darkSpyro

I never go in this section, just temporarily switched to set.
Honestly, I've had more fun with Dotd even though it sucks. Skylanders has this mind numbing gameplay to it that I can't play it for more than thirty minutes at a time, while Dotd might have the most cliched story ever and incredibly button mashy gameplay, it still manages to be more fun than Skylanders. The co-op too is also somehow really nice, it's fun to just dick around in it. So idk, if you don't take Dotd too seriously then you'll have a lot of fun with it.

Quote: arceustheprime

Honestly, I've had more fun with Dotd even though it sucks. Skylanders has this mind numbing gameplay to it that I can't play it for more than thirty minutes at a time, while Dotd might have the most cliched story ever and incredibly button mashy gameplay, it still manages to be more fun than Skylanders. The co-op too is also somehow really nice, it's fun to just dick around in it. So idk, if you don't take Dotd too seriously then you'll have a lot of fun with it.

This was also my experience. I recognize that DOTD was definitely not a great game for many reasons: neither the single nor multi player mode was great (...well, they weren't even good, to be blunt), button mashing gameplay is not my thing, quick time events can go die, the story is laughably full of cliches... I can go on.
Despite all this, at least I can play and enjoy it more if I don't take it too seriously compared to Skylanders, which I've given an honest shot in the past- I own the first two games, but have never completed either. I plan to replay DOTD at some point, multiple times. I will most likely never revisit Skylanders.


Edit: Just now remembered that my avatar is DOTD. I joined dS in like 2008 or 2009 so I picked it because I had just played DOTD (console and DS... neither are good games but man was I hyped). I didn't change my avatar ever since because reasons. Not actually a big DOTD fan like it suggests... just pointing it out to avoid confusion after criticizing the game in this post.

I've tried replaying it sometime before selling my PS2, man it was impossible because it was so easy to 100% and being ahead of most (badly timed) scripts would start getting on my nerves. Felt more like a chore even if I was trying to do that to find fun in the game, still, but that gets taken away as soon as I step onto The Destroyer or Burned Lands for dozens and dozens of fights there mostly to pad out for time since they were mostly damage sponges.
But hey, you tried to enjoy the other series twice(though some users will tell you to do it one last time with a newer game since graphics and jumping mechanics), that's plenty to at least know it's not your cup of tea.

I have to agree with you there. Some parts of DOTD are just frustrating (the Burned Lands is one, the entirety of Warfang above ground is another, also I really never liked the final boss). I understand completely the arguments I've heard that 'Skylanders is better quality than DOTD', and at some point it is possible someone may convince me to try other Skylanders titles- I know someone who I think owns all of them, so theoretically I could just borrow their copies of the games. Still, the music, memorable levels, and even some nostalgia (believe it or not, this game is over 7 years old now... where has the time gone? Of course, I also ask myself this whenever I hear a new Skylanders game is released. There's how many now?! 5? Crazy.) from DOTD win me over every time.

Well, it's still crazy I joined DS when the first Skylanders came out(not that I wasn't a hardcore lurker 2 years before already), feels like I've been here for a year or two at the most.

The music I feel is great, but too many remixes from the other two games. That aside(SF is just as guilty of it), it's a bit apples and oranges - DOTD went for epic orchestra while Skylanders does that rarely, focusing more on eletronic music and simpler classical tunes.

And I everyone knows I de-... uh, have a strong dislike of DotD. ^.^;

i would like to add on something else to why dotd sucks, and it's actually my main peeve about the game;

they ditched sparx towards the end of the game. you can't ditch sparx. that's downright bull****. i had major trouble going through burned lands because sparx wasn't there. sparx should have had more priority than cynder to be there until the end, but because of the ****ty co-op and the forced spyroxcynder crap they couldn't get rid of cynder, who had the ****tiest personality in dotd. spyro and cynder were the worse characters in DOTD, and sparx, krome ignitus and evil/dark cynder (and TEN Cynder to a degree) where the only characters i like in TLOS.

and sparx's treatment in that game was terrible in general. spyro's full attention was on cynder in that game so sparx was shoved to the side, whilst in previous titles spyro's closest buddy had always been sparx, and he used to drag sparx along everywhere he went.

