The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon (J2ME)

The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon for the J2ME cell phones is the final Spyro feature phone game and perhaps the most disappointing one. Despite the excellent art and music, the gameplay formula has had questionable changes, with one of the largest criticisms (from the few people who have played this game) being larger emphasis on unskippable dialogues and camera cutscenes.

Sub-Pages#

Development Info

Unused Music#

The song b4.mid, which is one of the most elaborate ones in the game despite being unused, was likely intended to play during the second phase of the final boss fight (after freeing Cynder from the crystal trap). However, the final game keeps playing the first phase theme.

Unlock All Cheat#

At the title screen, enter the sequence 84837834 using the keypad. This will unlock 100% completion and open the game's level select with all levels beaten to confirm this.

Text#

Capitalization Oddity#

Even though the game uses an all-caps font in the high-end versions (the ones that have significant amounts of dialogue), all text in the game is written for variable cases. Not only that, but it didn't stop the script writer from writing Malefor's dialogue like this:

Unused Text#

Surprisingly, there's not much of it.

Some text for menus. "GMG" appears to be an untranslated line that means "get more games".

Narration text that isn't used in favor of in-game animations:

Cynder was evidently supposed to say the following lines during the Dragon City boss fight when Spyro runs away:

In the final game, it's only implied that Ignitus is going to die at some point during or after the endgame, but an unused early version of one of Spyro's lines (stored right next to the used one) confirms it straight up:

Working Title#

The game's main Java class file is called STDHMidlet.class. This reflects the game's working title - The Legend of Spyro: The Darkest Hour.

Versions#

To do: This section has just been started.

Multiple versions were developed for different mobile devices. Each build includes an internal version number and timestamped files. The version numbers appear to correspond properly to the dates they were finished, though, similar to The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night (J2ME), the MANIFEST.MF file and the "gmg2" file have a later timestamp of 2008-08-25, which is likely a quirk of Vivendi or TMT's build system that lets us know when the game was actually built as well.

The versions fall into three main content categories, based on internal asset count, script length and level count:

High-End versions:

• Version 0.2.7 for Sony Ericsson W810i (176×220), 2008-05-27
• Version 0.4.4 for Nokia Series 40 (240×320), 2008-06-18
• Version 0.5.7 for Nokia/Symbian S60 (240×320), 2008-07-07
• Version 0.7.7 for Sony Ericsson K800i (240×320), 2008-08-05

These contain the full-length script, more assets, and appear to represent the complete version of the game.

Mid-Range versions:

• Version 0.3.5 for Nokia (208×208), 2008-06-06
• Version 0.3.9 for Sony Ericsson K300i/K500i (128×128 / 128×160), 2008-06-11

These versions have a lot less levels in the game, cut dialogue, and fewer asset files.

Low-End versions:

• Version 0.4.1 for Nokia Series 40 (128×128 / 128×160), 2008-06-13
• Version 0.5.7 for Nokia N70 (176×208), 2008-07-07

Similar to the Mid-Range versions, but these are also missing the Space Harrier-like flight stages.

Differences between the High-End Versions#

• The Series 40 version and the W810i version use the standard version of the high-end music. In comparison, the Nokia/Symbian S60 version uses a quieter mix, and the K800i version only includes the title theme and the flight theme. The latter is rather bizarre, as the expectation for a high-end version for a phone like Sony Ericsson K800i is to be feature-complete.
• In spite of that, only the Sony Ericsson versions have a vibration option. The Softkeys are also swapped in comparison to the Nokia versions.
• The graphics for the semi-transparent lights in The Dream Forest and Dragon City were excluded from the Nokia/Symbian S60 version. Presumably, the Java runtime on these phones would display the transparency in a dithered way, and the developers might not have liked that.