He's back. My sweet boy is back. Or rather, I should say, he's coming back. Yes, folks, I've spent the last few days freaking out about the Spyro: A Realm Beyond announcement, as has a solid chunk of the internet who started gaming in the late '90s or early '00s. However, the more I watch the trailer - and trust me, I've watched it quite a bit - the more I'm starting to worry. Could this be another false dawn for Spyro the Dragon fans?
For context, this new entry in the series is courtesy of Toys for Bob, the developer behind Spyro Reignited Trilogy, which remains a top pick in our list of the best Switch games, and Skylanders. It's arriving 18 years after the launch of The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon, the last standalone game in the series, and follows years of clamoring from Spyro fans, myself included, begging for more. It had started to feel like we'd never see another original Spyro game, a point I made clear in my Spyro retrospective earlier this year. Now, it's officially happening, with a wide release, including a version for Nintendo Switch 2, coming in 2027.
So, what are my concerns? Well, the big one is the flying factor. Since the big reveal, Toys for Bob has been keen to highlight that their idea for leveling up the series, which they see as a continuation of the original trilogy, is to allow Spyro to take flight at a moment's notice. On paper, this sounds like a great idea and, in the developer's defense, the natural evolution of the series. However, when you take a closer look at the DNA of the series, there's a small problem. Spyro is, first and foremost, a platformer.
To properly explain my concerns, I need to offer a bit more context. Spyro launched in 1998, the early era of the 3D platformer, with Sonic Adventure, Super Mario 64, and Crash Bandicoot all arriving within two years on either side of the release date. If you've played more than five minutes of any of those games, you likely know that the challenging part, or the engaging part, is often in the platforming rather than combat, puzzle-solving, or anything else.
Spyro changed the platformer formula by introducing the purple dragon's signature gliding mechanic, which allowed for more abstract level design than the likes of Crash or Mario, who could only jump so far. Strip away the gorgeous polygonal visuals, Stewart Copeland's iconic world music-infused soundtrack, and Tom Kenny's voice-acting skills, and the core hook of Spyro is the gliding mechanic, with a bit of fire-breathing thrown in for good measure.
For me, gliding is a fundamental part of the Spyro experience. It's seeing that ledge, which looks just out of reach, and perfecting the run-jump-glide combination to somehow reach it, made even sweeter if you failed the first few times. From what we've seen so far, it looks like Toys for Bob aren't on the same page.
In an official blog post detailing Spyro's much-hyped return, Toys for Bob details that the concept of dragon flight serves as the studio's "guiding light" in the quest to recapture what it calls the "Spyro flow state" of the original trilogy. Admittedly, I can understand some of the thinking there. Even compared to some of its late '90s contemporaries - I'm looking at you, Croc - Spyro feels particularly fluid.
What I'm saying is, I can see why Toys for Bob sees the gift of flight as a natural progression; it's just that I don't. It doesn't help that, while I love the original trilogy with all my heart, the bane of each of my replay experiences is in the flying missions. Part of that is due to the purple dragon dropping like a stone after any sort of collision, but another part is that it doesn't feel like you're playing the same game. These levels are more Star Fox than Mario, and, personally, I want less of that, not more.
My concerns surrounding flight aren't just limited to gameplay, though. I'm also a little worried about level design and how it might differ from the original trilogy's approach to accommodate flight. To best explain my concerns, I'm going to turn to another game's approach to taking to the skies. I'm talking about GTA IV.
By the time GTA IV arrived in 2008, plane flight felt like a fixture for the series, especially on the back of GTA: San Andreas, which featured four different airports. This emphasis on aviation meant that a lot of gamers went into GTA IV anticipating more of the same, but that's not what we got, outside of a couple of helicopters. While there are multiple theories for the absence of planes, the most logical is that the map of Liberty City is too small to accommodate flight.
Now take that context, and think of any level from the first three Spyro games. In almost all of them, except, of course, for the flying missions, the ability to take to the sky at a moment's notice would allow you to gather up most of the collectables and finish the level in almost no time at all. It would essentially undo all the fantastic design of levels such as Tree Tops, Fireworks Factory, or Enchanted Towers, to name just a few.
