YMMV / Spyro: Shadow Legacy

• Audience-Alienating Premise: A Spyro RPG with a mostly dark tone (in the same universe as the classic games instead of being a reboot)? Not hard to see why this game has been mostly forgotten and got largely poor reviews and sales.
• Base-Breaking Character: Bandit. You either like or hate him for "taking" Ember away from Spyro, mostly depending on how you feel about the SpyroXEmber pairing.
• Complete Monster: The Sorcerer is a Purple Dragon who believes that he is a "True Dragon", claiming that the other dragons are not true dragons. Prior to the events of the game, the Sorcerer corrupts Red with his magic, and orders him to place life draining Dark Gems across the realms to poison the life of the world. After Red's defeat, the Sorcerer creates three Shadow Amplifier Machines to pull everyone, including children, to the Shadow Realm so he can drain them of their magic, which involves torturing and leaving them to die there. When Bianca tries to stop him, the Sorcerer easily defeats her and orders Red to use her as bait for Spyro so he can kill him — also using Red as a scapegoat as the one responsible for his actions. When Spyro finally confronts the Sorcerer, he offers to make Spyro his apprentice, only for him to reject him anyways, deeming him too small and weak, before attempting to kill him for interfering his plans — with his final plan to drag everyone back into the Shadow Realm to drain them of their magic. A cruel, dark being who believes himself to be superior to the other dragons, the Sorcerer serves as one of Spyro's darkest foes.
• Die for Our Ship: Bandit gets this treatment from Spyro/Ember fans.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Aside from those who ignore the game as a whole, due to the game not being made by Insomniac, or general dislike of the game regardless of that fact, Bandit doesn't exist. Even people who dislike Ember usually don't bring him up when Ember's crush on Spyro is brought up. It helps that, being on the DS and generally being an underpopular game in the series, most people aren't aware Bandit exists in the first place. This game is notably even more disliked then "Enter the Dragonfly", which at least had the excuse of Troubled Production for turning out the way it did and many fans argued it could've been a good game if it had only had more time in development. On the other hand, quite a few fans agree that "Shadow Legacy" was just a bad idea from the very start and that it had little chance of ever being good.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Many critics and fans criticized this game's use of the stylus due to the touch-screen mechanics being WAY too strict for their own good, as the game will reject anything other then a perfectly drawn lightning bolt, making battles very tedious to say the least.
• Strangled by the Red String: Bandit immediately falls in love with Ember when he meets her and has Spyro deliver a love letter to her. When Ember gets the letter, she immediately drops her crush on Spyro and falls for Bandit, even though the two of them barely spoke to each other and would not interact again for the rest of the game.

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