The History of Spyro 2

The villain's name is the trilogy's best naming story. Ripto came from the Japanese katakana spelling of Spyro itself: the Insomniac team looked at the first game's Japanese logo, thought the characters resembled the word "Ripto," and kept it for their sorcerer. The name travelled back to Japan inside a game whose own Japanese title had dropped it entirely.

Insomniac president Ted Price said the sequel was designed to give experienced players a "greater challenge," with more depth and variety than the first game. Spyro, planning a vacation to Dragon Shores, is summoned instead to Avalar, three homeworlds named for seasons, where the sorcerer Ripto has arrived by accident through a portal experiment and decided to conquer a world with no dragons in it.

The structure changed from collecting for its own sake to working for a living world. Each realm ends with a talisman; side tasks earn orbs; and gems are now currency, paid to Moneybags, a bear who charges for portals, passages, and three new abilities: swimming, climbing, and the headbash. Power-up gates grant temporary superflame, flight, ice breath, and more. New regulars Hunter the Cheetah and Moneybags joined the cast, and Ripto went on to make more appearances than any other villain in the original series.

Tom Kenny took over the voice of Spyro from Carlos Alazraqui, and Stewart Copeland returned to compose, with Jeff Seitz engineering and co-producing.

Japan's Spyro 2 arrived four months after the Western release, under its own title and built on the same thinking as the first game's rebuild: a gentler fixed camera and a slowed charge, with a smaller promotional push. It underperformed like its predecessor. Famitsu scored it 30/40, the coolest major reception the trilogy received anywhere. The full account of why Japan's Spyro games were rebuilt at all is on this Library's Japanese version page; the consequence lands on the next page of this shelf, because the third game never came to Japan at all.

The game took an ELSPA Gold sales award in the UK (at least 200,000 copies), sold a million copies in North America by December 1999, and passed 3.4 million units by mid-2007. When the trilogy was remade in 2018 as the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, the compilation kept the North American name, Ripto's Rage!, for every region, retiring Gateway to Glimmer to the original PAL boxes.