This game is almost two decades old now and I love it as much as ever. It's so refreshing nowadays. There's almost no story, just a premise that you're a dragon and there's a bad guy to beat. Everyone likes dragons. I still find the graphics enchanting and like the controls and music. It's not bogged down with a bunch of mini-games and scenes and different types of characters for each world. I don't like the random characters they came up for the various levels in 2 and 3 as much as dragons, and I'd rather run, jump, glide, charge, and flame as Spyro than do a bunch of random mini-games. I like how the gems in 1 are tucked away in little nooks and crannies and hidden cleverly. In 2 and 3, there's a ton sitting in plain site that take a while to collect, and it can be a bit of a slog. In 1 there's just enough in plain site to make progressing feel constantly rewarding. I think the downplaying of scenes and the smaller number of gems and the more focused gameplay and smaller stakes gives this game more of an innocent charm than 2 or 3. I like how short the levels are. They're like ten minutes. You just blast through them and get instant gratification. I miss games you can play for an hour and feel like you accomplished a lot. Nowadays games focused on gameplay are throwbacks to really hard games. Late 90s games knew how to be easy and still satisfying.

When I hit the second world today, I was stuck by nostalgia. I had a demo of the first world as a kid for a while before I got the whole game, so playing the second world for the first time is from a different part of a childhood. This gave me a somewhat painful but good, human nostalgia. I'm moving Spyro 1 up to a 9.5 and my 7th favorite game. It's an important part of my life.