While Spyro struggled to follow up the original trilogy on consoles, a series of side games were developed for the Game Boy Advance throughout the early 00s. Considering Spyro was conceived as a fully 3D freeform series, it wouldn’t be as easy to adapt to a system that normally didn’t do 3D. But Digital Eclipse stepped up to the plate and managed it with a trio of solid isometric platformers, starting with the decent if sometimes frustrating Season of Ice.
Spyro, Hunter and Bianca are having a nice vacation in Dragon Shores when a balloon appears with a letter from Zoe the fairy. An incredibly powerful spell has been cast in the Fairy Worlds, trapping all the fairies in unbreakable Ice Crystals and leaving them at the mercy of the Rhynocs. While Bianca tries to find the source of this strange spell, it’s up to Spyro to rescue the fairies before it’s too late.
Season of Ice recreates the PS1 Spyro gameplay through an isometric platformer, where your goal is to explore psuedo-3D environments, collect gems and free the frozen fairies by flaming them. You’re able to jump, glide in mid-air, and hover for an extra boost at the end of glides, while you can attack enemies and break pots with your flame breath or charge attacks. Considering the GBA’s handful of buttons, the controls are surprisingly intuitive with A handling all the gliding and hovering, B triggering your flame and serving as your basic attack in most situations, and holding R to charge only when needed.
You can also look around by holding the L button and pressing the D-Pad in whatever direction you wish to look, which is almost required for orienting yourself. While the mechanics are reworked quite well for the isometric style, the zoomed-in view makes it troublesome to see where you are. It’s easy to overlook sections hiding gems, enemies, or even significant chunks of the stage, and accessing them can be difficult when the camera angle makes it unclear if platforms are lower or higher. The game manages to distinguish higher elevated platforms using distinct tiles and colours, but it’s a common occurrence early on to misjudge the height and fall to your death.
Enemies thankfully don’t respawn, but you’ll be thrown back to the beginning of the level and have to find your way back. It’s pretty disorienting when levels largely lack distinct landmarks to keep you grounded, not to mention how completing certain objectives will teleport you to locations you mightn’t be familiar with. The best way to handle levels is to explore them more cautiously, especially since you move rather quickly and it’s easy enough to accidentally fall off edges or get knocked off by enemy attacks. While going slow removes the kinetic energy of its console counterpart, it’s still decently satisfying to explore the worlds on offer.
Stages largely give you room to discover at your own pace, alternating between big landmasses and smaller islands to fly between. Some fairies are found out in the wild and are enjoyable to stumble across, while others are obtained by completing objectives. The objectives largely stay the same between stages, such as defeating all the enemies and flaming eight special objects (which sadly do reset whenever you die), though they sometimes throw in unique goals like activating lighthouses or leading bumblebees to blooming flowers.
Each homeworld contains a trio of regular Spyro stages, along with a Sparx level and a Speedway. Sparx stages are unlocked by paying Moneybags gems, and play identically to the top-down shooter stages from Year of the Dragon, complete with extra ammo types and strafing. Speedways have been completely reworked into rail shooter gauntlets where you need to survive and take out the boss before time runs out. These are generally much harder, especially on a first go since certain enemies only will give you extra time on repeat attempts once defeated.
If you want to see most of the game, you’ll have to overcome the Speedways since you need a significant number of fairies in each homeworld to unlock the next one. Not only that, but you can’t face the final boss without finding all 99 fairies! Although this encourages players to really get the most out of Season of Ice, that last requirement’s too unreasonable for most players, which isn’t helped by said final boss merely being a harder version of the only other boss fight. But if you manage to do it, and also collect all the gems, you’ll unlock the bonus minigame Dragonfly X in which Sparx shoots at a shielded bug in the style of Star Castle.
It’s a solidly packed game, and one that manages to look and sound quite nice as well. Pre-rendered games are dime a dozen on the GBA, but the more considered character models and colour choices result in a clean looking adventure with some charm and a variety of fantastical locales. The sound effects are ripped straight from the PlayStation games and feel perfectly at home, while Robert Baffy’s soundtrack features a mix of appropriately Spyro-sounding songs and more gentle tunes thanks to softer instrumentation.
Season of Ice surprisingly received a Japanese release in December 2002 as Spyro Advance, making it the first Spyro game to get localized over there since Ripto’s Rage. There’s various minor changes like redrawn character portraits and gems being moved around, but it also has a couple major gameplay tweaks. Fairies now act as checkpoints whenever they’re rescued, so you don’t need to backtrack through the level upon death. Most useful is the introduction of a level map that can be accessed with the Select button, which makes it much easier to orient yourself and see where you haven’t been.
The map screen as seen in the Japanese version
LINKS:
A page on programmer Darren Schebek’s website where they discuss working on various games from 1983 through 2020, including the GBA Spyro games: http://www.schebek.ca/projects.htm
A YouTube playlist by Robert Baffy, containing enhanced versions of his Season of Ice soundtrack using the original MIDI and SoundFont files – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLudR0fCOl3TwrQlTqqSwQ5hWdZJnLJ_f6
