Spyro: Glitch Legacy
This game may have been meant to be RPG-like, but the story is very shallow. Basically, everyone except for Spyro gets sucked into the Shadow Realm and Spyro has to go and save them. This is the sort of story that you might expect from, say, the original Spyro trilogy, but this is meant to be an RPG.
The background graphics are fairly nice. However, the characters are fairly blocky and some platforms look a little crude. Sometimes (though not very often) there are glitches that may cause you to fall through the floor. The characters' faces that appear when they are talking look fairly roughly done as well. Not exactly eye candy.
The music also has its good and bad points too. Half the game's music is fairly boring, because every cave has the same music (which isn't really music since it's just the sound of water dripping) and the Shadow Realm has the same music no matter where you are in the world. There are some very well done tunes though, for example, the music in the Fairy Realm. If the Shadow Realm had a wider variety of tunes, that would be great, because the Shadow Realm is where you will spend a lot of time in this game.
But music and graphics aren't truly what makes a game; gameplay is. The game is fairly easy. The flow of the game is simply walk into a new area, go into the Shadow Realm, rescue villagers, go into the real world, talk to the villagers and do sidequests for as many as you can and repeat. The Shadow Realm is simply a darker version of the real world, where you have to go to rescue villagers. Early on in the game you receive a Shadowstone which allows you to go into the Shadow Realm by simply stepping on a certain kind of pad and pressing X. To rescue villagers, you must go up to the cage that they're trapped in and defeat all of the monsters around their cage to destroy the cage and then walk up to the villager. These monsters are the only monsters you actually need to defeat and they are immune to some of your attacks, making it only really worthwhile to get attacks that they will be vulnerable to.
The game has a level up system which is probably to make it feel like an RPG. However, levelling up isn't necessary. The only thing you need it for is to learn new skills and not all of them are necessary either. The three bosses in the game have certain methods of defeating them and not one requires a wide variety of skills. You can level up to level 25 but you can learn all the skills at level 17.
You can learn two new skills for every level you gain. There are six Dragon Elders in the Dragon Dojo that each teach you different skills. Titan teaches charging and jumping/gliding, jumping being a more useful skill since charging doesn't affect monsters in the shadow realm. (There are a few rocks that must be smashed with a higher level of charging, though some can be glided around and it's also a faster method of movement.) Tomas increases your general magic skills, the higher your skill is, the further you can teleport. Astor increases your fire and ice breath power, other skills that Shadow Realm enemies are immune to. Magnus gives you the ability to shield yourself and occasionally deal a critical strike while Cho-Lei gives you stronger attack magic power and the ability to occasionally deflect magic. Sensei, however, can be the most useful one of all. All the skills he teaches are useful in the shadow realm, horn attacks, tail attacks and Chi attacks that are powerful and allow an enemy's magical shield to be destroyed but consume a lot of MP.
There are also spells that can be learned at certain points of the game. There are six spells (that's including a secret spell that allows you to turn into an egg) and only half require the use of MP. I think that must be a glitch. After the second boss, you receive the Cyclone spell which does plenty of damage to both Shadow Realm and real world enemies, gets past magical shields and doesn't seem to consume any MP at all!
The sidequests that you have to do after rescuing villagers aren't interesting. They're either fetch quests or get-from-A-to-B quests. The rewards are either dragon eggs (collecting 30 allows you to learn the aforementioned egg spell), money, crystals (these will temporarily power up some of your abilities, for example making you less resistant to Shadow Realm monsters' attacks) or relics. There are 10 relics in the game, required to open the doors to the boss' rooms (2 for the first boss, 3 for the second and 5 for the final).
Spyro: Shadow Legacy isn't particularly long and there are only a few things to do after you've beaten it such as gain all of the skills and level up to level 25. You can also experiment with one of the glitches in this game, for example there is a glitch that allows you to be Spyro but controlled by the touch screen.
If you're an avid Spyro fan, you might enjoy this game. Otherwise, I would suggest only renting it. It can be fun at first but quickly gets old.