Headscratchers / Spyro the Dragon

• How exactly does Moneybags reach some of the places you run into him? Such as the Icy Speedway portal in Autumn Plains that is on an island right in the middle of a big bottomless pit that requires a glide to get there. Seriously can that fat bear glide too?
• How come in the mini-game the Bonebuilders of Skelos Badlans are being preyed upon bythe Lava Lizards, but in the cutscene and the epilogue they have one as a pet?
• Exactly what is the Sorceress supposed to be? An alligator? A dinosaur? Some kind of toad, perhaps?
  • She looks a lot more crocodilian in the Reignited Trilogy tho.
• Where are the Dragon Eggs coming from if there are no female dragons? Do the fairies created them somehow?
  • There are female dragons. However, none of them are seen until A Hero's Tail.
    • Female dragons are found in Year of the Dragon as well, it's just that all the female dragons in it are hatchlings. Only the original game really had the weird gender imbalance, as the next two games just lacked adult dragons in general.
• There are 5 portals underwater in Evening Lake. Wouldn't the water flow into the portals?
  • Perhaps only solid objects can pass through the portals...
    • Or perhaps beings suffused with magic (so pretty much anything short of machines)
• Why did the creatures in the Midnight Mountain World realms go through the exit portals? The first 3 worlds are explained as the inhabitants helping you build the next method of transportation, but there is no such to be built in Midnight Mountain so... that Just Bugs Me.
  • The game was slightly rushed to be out by the Year of the Dragon, so maybe there was originally going to be another vehicle but then the developers ran out of time? As for an in-story reason, maybe they all just had some place else to be?
    • In Haunted Tomb, the last jackal tells you he's going off somewhere after a thousand years stuck in the tomb. I think there are similar explanations as well.
• When Gnasty Gnorc reappeared in A Hero's Tail, why did pretty much no one bat an eyelid? This guy once turned EVERY DRAGON IN THE WORLD into crystal statues. Are they just confident that Spyro can kick his ass? Or do they think his magic power has weakened? And for that matter, what is he doing back in the first place?
  • I think there really was no reason why he was in the game, other than to give a nod to the first game in the series.
  • It's clearly explained that he was hired by the new Big Bad Red, and implied that the dragons sent him into exile. Also, he used a magical wand to turn the dragons into crystal, while in the new game he has only a large morningstar with a thunder fairy trapped inside. Then again, of course they're confident! In the first game Spyro roasted him in two hits!
• What the hell happened to Moneybags's voice? When he first appeared, he had a posh British English accent. In A Hero's Tail, he has an... I think Indian accent. What the hell?
  • Maybe he's the inverse Mohinder Suresh.
  • I always thought it was a gimmick for an "Indian-themed store" or something.
    • Also possible he would have appeared in another stores with different accents, but... this is A Hero's Tail we are talking about.
• Does anyone else think we should separate the Spyro entries? There's the PS1 games and then the PS2/Gamecube games.
  • Given the vast differences in storylines, characters, gameplay, overall style, general fan base, and the Word of God that the "Legend" series is a franchise reboot/alternate universe, it's not really such a bad idea to separate the PS1 (or, if you must, PS1 and first two PS2 titles) from the "Legend" series.
  • I'm pretty sure the developers intended for the Legend series to be taken as a separate entity to the original series - hence the new name.
    • They are separate series.
  • Agreed, just split them already.
  • My best guess is they're trying to make Spyro games more popular. Why you think they created the Legend series and the Skylander series? Although the Skylander series focuses on different characters, not our favorite hero himself...
• What was with where the eggs were in Spyro: Year of the Dragon? Even if the Sorceress had just told the rhynocs, 'Put them all over all the worlds,' some of the places where the eggs were do not make sense. Like the ones at Midnight Mountain- one's under a false floor, one's on a ledge above a pool of slime, one (or maybe two) you have to glide to... if the eggs hatched before Spyro got there, how the hell were the dragons supposed to survive?
  • Well if you recall the sorceress didn't actually care whether the dragons survived or not, she just wanted to rip all their wings out and make an Immortality Potion out of them. As for the rest... Meh, videogame logic, I guess.
  • One egg in particular always made me laugh: at the start of the game one of the villains (can't remember her name) taunts you and says that they've hidden the eggs all across the worlds, and that I'll never, ever find them in a million years. She says this, whilst there is an egg sat in plain view and within easy reach right behind her.
    • A part of me is half convinced that even then a tiny part of Bianca was not convinced she wanted the plan to succeed in the first place. Her behaviour at first contains a lot of... very blatantly villianous gloating and as we later find out, she's actually quite nice and in this to save her world.