It's especially obvious that EL did this out of their own accord and idea of the series too. In ANB, Spyro straight up tells Sparx to stay behind in the start,but Sparx makes up a bunch of excuses to keep following him; same on TEN in situations where he clearly is in greater danger but wants to help anyway - Sparx is a scaredy cat but he wasn't a coward in the Krome games. In here? 'oh fire is too strong even if we'll get a shield for it, stay behind and uh do something else' 'ok' it's obvious they only watched some videos of the previous games to deal with him in such a cold way.

I never understood the reason, since before that Sparx went with Spyro into the Destroyer, which had just as much fire and lava than Burned Lands. And considering they ruined Cynder and gave her a different personality and Volteer the chatterbox had one line, I think it was obvious they didn't have full knowledge of the characters.

and ignitus the fire dragon dying in a fire was hilarious. i'm sorry, the 'death' was sad but the cause of it was ridiculous

Ignitus dying in a fire is something even the dumb part of the fandom prefers to forget. It's more aggravating on how forced it is because later on they complain about the steam and how a cliff over fire could get them into the Floating Islands by air current... Gee, wasn't there a cliff outside pointing to the Ring of Fire? Right in damn front of it?

Volteer and Cyril losing lines were justified, the writers said in the official forums long ago is that they were rushed to cut anything not "essential" from the story(the Avalar filler was soo necessary I'm sure) and it included comic relief from them and Cynder putting her shackles back on.

DotD is the only Legend game that I played (and I was confused in the story aspect because of this), but, for me, Skylanders is very better, at least game-wise. DotD is very fun, but I don't know if the edginess (present in all Legends) fits with Spyro. This remembers me that, originally, Skylanders/Spyro's Kingdom was planned to be a M-rated game.

^ wait it was? the game originally being m-rated is news to me

Yeah, Spyro's Kingdom was going to have blood in it as well, but TFB went against the idea.

Oh wow, that's pretty interesting. I never new this. xD

I'm glad they decided otherwise.

Yeah. They felt that a mature game would not fit Spyro at all, so...

Edgy game is something. But a mature game is different.

So they decided to go full on dark and depression mode with TLOS, and then were going to go even further and add blood? I don't get why developers have the need to make every game dark and mature with blood, gore,swearing, sex, etc nowadays. I'm glad they changed this because that would not have been good for Spyro.

Well, it was probably edgy,let's not forget the LOS writers work on TFB now(though iirc for the first game they also called in Toy Story writers). And hey, they seem to be sneaking in darker aspects every game,one day maybe we'll get a proper mature game and not just edgy gritty.

They are? I don't play Skylanders so I wouldn't know. :\

Also, I still have my PS2 copy of DOTD and I don't know why I still have it. There are a few games I don't know why I have actually, like Spyro's Adventure and Catz. They're not worth trading in though since I would probably only get about $10 for all three of them, probably not even that. xD

It's on the background since kids' game,but it's there. Horrible fates await a ton of people in Skylands, ranging from zombification to being eternally cursed or stranded from their loved ones forever.

I had all three games but they stopped working eventually being illegal copies, DOTD first ironically. It wasn't a happy day when I decided to marathon ANB and TEN but the LOS Spyro picture never came up (that was the 'load or freeze' point on the CD usually) D:

Oh wow, that's rather dark. I honestly hope it doesn't get any darker since Skylanders should remain a kids franchise. Like I said before, not everything needs to be M rated. I personally find more enjoyment in games that aren't rated M (I mean, rated M for more than just violence. I never understood why Zelda games now have the M rating). :\

Quote: DarkCynder_543

Also, I still have my PS2 copy of DOTD and I don't know why I still have it. There are a few games I don't know why I have actually, like Spyro's Adventure and Catz. They're not worth trading in though since I would probably only get about $10 for all three of them, probably not even that. xD

Well, I was at a locally owned game store just a couple of weeks ago and on my out I happened to look in one of the glass display cases, where they usually keep more popular items (usually good games that are a bit older, I see a lot of SNES and PS1 games in there). This time, though, I did a double take when I saw a copy of DOTD. Looking closer, I saw the price was way higher than the game honestly deserves (in my opinion, at least). It was around $30 dollars if I remember right. And I thought my copy that cost $15 was a bit much! From my own experience, DOTD was not a good enough (or rare enough) game to deserve a price tag like that after over 7 years. (Gosh, has it really been that long? )

Anyway, long story short, I'd ask about how much your copy would sell for if you want to get rid of it. You might get lucky

I'm pretty sure I didn't even pay that much for the PS3 copy of DotD I have. Maybe i paid that much for PS2 DotD when it was new and nobody realized it totally sucked.

