YMMV / Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Sparx spends way too much time mouthing every single thing out and saying exposition. This even extends to extremely minor things like the different breakable gem containers, which you never had any exposition or hand-holding for in the original trilogy. This can be mitigated some by disabling Sparx Hints in the options, but it doesn't completely shoo him off.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Ripto final (and only) boss is a total joke. It takes place in a very small arena, he spends the entire fight making "witty" remarks that just come off as corny at best, and the fight is extremely easy. Even more baffling, the amount of phases the fight has depends on how much completion percentage you reached, so if you went with the bare minimum, you're treated to a fight that lasts only one phase long and is over nearly as quickly as it starts, with no proper closure of any sort either aside from a credits roll (which also holds true if you hit the second tier that nets a two-phase fight). Even the full three-phase fight is hardly worth talking about.
• Awesome Music: For all its flaws, this game's soundtrack is astounding. Exhibit A. This is also the final game to have the involvement of Stewart Copeland as composer.
• Demonic Spiders: The Wizard Riptocs in "Thieves Den", they're the only enemy in the game you can't kill with your breath or charge, instead you have to use your wing shield to reflect their spells back at them, the problem is the game is extremely picky with how precise your positioning has to be in order to reflect their spells to the point where it feels like random chance as to whether or not you'll succeed in killing them, thankfully they are the one enemy in the game that never respawns after you kill them.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some fans prefer to forget this game ever happened. Some even pretend they never made more Spyro games after the original trilogy. Even fans of later entries in the series like to pretend that the GBA games between Year of the Dragon and A Hero's Tail happened in this game's place.
• Fridge Horror: As many fans have brought up, one cutscene shows Ripto angrily blasting Crush and Gulp with his scepter, knocking them over. Afterwards, they are never seen again, never fought as bosses or encountered in the story, not even in the cutscenes^note Naturally they do appear in later GBA titles however. Did Ripto... straight up murder his two henchmen in cold blood?
• Good Bad Bugs: In an already buggy game, the classic "Swimming in Air" glitch that Ripto's Rage! and Year of the Dragon had is available too. This time, it can be used to skip most of the game by glitching through into the boss arena where Ripto is waiting.
• Harsher in Hindsight: So many of CheckSix's rejected proposals, which Ricci Rukavina shot down for not being "Spyro enough", would immediately appear on the next installment.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the dragonflies is named Cinder. This is before The Legend of Spyro's Cynder was made a thing.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Even those that can forgive the other flaws of the game criticize its length. Due to its rushed development, the game featured only a single hub of eight worlds (eleven counting the three speedways now hidden inside worlds) and one boss.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: This game is essentially the same concept as Year of the Dragon, only with dragonflies in place of dragon eggs.
• Mis-blamed:
  • Some had assumed that Insomniac Games made this game, and hated on them for it, when in reality, they had nothing to do with it. In fact, they themselves hated the game.
  • Prior to the release of the fan documentary, many had assumed Check Six was at fault for why the game was released in such a sorry state, and why it was so lacking in new ideas. While they certainly take some of the blame for the final product (and conflicts with Equinox over the design direction didn't help either), Executive Meddling was the major culprit, as Check Six actually wanted to do something completely different, but Universal shot it down for "not being Spyro enough." The lack of originality in the overall product was more of Universal's doing in particular.
• Narm:
  • In spades thanks to the ridiculous facial animations, but special mention has to go to the bit at the beginning where Hunter sees a Sorceress balloon and hilariously overreacts as the camera zooms in on his wildly-flapping face dramatically —
    Hunter: WHHAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOWAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOWWAAAAAAOOOOOOOH!
  • It's difficult to take Ripto seriously during the final battle when he demonstrates Medium Awareness out of nowhere, and keeps yelling "HOCUS POCUS!" in the wheeziest voice possible while his face constantly spazzes out due to the game's terribly animated facial animations. It also doesn't help that the music starts off sounding decently epic enough before spiraling into an inaudible mess of out-of-sync instruments that would make Sonic Unleashed's E-Rank music cringe.
  • There's also Bianca as, for whatever reason, the game has Pamela Hayden's voice work pitch shifted, despite using her natural pitch for Bianca in Year of the Dragon thus making the character uncharacteristically sound like a helium-voiced Motor Mouth.
• Nightmare Fuel: The thieving related level is rather unsettling because of the treasure chests and gems that suddenly sprout legs. Some players stopped playing after this level to avoid getting the heebie-jeebies.
• Obvious Beta: The game was infamously rushed out the door and it shows in several places. The game is significantly shorter than earlier Spyro games, there are only three cutscenes, the Final Boss is the only boss, it's impossible to have a complete gem total since Moneybags never reappears to return your gems, many of the voice lines don't match up with the script, characters' facial animations tend to be very wonky, and the game is very glitchy (mainly the PS2 version) and suffers frequent framerate drops.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: The very first (non-spinoff) Spyro game not made by Insomniac Games, and it very much shows in nearly every aspect of the game. Many later games would fare better, but the series was never quite the same after Insomniac left it.
• Polished Port: While it wasn't enough to save the game's reputation, the Nintendo GameCube version did fix most of the bugs found in the original PlayStation 2 release and had considerably shorter load times.
• Sequelitis: Enter the Dragonfly is generally nowhere near as liked as the original trilogy due to its rampant bugs, short length and poor animation.
• So Bad, It's Good: The glitches are fun to mess around with, and the game is pretty fun aside from its several flaws.
• So Okay, It's Average: Many people who didn't outright hate the game have this feeling towards it. The GameCube version puts it in this realm more firmly due to fixing most of the bugs.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The game's short length and rushed nature means that many characters that made brief appearances didn't actually have much to do, particularly Bianca who had pretty much no role in the game outside of bantering with Spyro and Hunter in the cutscenes, Moneybags who only appeared to ask for money once in the whole game, and Gulp and Crush who were zapped by Ripto halfway through the game before they could even have a boss fight.
  • In addition, Bartholomew from Year Of The Dragon made a cameo in one of the stages, but didn't even name-drop his own brother, who was a playable character in that game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Among all the dragonflies scattered around the world, a special amount of focus is given to Sparx also getting warped away, leaving Spyro without his best friend and protector. You'd think this would lead to a section involving Spyro having to look for his lost friend, but this potentially interesting idea is thrown out when Sparx ends up being found in the next scene, making the first scene of him being warped away completely pointless.