs the confused pair that during their imprisonment, the evil dragon Malefor threatens to destroy the realm. Young as they are, since both dragons wield special magical powers, they are the best chance the realm has. And so, the two set out to save the realm.

I can see the pitch Tantalus Media made for this game. A platformer in which you switch between our two heroic dragons, each with different magical breaths that affect enemies and the environment differently. A combo system to spice up the fights and flight sections to add in some variety.

The problem is that this concept was executed oh so poorly. I know nothing of the development of this handheld iteration but I can hardly imagine this game being given nothing but a small development budget and a tight deadline. That was the trend of the early 2000s after all. 

Let’s start with the story. I will give it this: that all lines of dialogue are fully voice acted was a surprise. Sure, it's all reused from the console versions but I still didn't expect it here. In my experience, voice acting is sparces in DS games.

And that’s where the praise for the narrative ends. Well, I say ‘narrative’ but it can hardly be called that. Really, what we have are nothing more than blunt plot beats. These are presented to you through voiced text boxes on the lower screen with some very badly drawn art on the top screen. Sometimes these are about as long as you’d expect, but more than once, these are only a single sentence long and tell you basically nothing.

This story also doesn’t bother catching you up to speed about what happened in the game that it is a sequel to nor who the few side-characters you meet even are exactly. We have a heroic sacrifice here but I don’t even know who the dragon who sacrificed himself even is. Because of these things, the ‘narrative’ is not engaging at all and it feels like they simply cobbled something together at the last minute to check the ‘story’ box of the list.

Like I said before, Dawn of the Dragon DS is a platformer with a focus on combat. Spyro and Cynder run, jump and headbutt their way across caverns, cities and the like while kicking the butts of Malefor’s evil forces.

Let’s, once again, start smiling about the good stuff. I actually don’t mind the level design. Most levels are not straightforward ‘go left to right’ à la Mario, but more maze-like. There’s a lot of verticality in these levels and they contain alternate paths, dead ends, and those sorts of things. It's easy to get lost sometimes, but I admire the attempt to be less straightforward and more explorative in design. The game also, thankfully, kept the small real estate of the DS screen in mind. ‘One-hit kill’ obstacles are here, but not in great numbers and I only counted one ‘leap of faith’ moment because I couldn’t possibly see what was below me.  

For a lot of the adventure, you go through caverns and ruins and the like which feel and look rather similar. There are, however, some more imaginative locales such as those floating isles too. While the graphics are jagged, they are pretty decent for 2.5D graphics on the Nintendo DS. Not amazing, but far from ugly and you can make out things more than fine. Moreover, because of how this game is only about 4 hours long, there isn’t really any time for these things to become repetitive.

An example of the cutscenes. That art looks... amateurish, to put it kindly. 

And that leads us beautifully into everything else and let’s start with that length, shall we? If you bought this title back in the day at full price you might’ve been left disappointed after finishing this game in just one afternoon. Those 4 hours wasn’t me speedrunning or some old familiarity helping me along: it was me playing normally at my own pace and dying plenty.

A short campaign doesn’t have to be an issue, if the title offers a lot of replayability but this Dawn of the Dragon hasn’t gotten that memo. After seeing the credits, the only thing to do is to start the game all over again from scratch. Playing this game now, the way it was intended, I wasn’t enjoying myself much and I now have to wonder if my enjoyment as a kid wasn’t because of cheat codes I could load in through my old, long-since-dead, R4 card. 

After only two short play sessions I already had plenty of problems with the gameplay. For one, simply playing the game doesn’t feel very good. Spyro and Cynder are rather slow and heavy to control making basic actions such as running and jumping feel sluggish. I also can’t help but feel like there’s either a lot of dead space on your clicks and/or that there’s some kind of input delay at play here. Because of these things, platforming doesn’t feel all that good. I redid a lot of jumps or even entire sections because I failed jumps that I logically should’ve made. 

The combat, which you’ll do a lot of, doesn’t fare much better. The big thing is that it has poor hit detection. There are so many moments in which it looks, feels, like you should hit your foe but just… don't. What is also stupid is that the characters slide when you fight. You can thus fall off platforms when you break crystals or break a combo or open yourself up to a counterattack because your position towards the enemy has changed. 

That combo system is not a bad idea to spice up the otherwise standard combat. Spyro and Cynder do different attacks depending what button of the D-pad you hold down. Holding up, for instance, can launch enemies in the air. You chain these types of attack together to creates combos. The higher these combos, the higher the chance foes will drop health, energy or experience gems when they go down.

That could have been a neat way to turn the combat into something more than just mashing buttons, yet it ends up being just that. The different moves are not easy to chain together and with the position issues and that enemies can take a lot of damage, it just isn’t worth comboing enemies to take them out.

More reliable, and quicker, are those magical breaths. Spyro and Cynder each have four different breaths, each with different effects. Spyro’s lightning, for example, creates a shield while Cynder's fear makes enemies temporarily run away from you. Nearly all enemies are weak to one breath, taking double damage if you whip that one out against them. Once you upgrade your breaths, instead of taking dozens of seconds, enemies can go down in only two-to-three seconds. Well, assuming you can hit them that is. Some breaths, like the plant bomb, behave a bit weirdly which can make hitting enemies harder than it should be.

Also: why are certain enemies immune to the standard attacks? That is annoying as, because of the magic meter, it means you often have to wait to defeat them. Even more annoying: Spyro and Cynder have individual health bars but you get a game over when one of them reaches zero. What’s the point of giving them separate health bars than?

A 'super-effective' breath in action. Note the icons on the topscreen telling you exactly what is effective and what isn't.

Lastly, we have the flight sequences. These are on-rails 3D sections in which Spyro and Cynder automatically fly through, for example, a valley while attacking enemies with your fire or acid breath from afar. They are neat but rather short and basic in execution, except for the boss fights, most of which are done in this style.

Those range from fighting a giant golem to what was the best part of the game for me: you fly to the heart of the ginormous beast, destroy it, and then fly out of it before its remains collapse. However, due to them being flight sections, they are limited in design and scope due to its mechanics and play out the same: dodge their attacks, hit purple crystals for damage, rinse and repeat.

The only one who isn’t fought this way is Malefor. Well, his first phase at least. That one starts in 2.5D before going full 3D. While my first attempt ended in defeat because of the clunky control (and a tired brain), in my second attempt I won easily because I stumbled on a way to cheese the fight. If you jump and combo at the right moment, you attack him from an angle he can’t reach. That made the final 10 minutes of the game rather anti-climactic, to say the least.

Conclusion

The Nintendo DS version of The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon is one of those games that I loved as a kid but, as an adult, have to conclude that it just isn't very good. It has some good qualities to it, I get the intention behind things like the combo system and the different elemental breaths, but the overall execution of these ideas is poorly done. There is a plethora of issues that drag the game down aside from that, from bad collision detection to heavy and clunky platforming to a story that can hardly be called that. 

It kept me entertained as a kid but these days it's not really worth playing. A fun collector piece for those who grew up with The Legend of Spyro and not much else.