Spyro The Dragon is one of those series that has had big ups and downs over time. After getting off to a strong start with the beloved original trilogy for the PS1 (developed by Insomniac Games, who went on to make even more classic games like Ratchet & Clank and the PS4 Spider-Man series), the collect-a-thon platformer series jumped ship to various other developers with mixed results. The fourth entry, Spyro: Enter The Dragonfly (PS2, GameCube) was heavily hyped before release, but turned out to be nothing short of a disaster, one comparable to Sonic 2006. It had a truly nightmarish production behind the scenes (an entire documentary was made about it--look it up on Youtube!) that is reflected in a game that was clearly unfinished and a pale shadow of its predecessors at best. Even Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price openly lambasted EtD as a terrible game and an embarrassing follow up to their own Spyro games. (As an aside, my PS2 flat out couldn't read my disc of it and spat it out as if to say "Sorry dude, this game is too bad, even for me! I'm doing you a favor!" I'm not making this up!)
But the good news was that another developer also got their hands on Spyro around this time--Digital Eclipse (who are now best known for their many, many high-quality retrogame collections like Atari 50 and their 'Gold Master' series like The Making Of Karateka and LLAMASOFT: The Jeff Minter Story), who developed several Spyro games for the hot-new Game Boy Advance, and the results--while not quite up to par with the PS1 trilogy--are fine games in their own right. (Notably, Ted Price gave praise to them in sharp contrast to EtD) Believe it or not, these were the first Spyro games I got to play in full before I played the PS1 trilogy, and I'm glad to be revisiting them now!
The first entry, Spyro: Season Of Ice (2001) was a good--if flawed--portable take on the collect-a-thon platformer formula (collect gems, torching or charging at bad guys, making tricky glide jumps, and doing missions for various people so you can unlock new worlds, rinse and repeat), pragmatically reformulated into an isometric platformer ala Sonic 3D Blast, though much less slippery to control by comparison. It had impressive graphics, catchy music (not as memorable as Stewart Copeland's tunes for the OG games, but still pleasant) good gameplay control, and also has some very fun Space Harrier-esque bonus levels and shoot em ups with Sparx The Dragonfly. But it also suffered from a lot of frustrating fake difficulty tricks (i.e. no checkpoints, no map combined with repetitive level design, lots of bottomless pits and frustrating depth perception) and rather blown out looking colors.
Spyro 2: Season Of Flame practically feels tailor-made to rectify virtually every complaint about that game. Checkpoints are abound, levels have much more variety in their setpieces and enemies, you can pull up an in-game map (by pressing L and Select together) and there are far less issues with gauging where you can and can't jump/glide to in a level. Not to say that Spyro 2: SoF is a total cakewalk--there are some genuinely challenging parts--but it is far less tedious. There is also much more variety to the gameplay. While the flight levels of Season Of Ice are gone, you get 2D platformer/run n gun levels with Agent 9 the chimp, and Q-Bert esque platformer levels with Sheila the Kangaroo. I also like that Spyro can switch between his fire breath and ice breath as you get further in--I actually find it more fun to freeze the enemies, personally! And the colors are much easier on the eyes in this entry. My only big complaint is that the game outright forces you to backtrack in order to finish certain levels by gating parts off with moves you won't learn till later. What's the point?
While I haven't finished Season Of Flame yet, the first third of it that I've played is quite a good game. If you want your portable Spyro fix without having to get Spyro Reignited Trilogy for Switch, you could do far worse than try this one out!