• Why does Bentley make so much noise when he walks, but no noise when he jumps?
  • Magic? Crazy yeti biology?
  • Simple, he can't jump high enough to make noise when he jumps.
• How does Bentley get to the rocket from his portal? You have to swim through the lake to get there, and we're given no indication that Bentley can swim.
  • Have we seen any indication that he can't swim, either? If I recall there isn't any water in any of Bentley's stages, so we have no way of knowing if he can swim or not - though the fact that he did make it to the rocket would indicate that he can.
• How did Moneybags get to the Forgotten Worlds? And for that matter, you fall through a hole to get there... so what happened to the hole?
  • There's at least one portal linking Avalar to the Forgotten Worlds, in Agent 9's Lab. There's no reason to suggest why Moneybags couldn't have come through there, or that there aren't other portals - bear in mind that they can be reprogrammed to connect to different realms (the Superportal in Ripto's Rage linked to both Ripto's home world and Dragon Shores).
  • Presumably, the same way that other returning characters - such as Handel and Greta - got to the Forgotten Worlds.
  • According to Shadow Legacy, the Forgotten Worlds can be reached via aircraft without having to use portals.
• Why don't the rebels escape earlier? Sheila could probably kick her way out (OK, it could take her a while, but she could probably do it), Sgt. Byrd could blast his way out, Bentley could club his way out, and Agent 9 could shoot his way out... and Moneybags has no weapons, so he couldn't stop them escaping.
  • Using a rocket launcher in such close proximity to yourself is not a good idea. Not to mention, Moneybags probably reinforced the cages to withstand such punishment.
  • Spyro asks Byrd the very same thing. He claims to be saving ammunition so he could get revenge on Moneybags, but his delivery makes it clear that he simply forgot.
  • As a hypothetical, perhaps the other allies were suppressed (Sheila and Bentley with physical restraints like shackles, Byrd and 9 with removal of their gear), but that wasn't visible due to corner shaving (it seems excessive to create a whole new model of each character for roughly one scene)
• In either the first or second game(Been awhile since i've played Spyro games), there's a hole inbetween a spiral staircase with Grimy Water. Only it's not lethal. Hell, it isn't even an actual liquid judging by how you can stand on it. And yet it has the same animation as the pools of death liquid seen during the rest of the level. There's nothing to be found in it, and it's not an Unwinnable-pit trap. So what IS it besides possibly a glitch?
  • A real pain in the ass for the people who took a while to work out you could actually walk on it?
  • That is in the first game at the back of the Metalhead level in the Beast Makers world. I accidentally fell in it and experienced the same confusion. Considering it does have the same texture/animation as the other liquids, it's most likely just a glitch.
• In Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage/ Gateway to Glimmer, Zoe appears in front of you in Idol Springs and tells you how to defeat the enemies wearing metal armour. The thing is, by that time you've already passed several by, so either you've run past them since flaming didn't work, or you charged them because flaming didn't work so you already know. My point is, wouldn't it be more appropriate for Zoe to turn up when you first see the enemies?
  • To be fair, Idol Springs is likely to be the second level the player visits, and the first to feature shielded enemies - and by the time you run into Zoe's hint, you've only met a small handful of the enemies, few enough to just go back and charge through after hearing the hint.
  • Every single dragon who dispensed advice had the same issue in the first installment- particularly amusing was Spyro asking a mentor "how the heck can I get these fireproof guys?" after presumably disposing of three waves of them.
• In Year of the Dragon, during Hunter's gliding training lessons in the first home world, he refuses to jump down a hole because he hears running water, and explains that he hates to get wet. Yet in Ripto's Rage, and even during YOTD itself, he appears underwater, and doesn't seem bothered in the slightest...
  • If I remember correctly, he's wearing a wetsuit during those instances where he's underwater. Maybe he only wants to get wet if he's properly geared up?
  • It's not just that, he clearly said he don't want his fur wet as felines in Real Life don't as well. He has no problems swimming if he got his gear.
• Is Spyro twelve? Dragon eggs arrive every twelve years. These dragons appear to age normally, since the one hundred or around that age year old ones do look 100.
  • Presumably in the classic version. The new Spyro is confirmed to be twelve in the first game and fifteen in the third. Same with Cynder.
  • Wait, how you know he's twelve? The classic version didn't state his age, like most cartoon characters from TV.
  • There're just guessing he's 12 because the third game states the eggs all hatch on the Year of the Dragon every 12 years. Presumably this also applies to Spyro (It would explain why there's such an age gap between Spyro, Ember, and Flame next to all the other dragons).
