YMMV / Spyro: A Hero's Tail

• Anti-Climax Boss: While the fight against Red in Icy Wilderness is fairly challenging and the idea of having him turn into a massive robot dragon as a final showdown certainly sounds impressive on paper, Mecha-Red is a complete joke of a final boss (arguably being just as easy as Gnasty Gnorc in the beginning)—even the distinct lack of checkpoints between phases is a nuisance at worst. Despite the plethora of attacks at his disposal, almost all of them are very easy to dodge and deal with, and he suffers from some of the most blatant Boss-Arena Idiocy you'll ever see in a video game as Red stands idly while you launch rockets at him, electrocute him and then turn his own robots against him.
• Awesome Music: See here.
• Badass Decay: Bentley goes from an eloquent Genius Bruiser who took out dozens of Rhynocs before finally being defeated in Spyro: Year of the Dragon to an utter dumbass who got kicked out of his own house by the other yetis.
• Best Level Ever:
  • Gloomy Glacier, Hunter's second and last level in the game. Besides the moody atmosphere, it hits the perfect sweet spot between being a challenging yet fun level where Hunter has to traverse a long and risky cavern in order to reach the Icy Citadel and reach Spyro.
  • Immediately following that is Icy Citadel, which is likewise a very fun level, featuring great setpieces and use of the Supercharge power-up and has a killer piece of music to go with it.
  • Molten Mount and its follow-up levels Dark Mine and Red's Laboratory are everything you could want from an endgame world—long, full of hazards, puzzles and beefed up enemies that give a genuine sense of thrill, and a great sense of atmosphere on top of that.
• Base-Breaking Character: Blink the Mole. Some found him a rather charming addition to Spyro's friends, having a cheerful personality that played well off of Spyro's own, and giving a relative to the main cast in being the Professor's nephew. Others considered him a boring one-note character who has little personality beyond jokes about not liking being above ground, and his gameplay feeling redundant compared with Hunter's.
• Broken Base: Opinions on this game vary wildly in the Spyro fandom. Some people enjoy the Wide-Open Sandbox approach that the game took, feeling that it added a well-needed change-up to a series that was getting stale. Other people feel that the portal-based gameplay of the original trilogy made the series more unique, and that removing it made the game too similar to other open-world games like Jak and Daxter.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Ember. Despite the fact that she only had one major speaking line this game (four overall if you go back to speak to her after doing specific things before leaving for Crocovile Swamps) and otherwise just serves as an unlockable player skin, Ember still tends to pop up a lot in fan works today, as if she was a major character from the beginning of the series, even though she only appears in this game and as a minor NPC in Spyro: Shadow Legacy. Though she may get death eater'd a lot by hardcore SpyCy fans, she's still pretty popular in her own right and tends to get paired with Spyro in a lot in Classicverse works regardless; arguably more so than Elora! (helps that they're both dragons).
  • Flame too. He's pretty much in the same boat as Ember, but despite that, he tends to pop up as much as she does in fan works as one of Spyro's few same age friends that also is a dragon. (Or, in the case of some Yaoi Fangirls...)
• Game-Breaker: Ice Breath. As soon as you get it, there is seldom any real reason to ever use any other kind of breath. It's slower to kill unarmored mooks, but quicker to kill ones that are armored (which, by the time you get Ice Breath, is a pretty common enemy type).
• Goddamned Bats: The "Secret Area" in Dragonfly Falls has a cave with, well, bats in it. It guards a light gem, and the bats will home onto you if you get too close to them, and killing them is a near-impossibility as they're small and annoying to hit. Mitigated by the fact that even if you die while successfully getting the light gem, that gem will stay collected when you respawn.
• Goddamned Boss: The first fight against Red isn't particularly difficult, but it is a very tedious fight where Spyro is sliding on ice the whole time and can't double jump, and if you don't know the trick to evading his very difficult to dodge freeze attack (you're supposed to stay right in front of Red when he launches this wave of attack, which can also risk you getting whipped by his tail), you are guaranteed to get your butt handed to you over and over again.
• Good Bad Bugs: As discovered by NPCarlsson, it's possible to glitch Hunter out of his parameters in Icy Wilderness, allowing you to explore Spyro's segments as him, and using the Professor's Teleporter, it's possible to explore other levels using Hunter that he's normally not able to access.
