In this review, we save the fairies in the Game Boy Advance game Spyro: Season of Ice. We find out how well this adventure game plays.
This game was released in 2001 and is the first game to be released on this system.
We have rather limited experience with this franchise. We previously played the original Spyro the Dragon on the Playstation. It wound up being OK for us. So, we curiously gave this game a try to see how it played.
The story is that Spyro is relaxing and on vacation with two friends. A balloon then appears with a message. That message is a plea from one of the fairies in Fairy Land. Evidently, Rhynocs has made a return and is capturing fairies in large crystals of ice. Spyro, Bianca, and Hunter decide to rescue the fairies.
You play as Spyro and arrive in the land of fairies. Right away, you are in the first of four hub worlds: the Fairy Autumn homeworld. This is where you access the first set of levels. In addition to a number of the other levels, you’ll have a few hundred gems and up to 6 fairies to find in the hub world. Each fairy is locked away in a crystal of ice. Use Spyro’s fire “B” attack to free them.
Fairies allow you to unlock more worlds, so the more you unlock, the more of the game you’ll have accessible to you. Keep in mind, in order to beat the game, you need to free every fairy in the whole game (99). The final stage has one additional fairy and this will unlock one additional level.
Gems will allow you to access worlds guarded by Moneybags. You generally don’t need very many gems to unlock those worlds, though the first world unlock might be at a bit of a steep price considering how many gems you have accessible to you.
In a regular level, fairy rescue is generally broken down into a couple of types. One is to light various checkpoints with your breath attack. This can be plants, lighting candles, destroying mushrooms and pencils, or even spinning fans. Each world has its own set of locations to light up. Light them all up and you’ll be teleported to the fairy for the purpose of rescuing.
A second rescue is defeating every enemy on the level. Once you do this, you’ll be teleported to whoever happens to be the quest giver and you’ll get the chance to rescue a fairy.
A third rescue is the skill test. Sometimes, the skill is chasing down a thief. Other times, it’s locating certain objects in specific locations. Sometimes, it’s just collecting items in general. Regardless, you’ll be tested in one small way or another. Some of these skills are repeated in different levels.
The remaining fairies is just a simple rescue where you find the fairy trapped in a crystal, breath attack it, then get whatever dialogue you get after.
Note that hub worlds don’t have skill tests.
If you are going for 100% completion, then one thing you’ll also need to do is collect the level key and unlock the level safe. Each level has a key and a safe. Bring the key to the safe and you’ll release a small number of gems. If you get all the gems or fairies, a simple 400/400 or 300/300 will appear. Fairies will display a full ratio as well in the same manner.
There are other special levels as well. One is the speedway levels. In these, you have two difficulties: normal and hard. Both difficulties are actually the same, but hard reduces the time you start with. Also, you can’t collect the level gems on hard. Complete the stage in both difficulties and you’ll rescue a fairy (for each difficulty respectively).
During the speedway challenge, you’ll encounter a number of enemies. The colouring between each speedway is not consistent. One colour is for enemies carrying a gem. A second colour are for enemies carrying 1 second bonuses. A third colour denotes an enemy that has neither. Defeating them can help, but do not net the player any bonuses.
If you get hit by an enemy, then you get a 1 second penalty. If you get hit by the final boss, you’ll be assessed a more sizable 3 second penalty.
Also note that rings will grant you a 1 second bonus. Since it takes you about a second to go through each ring, a perfect run through these seconds means that time is more or less paused.
The challenge is that you need to complete the whole stage within the time limit. Do so successfully by completing all the phases and defeating the speedways boss and you’ll successfully complete the fairy rescue.
Generally speaking, your first few attempts will likely involve you picking up as many gems as possible. After you collect the gems, those enemies will simply be replaced by enemies with 1 second bonuses. Those one second bonuses can increase your chances if beating the level, so the more you can pack into the next round, the better your odds.
A second special level is the dragon fly challenge. Moneybags was explicitly told that dragons can’t enter the doorways he is guarding. However, he was not told to disallow dragonflies, so Sparx can go through. Of course, since he’s greedy, he’ll want payment for first time entries (subsequent attempts are free).
In the levels themselves, you can attack with “A” and speedup with “B”. Blue butterflies replenish health. Other colour butterflies will arm you with a special weapon (which you can use with the “R” shoulder button). This is the part of the game that loosely resembles Gauntlet (but without a time limit). There are lots of enemies here and you can shut many of them down by destroying regenerators. Note that regenerators with a circle around them are invulnerable. Some enemies will simply charge at you. Other enemies will fire shots at you. It’s not required, but it can be extremely useful to defeat those enemies.
Along the way, you’ll encounter keys. Each key unlocks a corresponding door. The doors and keys are colour coded as blue, yellow, green, and red. Note that you also collect gems in these levels. You’ll have a health bar denoting how much life you have left. Die and you’ll be sent back to the last checkpoint (typically, the last key you collected or at the very beginning of the level).