• Spyro got lots of cool abilities in Ripto's Rage... so how come he can't tumble anymore? Also, why in the first place couldn't he swim on the surface of water?
  • Hydrophobia?
  • If you want a more technical/gameplay-based answer, he probably lost the ability to tumble because it wasn't exactly a necessary ability– unlike, say, charge attack, which is one of Spyro's most iconic abilities. As for swimming– in the first game, they used water as an obstacle for platforming. Programming in the ability for Spyro to swim likely hadn't even been thought of or, if it had, was viewed as unnecessary. After all, swimming on the water's surface is essentially the same as walking on terrain; if they didn't intend for Spyro to eventually dive under the water, there would be no reason to make such a time consuming addition. Spyro can learn to swim in Ripto's Rage because some of the portals are underwater. If there were no portals underwater, swimming would probably not have been in the cards.
  • As for a more Watsonian perspective: the swimming thing could be a result of dragons living in the Dragon Realms. YOTD makes it clear that dragons are very powerful sources of magic... possibly, this might mean that such a high number of them actually makes bodies of liquid, such as water, toxic for them. As for the tumbling... maybe young dragons' bones are somehow more flexible than those of adult dragons, and in between the first and second games Spyro grew past the threshold where tumbling is physiologically possible (or at the very least comfortable) for him. Just a couple of total guesses there.
  • Another possibility: the water in the first game could have been effected by Gnasty Gnorc's magic, just like the dragons and the gems were. Normally, the water is just water, and Spyro can paddle around in it just fine. As for tumbling, Spyro stopped doing it when he figured out he could just sidestep the projectile and charge the guy that threw it at him.
  • Maybe Spyro just learned how to swim.
• Is Spyro a Peace Keeper? It's obvious that he's got the knack for stomping gnorcs... so why is he living in the Artisan world?
  • Spyro could be half-Peace Keeper and half-Artisan, since the Spyro wiki suggests that Artisans often interbreed with the other clans. Maybe he was raised in the Artisan world, but inherited the combat skills of his Peace Keeper side?
  • I got the impression that the dragon kinds weren't breeds or castes, merely professions. As such, Spyro will be whatever he want to be, he's just hanging around with the Artisans because they're fun guys (or maybe it's dragon apprenticeship, or dragon fostering; he's young and probably has to spend time with all of them at various times - it takes a village to raise a child, especially given they seem to lack traditional family).
• What happened to Elora? She disappeared for most of the third game, but she wasn't really needed. But the people who made the next games.. Discarded her for no reason. She was a love interest, a girl, and a well-rounded character. I expect that if Insomniac had continued to make Spyro games, she'd reappear.
  • There's an Easter Egg in Dragon Shores that implies Spyro did something to piss her off in the Tunnel of Love (specifically ignoring her) so I always assumed that was the canon reason for her absence.
  • Actually, it turns out that Elora was supposed to be a playable character in these games but got scrapped at the last minute.
• Elora says she's a fawn, but from where? The only other female fawns in the game don't look anything like her.
  • This Troper always got the impression that there'd be a lot less difference between Elora and other fauns if it weren't for the fact that the latter basically had one model per sex (well... two for the males if you count the ones in the volcano level too). She does share something of the personality with them in terms of being basically your average American young female - she's just more mature because she's an actual character rather than a one-level NPC. The only slightly unexplainable thing is her skin colour, which does seem rather different, but... maybe that's just how fauns tan?
  • At the risk of being off topic I think she's a faun from Magma cone. in fracture hills the satyrs are brown and tan with the fauns being blueish, but in magma cone the satyrs are blue so maybe the fauns their are brown?
    • Those were explicitly stated to be fauns in Magma Cone, though looking at the two you might not guess that both sexes were the same species. Maybe the reason why all the female fauns aside from Elora hang out in Fracture Hills is because they find the satyrs to be better-looking.
  • Maybe she's half faun at Magma Cone and half faun at Fracture Hills.
  • I like to think there are areas in Avalar unexplored by Spyro (Shadow Legacy has a cheetah village level in Avalar if you count that as canon).
  • I think she's actually a satyr and she just said the wrong species. There are both male and female fauns found in levels, and they both look similar and are blue. The satyrs meanwhile are found on the same level as the female fauns and are brown like Elora is.
• Okay, so in A Hero's Tail, the second boss (Ineptune, I think her name was) commented that Spyro was larger than she expected, then says something along the lines of she assumed dragons were tiny due to being in the water all the time. But during the cutscene when you first go to the second world, she was shown at the very least seeing Red, who is much larger than Spyro. Would someone care to explain?
  • Probably she was just mocking Spyro. "Blasting his Ego", you know?