• Memetic Mutation: "Hey there, Spyro! When I zap you with my wand like this, your current position and progress is saved. Also, you lose a million brain cells."^ExplanationA quote said by Zoe near the start of the game to tell you about checkpoint saves. It became a bit of a meme due to Spyro's reaction ("That seems excessively destructive"), as well as Zoe clearly taking some joy in blasting Spyro with her wand for seemingly no reason other than because she can.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Those nasty giant spiders that like to crawl inside the tunnels. Especially if you're afraid of spiders. Some of them like to hide and can surprise-attack you.
  • The music that plays when you're next to a Dark Gem. Just have a listen.
  • Those... tentacle plants. Which can't be killed. They even make a shrieking noise too!
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The Ice Princess, who has a very charming design and attracted a small fandom, appears only to give the player a single mission.
  • Ember and Flame, who each only give Spyro a hint (Ember tells him to go to the dragon elder to learn the move to destroy dark gems and Flame subtly mentions Gnasty Gnorc's weakpoint). Ember has a total of four lines before disappearing (telling Spyro to see Elder Tomas three separate times, and begging Spyro to not visit Crocovile Swamp), while Flame only has two (thanking him for the rescue, and telling him to ram Gnasty's butt) and yet they are still incredibly popular characters.
• Padding:
  • While mini-games and side characters have been part of the Spyro series since the original Spyro trilogy, some have argued that the side-characters in this game do little more than artificially draw out the games length, as if you want to fully complete the game, you have to play the minigame twice, resulting in some of them becoming major pacebreakers, with Blink's slow-paced segments being considered the worst offender by far. Hunter's segments tend to be considered the best out of the lot, however, since he only gets two segments to himself (and only one of them is mandatory to play), and both of them can be completed in one go. Sparx's levels suffer from Bullet Hell difficulty in the later Realms, while Sgt. Byrd is mediocre at best, or finnicky to control at worst.
  • The "Secret Areas" of the game are a questionable attempt to draw out the gameplay as well, since two of them require large amounts of Light Gems to open (70 in Dragonfly Falls, 95 in Frostbite Village) and reward you with...a couple more small play areas that give you... a couple more Light Gems and Dragon Eggs to collect. They also provide more regular gems, but you'll more than likely have a ton of those by then. In short, they feel like a really arbitrary way of forcing you to backtrack to those levels later in order to achieve 100% completion. The Dark Mines secret area is also questionable in placement since it requires a mere 45 Light Gems to open, and you would more than likely have half of them by that point.
• Popular with Furries: The most out of the main Classic games due to introducing Flame and Ember (and to a lesser extent, Funny Animal NPCs like Blink and Ice Princess). Spyro also received a redesign that makes him look less stylized, which helped.
• Ron the Death Eater: Ember only appears in one stage, says some flirtatious lines (Spyro's only reaction being an awkward Oh, Crap! "Uh..." towards the camera) and is then never seen again after Spyro leaves for Crocovile Swamp. Despite this, some people (mostly SpyCy fans) portray her as being completely obsessed with marrying Spyro, to the point of trying to get rid of or kill Cynder, and that Spyro despises her or is outright terrified of her. This is despite the fact that her and Cynder exist in separate universes, and the fact Spyro's only real reaction is the above "Uh...", which could be interpreted in multiple ways.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Blink gets the same complaints that some of the partners in Spyro 3 get, due to being redundant and a major pacebreaker to the core gameplay; with Blink's gameplay resembling a much slower paced, less interesting version of Hunter's sections. Many feel like he was only added just so they can say they have a bunch of different characters to play as.
  • To obtain a minigame's light gem, you have to play the minigame twice: once for a dragon egg (which doesn't unlock anything besides optional bonuses), then a second time for the gem itself (which actually is necessary to activate the Professor's machinery and progress through the game). Many fans find this to be a nonsensical design decision that ultimately only serves to unnecessarily pad out the game, especially when it comes to Blink's and Sparx' levels.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus seems to be that it's a good game in its own right, taking cues from the original trilogy, but it doesn't surpass it due to being too easy to complete, as well as the above-mentioned Minigame grinding.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Compared to Enter the Dragonfly before it, though that isn't a high bar to reach to begin with. While Enter the Dragonfly is often seen as the Spyro franchise's worst entry due to being Christmas Rushed (and thus ended up being an Obvious Beta), A Hero's Tail was a vast improvement, and more in line with the quality set by the original Insomniac developed trilogy of games. Youtuber game reviewer Antdude in his retrospective review of the game probably describes the games best:
  AntDude: And the craziest part about all of this? It doesn't matter how mediocre I think this game is, it's probably still the best game in this series after the original trilogy... and they made quite a few games after the original trilogy.