At the end of the level is a boss for you to defeat. Defeat that boss and you’ll not only rescue the fairy, but also unlock the portal to exit. Note that if you die as you defeat the final boss, you will get the cutscene that tells you that you rescued the fairy, but the rescue won’t count and you’ll be booted to the last key location.
Finally, you’ll also encounter a couple of bosses in general. You’ll just be teleported to the boss for you to fight. Defeat the boss and you’ll rescue a fairy as well.
More minor things you can encounter in levels are large jugs. These require your charge attack to take out. Each of them contains a gem.
Barrels offer a gem each as well, but any attack can take them out.
Minor wildlife appear in this game. Sometimes it’s sheep, but other times, they are rabbits, frogs, or a small set of other animals. They do not harm you, but take them out and you’ll be able to replenish the life of Spyro by releasing a yellow butterfly. Sparx has to eat the butterfly, though. If you collect enough of these, you can also collect a free life as well, so even if you are full health, it may be worth beating up the wildlife anyway.
Spyro can take four hits of damage. At full health, Sparx is golden. After one hit, Sparx is blue. A second hit means Sparx is green. A third hit and Sparx is gone. Any hit at that point is fatal. Also note that, with the exception of the fairy hub worlds, falling into the water/sand/etc. is instant death.
In addition to this are blue jugs. Any hit will destroy them and grant Spyro an extra life.
Once you have collected enough fairies, meet Bianca at the hub world portal somewhere in the hub world. She will unlock the last portal and allow Spyro to advance to the next hub world. A fairy towards the end of the game will grant you the ability to simply use your Atlas to warp to previously visited worlds.
The Atlas is located in your pause menu. When you open it up, it will not only tell you how many gems and fairies are in the entire game, but also how many you’ve collected and your overall completion percentage. Flip to the next page and you’ll also get an assessment of how complete each level is. If you haven’t visited a level, the title will be grey. Only levels you have access to will be shown. So, if you haven’t made it to the Winter world, you won’t see it in your Atlas yet.
For me, there are things this game gets right and other things it doesn’t. The list it gets right is definitely longer, though. For instance, you get an idea of how you are doing with the Atlas. Additionally, the learning curve isn’t all that great. Also, the difficulty curve is nicely done. It allows new players to get a feel for the game while testing the more experienced players later on in the game. This game does get this right as well.
One thing it missed the mark on is the fact that if you have 2 gems left in a level, you could spend a considerable amount of time backtracking just to get those last few gems.
Another problem with the game is the fact that the game warps you back when you get certain fairies. If you defeat every monster, you’ll be warped to a certain location automatically to rescue the fairy. This may not sound like a bad thing until you realize that three other things on that one island are also critical to completing the stage. You could have a waypoint and a fairy on that island as well and you’ll need to backtrack to it an additional time or two if you aren’t careful. At minimum, there should’ve been an option to go back to where you were before.
In addition to this, the demand to get a perfect completion score is a bit of a miss for me. I’ve played a number of home console adventure games with a heavy emphasis on collecting. Few, if any, require absolutely every key item in order to attempt to beat the game. Examples of this include Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, Rocket: Robot on Wheels, and Donkey Kong 64. Considering how hard it is to get a few of those fairies, the requirement is excessively steep. I can understand unlocking bonus features requiring a perfect collecting, but just to beat the game seems a bit much.
Generally speaking, does offer a good, if flawed, gaming experience. It has a solid learning and difficulty curve, good variety, and plenty of adventuring to complete. Flaws include a hindering system that makes 100% collecting frustrating, annoying warping, and the steep 100% completion requirement just to beat the game. Still, this only suggests that you probably aren’t completing it, though you still will have a good time with it.
Graphically speaking, the isometric style is actually pretty impressive for an early Game Boy Advance game. The sprites look as though they sampled simple 3D art and compressed it down to 2D sprites. Additionally, the huge variety of art also offers quite the visual experience. The special effects can be a bit simple at times, but otherwise, it’s great all around.
Audio is alright. The music is decent and the sound effects work quite well. There are even small amounts of speech samples thrown in that are similar to the Playstation speech samples. So, a pretty good effort all around.
Overall, you have to give credit to the developers who were able to cram so much adventure into such a small system. It’s got great difficulty and learning curves. That’s not to say this is a perfect game, though. The high end game requirement and an annoying warp system does add some uneccessary frustration to the experience. Still, the game does have great graphics and good all around audio. So, a game that gets a thumbs up from me.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Obtained a 97.8% completion rating.
General gameplay: 20/25
Replay value: 8/10
Graphics: 8/10
Audio: 3/5
Overall rating: 78%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
