After fighting her way through four elemental-themed dungeons, Frodo meets Iran McKellen in person and discovers that he’s… Another dragon. And now that he’s with Frodo in person, you get… Another block of backstory!
Apparently, the previous purple dragon was… Evil. And Spyro’s girlfriend will be unable to resist his evil. And soon there will be an evil eclipse of… Evil! And then the well of souls will do something and some stuff will happen and boy will it be… EVIL!
Ian McKellen’s plan is for Frodo to just hang with him in the temple until the Armageddon has passed. Frodo, of course, readily agrees and the game ends…
Well, no, Frodo says he can’t leave the other dragons to die, so he insists on going back, and Sir Ian caves instantly. They make an exciting escape from the temple, which is told in the form of a cutscene, and Frodo and Fry instantly arrive at Skeletor’s castle on Mt. Doom.
At the top of the castle, Frodo meets the monkey king in a cutscene so important that it’s on film instead of tape. He makes Frodo fight his girlfriend, but she turns out to still be good, and they pull off a gambit they’ve tried before to disarm the monkey king. It doesn’t work, though, and she gets incapacitated, leaving Frodo alone for the big fight.
After the first phase of the battle, Spyro and the Monkey King fall into a lower arena, where Frodo is hit by a purple light that turns him into a scary-yet-dopey black form that can shoot purple energy blasts.
- Leah: No! He did not just do that!
- Ross: You died again?
- Leah: Yeah.
- Ross: That’s gay*.
- Leah: The monkey king guy is surrounded by legions of men.
After losing to Gaul the Monkey Queen a few thousand times, Leah cottons on to the fact that with time stopped, his first form takes a few extra hits each time he’s safe to approach, and this makes his first form not “easier” but perhaps less tedious.
At this point, Leah gets fed up, and it takes about three weeks for me to persuade her to play again.
After an arduous fight (Seriously, Leah can swear like a sailor when she’s riled up), The Pirate Queen orders Frodo to finish him — if he doesn’t, he just recharges and you have to play this segment again. Using Frodo’s Purple-mode finisher, he vaporizes Gaul, and then has to be talked down from destroying the world in a Purple Rage. Unfortunately, the mountain they’re in explodes in a ball of green snot, trapping Spyro, Cynder, and Fry . Recalling the words of Sir Ian — Who I have just learned is actually Gary Oldman — Spyro decides to Wait It Out by using his dragon powers to freeze himself and his friends in a block of ice, to keep them safe inside this volcano until the next game.
Inside… This… Volcano…
Anyway, that’s where the game ends, which Leah found mightily disappointing. I’m inclined to agree, except that it does redeem itself right after the end credits finish, when Samuel L. Jackson shows up to talk to Spyro about The Avenger Initiative.
Spyro’s adventures will continue in: The Legend of Spyro 3: The Quest For Peace…
* A Mind Occasionally Voyaging does not approve of the use of the pejorative “gay” to insult other people by suggesting them to be homosexual, nor do we condemn homosexuality, homosexual behavior, or even, say, college girls getting drunk and making out with other chyx (That is to say, we give Katy Perry a 50% approval rating). You should not call other people gay as an insult. Calling other people gay should only be done as a compliment, as in “Man, Tom, your fashion sense is impeccable, despite your love of intercourse with women, you have the fashion sex of a gay man.”
We do, however, see no issue with assigning human traits to inanimate objects or video game characters, particularly if there is a cheap joke to be made of it. In that spirit, the author apologizes for calling Gaul the Monkey King gay. He meant to say “Gaul the Monkey King is totally homosexual.”