In the level design department, my concern boils down to one question. Is Toys for Bob capable of offering multiple carefully crafted levels that are all big enough to accommodate both horizontal and vertical exploration? Think of the variety of levels in Spyro 2, my personal favorite from the trilogy. Is that sort of quantity, 20 or so different levels, possible when you're creating them for this scale?
I'm not a developer, and I'm not privy to the capabilities of Toys for Bob. So it could be possible. What I don't want, though, is a game that consists of five or six massive worlds, or worse still, an entirely open world. The original games had that rare mix of quantity and quality, and if this really is intended as a continuation, I'd want the same thing, not just the quality alone. That's probably greedy, I know, but I've waited over a decade for this, so sue me.
My final, and probably most subjective, hesitation surrounding Spyro's newfound flying abilities relates to the character of Spyro himself. I'm just not sure it suits him. This part of my argument is harder to explain, but the fact that Spyro can only glide makes him something of an underdog, or at the very least an unlikely hero, in the world of dragons. We think of dragons as these massive, powerful creatures, but that's not Spyro, and the lack of flying ability ties into this character's make-up as much as his diminutive size or nonchalant approach to tackling various villains.
Part of my anxiety here is tied to The Legend of Spyro trilogy, which tried to imagine an older, more rugged Spyro. I don't want to see that again. I really don't. That's why I feel a bit guilty about this part of the argument, as Toys for Bob had no part in that series of games. Spyro looks a bit aged up in A Realm Beyond, but he doesn't seem brooding or like he's spent too much time listening to My Chemical Romance.
Those are my three concerns, but what it all boils down to is that I can't face another Spyro-shaped flop. The truth is that there's little I want more than Toys for Bob to reinvigorate a series that's so close to my heart it can hear the blood flowing. Given how authentic Spyro Reignited Trilogy felt compared to its source material, plus the way in which Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time elevated the core mechanics of the first game while throwing in some new concepts that felt authentic to that IP, there's no developer I'd trust more to steer the good ship Spyro into newfound territories.
The short reveal trailer and subsequent interviews have also given me plenty to be excited about. First off, Tom Kenny is back as Spyro, and while I'm a big Elijah Wood fan, for me, you can't beat the original. According to an IGN interview with the team at Toys for Bob, Kenny jumped at the chance to get back in the booth and lay down some Spyro dialogue, so that's something I'm looking forward to hearing more of.
As I mentioned earlier, there's also the slight redesign of Spyro's character model, which I think is a pretty spot-on interpretation of a slightly older dragon that doesn't lean into any edgy or jaded tropes. I'm interested to see if there's a wider redesign, including characters such as Hunter and Moneybags, provided that Toys for Bob includes them in this game's character roster. It's worth noting, though, that Sparx doesn't feature in the trailer, so we can't take any of the original support cast for granted right now.
Plus, I will say, the short gameplay clip does look pretty visually stunning, which is exactly what I want from my Spyro games and a factor that the series almost completely forgot about for The Legend of Spyro trilogy, which had a certain Rayman 2-style bleakness about it. Vivid landscapes are an inherent part of the Spyro experience.
Oh, and there's the promise of a new villain, which is a brave call from Toys for Bob, as it would have been easy to revive Gnasty Gnorc or Ripto for another outing just for the nostalgia factor alone. Plenty of Spyro diehards are already having fun theorycrafting who the villain might be, but I've not seen any argument win me over just yet. I always thought that Moneybags would make a fantastic twist villain, but something new is just as exciting.
Ultimately, I'm willing to give Toys for Bob the benefit of the doubt for now. After all, the developer is responsible for one of the best Crash Bandicoot games I've ever played. I'm self-aware enough to know the developer is, and should be, making Spyro: A Realm Beyond just as attractive a proposition for those unfamiliar with the series as people like me, who feel they have some sort of claim to it due to something as silly as an emotional attachment. So while this might not end up being exactly the Spyro game I wanted, I'm still holding out hope that it's the game the series needs, and forgive me here, to take flight once again.