Pandora's Box: The Ultimate GameCube Tier List

#128: Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

Rating: E

Players: 1

Price Range: ~$10 USD

Yep...

The highest game in the F Tier is this disaster of an entertainment product.

I...I mean what is there to say that hasn't already been said?

This game is one of the most poorly crafted video games I've played in a long, long time.

Perhaps what is more interesting about this game is the story behind this game's development and how hellish it was and the toll it took on Check-6 Games...

There was a documentary video on YouTube from the channel Mr. FO1 that is nearly 2 hours long in which the YouTuber, who dedicated his whole channel to everything surrounding the game, actually interviewed several people involved with the project, found what it could have been, and discovered why everything went downhill in the worst ways possible...

And I'll tell you, it was so shocking and depressing, that it was legitimately terrifying that Universal, the game's publisher and owner of the rights to Spyro at the time, got away with all of this at the time.

View the video at your own discretion...

Anyways, I'll paraphrase what I gathered about the general situation to get you all on board with the background of this tragedy.

So essentially, Check-6 Games was one of the primary developers behind the game alongside Equinoxe Entertainment, with the documentary giving insight that the game could have been so much more had there been no interferences and that the developers could have been spared such torment...

They had to get through forces in order to get parts of the game set in stone.

Compromises had to be made with Equinoxe Entertainment, and Universal Studios, their publisher and corporate overlord...

Equinoxe Entertainment to my understanding refined and produced the art, assets, and animations from by game designs sent from Check-6, but unfortunately, they couldn't agree, nor compromise for a solution in terms of a bridge between the gameplay and the graphical quality, as they focused on the art design, not the gameplay. Because they both changed the game itself for Equinoxe's desire for a graphically pretty game at the detriment of frame rate and the teams' divided interests, nothing could be concrete, with the engine being poorly optimized due to the lack of understanding between the two.

Hence, the inconsistent framerate...

This prevented actual levels being completed, as a vision could not be refined, nor agreed upon.

Then there was Universal, who, when sent the stellar ideas by Check-6, said, "No, that isn't Spyro!", and when they adhered to their demands, they rejected them anyways. There was no middle ground, and when asked for explanations or support, radio silence...

As such, nothing in the game could be finished, as nothing was even approved upon by all parties. It came to the point that the deadline set in concreate by their publisher was rapidly approaching and they had to put together what little they had into a semi-functional form. However, even they failed to do that given the horrific conditions and the state of the game we got.

That is why past the middle of the documentary, the people behind the game simply laughed when asked if the game was "rushed".

To me, no, it wasn't.

The game developers suffered some of the most ruinous conditions in any game cycle I've ever seen, and they weren't allowed to create a vision, and when they churned out what was asked of them, it was rejected. It came to the point that they scraped together what was finished into a playable form when time was short.