• Is Skylander's even a Spyro game? He's the second word in the title, and from what I've seen it's more like a game that features Spyro and Cynder.
  • The second game removed Spyro from the title and box art completely, so nope, it's not "really" a Spyro game, insofar as he's not any more or less prominent than anyone else.
  • Spyro is the main character of some of the prequel novels, though.
• Is it me or is the Legend Of Spyro fan-base larger then the "classic" one?
  • It's nearly impossible to draw a clear line between the two and judge their relative sizes, since there is naturally a lot of overlap between them; I think most Legend fans are also fans of the classic series. But I suspect the Legend side only appears larger by virtue of being newer, thus fresher on people's minds, and born into a more net-savvy generation than the original series; there weren't as many kids within the games' target audience online in 1998.
    • It seems that the speedrunning community for the Classic Spyro games is much larger even with the consideration that there have been many more glitches found, indicating that the fan-base for the original games is bigger. None of the legend games have a speed run while all three in the original trilogy have a few.
    • That's probably because the Lo S games are so linear, speedrunning them would just amount to defeating the enemies super-quickly.
• Are the post-PS1 trio games in their own parallel continuity to the originals?
  • Everything from A New Beginning on, yes.
  • Specifically, Enter the Dragonfly happens immediately after Year of the Dragon (they're still celebrating it in the opening cutscene). Hero's Tail happens some time later (Spyro says it's been a long time since he defeated Gnasty Gnorc), Shadow Legacy seems to have happened right after Hero's Tail (Red is said to have escaped from the Professor's Lab). Whether the GBA games are canon or not is up for debate. On one hand, Season of Ice makes pretty clear continuity references to Year of the Dragon, but on the other hand there was a lot of weirdness in the GBA series (Hunter lives in the "Cheetah Spot Spa" and not Avalar, Sgt. Byrd commands other penguins and not hummingbirds, ect).
• With the smaller enemies wearing armour to protect them from your fire attack...the armour is made of METAL. How does METAL armour block fire?! If anything, that would make fire even MORE dangerous. (Science lesson: Metal conducts heat and melts easily)
  • Science lesson: Metal conducts heat and melts easily under constant heat applied over a prolonged period of time. A scattered burst of fire lasting all of two seconds is not enough to make metal armor dangerous, even in a game world where it is enough to send an unarmored Mook flying backward across the room.
• This one overlaps with Fridge Horror a little. The Sorceress from YTOD needed 300 dragon wings for her spell. I assumed she meant 300 sets. There are not 300 baby dragons. From memory, there was just shy of 150, so even if she meant 300 individual wings, there wouldn't have been enough for her, would've there? (Forgive me if I got the number wrong; it's been a long time).
  • You have, in fact, got the number wrong. There are exactly 150 eggs, therefore the Sorceress would indeed have 300 wings for her spell. You probably forgot the secret 100% completion egg from the Super Bonus World
• What's the deal with the Spyro series? There's been a focus on Skylanders but there hasn't been any news of a Spyro main game. I worry it might be stuck in a rut like Crash Bandicoot
  • I don't think it's incredibly different from what's happened to series like Megaman or Rayman, and since those games eventually got throwback games (Megaman 9 and Rayman Origins), hopefully Spyro will, too, someday.
• How is it that in Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! and Spyro: Year of the Dragon the inhabitants of Avalar, and the Forgotten Realms, respectively, know who Spyro is? Both games indicate that this is his first time in said places, but almost every time you enter a new level, the residents are somehow able to identify you by name!
  • Elora, Hunter, The Professor, Zoe, and maybe Moneybags spread the word to the other inhabitants that a dragon named "Spyro" had come to help them.
    • But the problem I'm trying to point out is that even in Glimmer, which is the first level of Ripto's Rage, they recognize you. Spyro didn't introduce himself to the others until after the level.
  • Spyro has been on television, twice, and has defeated a sorcerer powerful enough to trap roughly 98% of the dragon population in crystal with a single spell(don't remember how many of those freed were repeats). Sure, Gnasty Gnorc is terrible in combat when his magic fails but to most of the population he's a guy who nearly won a one man crusade against an entire civilization and then turned its treasure into an army(a highly undisciplined army prone to infighting but again, common man doesn't know that much). Is it really that much of a surprise someone might know Spyro? Glimmer is apparently adjacent to the dragon realms. If they can summon a dragon, why not steal dragon cable?
  • Also odd, when Spyro reaches Dragon Shores, the gnorc that greets you says "Well done, Spyro!" As if he's aware of the adventure and battle you just went through."
• Why is Haunted Towers named Haunted Towers? There's no ghosts or other undead creatures.