I forget that DOTD came out on a ton of different systems. In my head I always seem to think of it as a PS2 exclusive for some strange reason. If my memory is correct, what I saw was definitely the PS2 version, though I could be wrong.

I think it only came out for PS2 and PS3, didn't it? I don't remember a Wii version (something to do with TEN being so buggy on Wii they didn't even bother). Yeesh, the PS2 version definitely isn't worth $30; it was buggy and full of glitches (including the infamous "melting face Sparx" in that one cutscene).

I still remember the day I had my mom drive through a random thunderstorm to get DotD the day it came out....

I remember straight up having my brother pirate it all while he complained I was playing kiddy games as usual. I don't encourage that,but I don't exact regret not giving a dollar to EL in the end.

PS2, PS3, Wii. and Xbox 360. And there was a very different DS version.


Now that I think of it, I've owned 3 versions of this game over the years. This happened to me with ETD also. My two least favorite Spyro games... I don't understand how these things happen

Quote: Drawdler

Don't forget the mobile version.

I didn't know that such a thing existed. Man this game really did come out on everything.

I remember it coming out first and spoiling hard that Ignitus dies. No one believed OP because there's no way they could be THAT predictable,right?

I guess I avoided the spoilers then because it was a big surprise for me. I remember watching this video over and over and being super hyped for the game. 2 player? Full flight? Sign me up! Unfortunately, both of those things are not very fun in the final game... but the video seems very optimistic about them

I knew Ignitus was gonna bite it from the opening credits of ANB, but I never thought he'd be killed off in the stupidest possible fashion. XD

It kinda felt like Krome would avoid it since then the Star Wars parallels would be too obvious, but who knows without any The Darkest Hour info. Maybe he'd just retire after so much strife while Spyro and Cynder were away and effectively out of the plot forever but not really dead.

If Krome made The Darkest Hour, perhaps we would've seen more characters planned for the game different than what EL showed and a story without plotholes everywhere. Like the faint background character, Pyra (from deleted interview with Jared Pullen), or perhaps more.

Don't forget the Mansweersmalls and making Hunter not useless past the third level. TEN made their appearance so ominous it definately meant that Krome probably wanted them actually worked together instead of just letting the duo go by on their super cliche adventure after some saving.

Also Scratch running away, that MUST've been for something originally, especially since he was pretty much the sole really dark spot among the kinda comedic pirates. TEN in general felt like the buildup story as it was the middle of the triology,but now it just ends on itself because of what DOTD does.

Maybe even a revamped Elora too?

That one was unclear since Hunter's role was also unclear. He was going to rescue the three from the get go, but considering he was more than ready by TEN, the three year change might've been EL's thing; so who knows if Avalar was supposed to be filler like now and not straight up a big part of the plot.

Isn't that Ancient Grove from TEN though? I don't remember that in Jared Pullen's blog,so I have no idea about this.

It was in a blog owned by one of the artists at EL when they did DotD.

Page doesn't exist anymore it seems. But I did post an old topic on the art - //forum.darkspyro.net/spyro/viewposts.php?topic=35875

Oh my god Warfang was so Gondor I heard a bunch of LOTR immediately echo in my head.

But yeah,even with that concept art, this really wasn't much of the direction Krome was going. For easily categorizing:

-GBA version had a lot about how the Guardians were separated when that was only slightly implied in console, so much Ignitus in that version was in Hunter's place in Fellmuth
-Everything on Hunter not being a Aragorn clone
-All the musing about how Spyro wasn't strong enough to beat Malefor as he was - where's that training montage on DOTD despite all the OTHER obvious LOTR/SW usage?
-Jason mentioning a lot of cut content and also some small lore in a few TEN character profiles; from the look of things we'd see at least more out of the Apes
-Cynder development that even the writers regret cutting across both last games

It's times like these where I wish Acti wasn't so closed doors about stuff they'll never use. You hear things from cancelled games/previous versions in other companies a ton,but nary any sketches or concept art about Darkest Hour, just a few phrases about what was carried over into DOTD.

Yeah, Jared's blog has a ton of info about how the crew at Krome built on the bare bones characters/scripts they were given and added a lot to the world and story that wasn't originally in it. When things were transferred to EL, it's painfully clear how "first draft" the material they got was and that the EL team didn't have any interest in evolving the characters/story in any way beyond what they were told to do.