Spyro's sidekick, a dragonfly named Sparx, acts as an indicator of his health, defending him from a limited number of enemy attacks.

Additionally, the games feature a number of collectibles which must be acquired to make progress such as gems, which also act as currency, and dragon eggs.

In July 2014, now former Sony Computer Entertainment chairman Andrew House stated that his team was considering bringing Spyro back, adding that he believed longtime fans would be interested in revisiting a character from their youth.

[4] The realization of Spyro remakes was originally teased in April 2018 when several media outlets received a package with a purple egg from someone under the alias "Falcon McBob".

This involved putting Spyro's model through rigorous stress tests to explore the range of emotions and expressions that could be yielded before and after the discussions with Insomniac staff.

Because Insomniac Games could not provide source code or original assets to use as a reference, Toys for Bob utilized an in-house emulation tool called "Spyro-scope" which showed the schematics of a level's geometry and revealed patterns in enemy pathfinding.

Other returning voice actors from the original releases reprising their roles include Michael Gough as Gnasty Gnorc, Gregg Berger as Ripto, André Sogliuzzo as Sparx the Dragonfly and Richard Tatum as both Agent 9 and Bartholomew.

[11] Additional recastings for the game's principal cast consist of Cassandra Lee Morris as Elora the Faun, Catherine Taber as Zoe the Fairy, J.B. Blanc as Moneybags the Bear, Melissa Hutchison as Bianca the Rabbit, Chantelle Barry as Shelia the Kangaroo, Dave B. Mitchell as Bentley the Yeti,[12] and Cissy Jones as the Sorceress.

[35] Chris Moyse of Destructoid commended the game's soundtrack for its rerecording, "dynamic" aspect in which tempo adjusted to match Spyro's activity, and the option to switch to the original recordings.

Wallace noted all of these aspects, calling the loading times in particular "a tad unacceptable" for being "slightly longer" than those of the original games, despite being produced two decades later for more advanced consoles.

[37] In the UK, the game reached first place on the all-formats sales chart in its first week; while it sold less than Pokémon: Let's Go, it outsold both its Pikachu and Eevee versions individually.