• Tear Jerker: Teena the hyena, a quest NPC who consequently can't stop laughing, even though her house was just burned down by Red's minions. She sounds as if she's about to cry as she explains her situation to Spyro.
• That One Attack: Red's ice ball attack, as mentioned under Goddamned Boss, makes the fight much more tedious than it needs to be—it's very fast, there's no indication of how many projectiles there will be, and they can't be double jumped over because the whole area is covered with ice. There are two easy ways to avoid the attack, but they're both hard to figure out—the first is to use the Wing Shield (which hardly sees any use outside of Cloudy Domain) and the second is to stand right underneath Red (which will cause the ice balls to fly over Spyro's head).
• That One Level:
  • Sgt. Byrd's speedways. For whatever reason, the dev team saw it fit to replace Spyro's flight in the speedways from the original trilogy with Sgt. Byrd and his jetpack. The problem being that Sgt. Byrd's jetpack is a bit more awkward to control (and harder to get used to) when compared to that of Spyro's normal flight sections from the original trilogy.
  • Sparx's levels are disliked due to him being a Fragile Speedster in a Bullet Hell environment.
  • The later turret section minigames can get rather crazy too. Early on, they're challenging but manageable. Come late-game, they start reaching Bullet Hell levels of insanity.
  • Blink's levels aren't looked upon too favorably thanks to being a slower paced, less interesting version of Hunter's own levels and gameplay. Couple this with dodgy physics and dodgy level design, and it's a very frustrating experience. The Icy Wilderness level is downright exasperating due to some very tricky platforming and climbing segments, and the Dark Mines level is especially tedious due to its sheer length combined with some seriously tricky "do or die" platforming segments.
• They Changed It, So It Sucks: The main complaint of the game is the fact that the characters that weren't made radically different characterization wise (Moneybags) were either Flanderized (Spyro is snarkier and grumpier, Gnasty Gnorc is a bit more of a dork, the elder dragons act like old farts [Tomas admitting as such], Sgt. Byrd is more stereotypically British) or actually made to have their quirks toned down to make the game Lighter and Softer. (Hunter's semi-Surfer Dude portrayal is mostly absent, his ego is as strong as ever though. Sparx has a somewhat-normal voice, but liberally using buzzing noises, instead of the kazoo-filled noises he made before, and Bentley no longer speaks in Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness.) The only one who could possibly be considered left mostly intact is the Professor.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Ember and Flame are the only dragons in the entire classic series that are Spyro's age (and Ember being the closest he's ever had to a love interest that wasn't vaguely hinted at or in a completely different continuity) but they each only appear in one scene and then disappear. It doesn't help that they debuted in the second-to-last game of the classic series.
  • For the first time in a main series Spyro game, you can fully play as Hunter himself, without a vehicle! For about two levels in the entire game. Fans of his gameplay were sorely disappointed, especially considering he's the only playable character (barring Spyro himself) whose gameplay isn't considered a Scrappy Mechanic.
  • The game constantly plays up Red's past as being important because he was a fallen Dragon Elder who returned to make the realms his own, and while we do hear his past exploits in conversations with the other elder dragons, his storyline goes virtually nowhere. Spyro and Red end up having Snark-to-Snark Combat, but that's about it. Red is essentially a ambiguously vengeful bad guy with a big ego (who never once shows remorse, or has any second guesses about his past that led to his banishment) that Spyro is hell-bent on taking down and trash-talking too. Rescued from the Scrappy Heap in the following game, where it's revealed he was brainwashed by the sorcerer, explaining his attitude and demeanor in this game.
• Unfortunate Character Design: Gnasty Gnorc's design in this game has been widely mocked due to his chestplate resembling a bra.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Spyro dismissing a mermaid who mistakes him for a fish, muttering "Chicks..." under his breath. Needless to say, such a line probably wouldn't fly today, especially as more women have gotten into video games.
  • Elder Aster tells Spyro "None of your A.D.D.". Since the release of the game, it's become less acceptable to refer to physical or mental illnesses as a pejorative (such as "I'm so O.C.D. today").
• Win Back the Crowd: After the major disappointment that Enter the Dragonfly was, this game had the task of bringing Spyro fans back. While it doesn't measure up to the Insomniac trilogy, it's a lot better than Dragonfly was.

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