u/Flodo_McFloodiloo

Based on what I've heard, Shadow Legacy is not good.

Still, I can't help but feel like an RPG fits Spyro pretty well. Obviously, the series has dragons, fairies, and other fantasy staples commonly used in RPGs, but beyond that it also has a large cast of characters, many of which have a lot of fans--but who also are a bit divisive when playable in conventional Spyro games. It's probably case-by-case, but it stands to reason that when you played to play a Spyro platformer, it's not a guarantee you'll like playing as another character (granted, it's also not a guarantee you'll like playing as Spyro when he's doing any of several "do everything right or do everything again" mini-games, but I digress).

However, what if they made a game and pitched it not as just another platformer, but rather an RPG that was built around lore and character fanservice? Largely inactive, perhaps turn-based gameplay isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it does have the advantage of not forming or betraying muscle memory, so adding a bunch more playable characters isn't as much of a liability. Maybe always have Spyro as the team leader, but a wide repertoire of characters could be options for his party members.

It's hard to say but it kind of seems so.

From where I'm standing, it feels like the Legend series is dead and generally unmourned. It's version of Spyro didn't become the quintessential one for the fans, let alone its versions of Sparx or Hunter, and almost no character original to that reboot seems to have any fans among the core Spyro fanbase. Lots of people want Spyro 4, I don't know of anyone who wants Legend of Spyro 4.

And yet Cynder seems to be a rare thing from that reboot widely regarded well even now. She gets fanart, she gets skin mods for the Reignited Trilogy, she gets talked about as if she's one of the all-time greats of the Spyro cast.

Is this maybe just because she made the jump to Skylanders, and there's more crossover between fans of that and Classic Spyro? Is it because a female counterpart to Spyro was never done in the classic series so she doesn't contradict anything held near and dear to the original trilogy's fans?

Or am I interpreting this all wrong?

I've been meaning to ask about this for a while, and I figured I would have a better shot of getting discussion in this subreddit, since the other PSG sub tends to be dominated by images, for pretty obvious reasons. I'll probably cross-post it there, though.

PSG Season One, or if you prefer, the original PSG, derived a lot of its humor from the personalities of characters bumping up against each other, often in the form of different values causing them to get into spats. Panty commonly got into spats with Stocking, Panty and Stocking as a unit got into spats with Garterbelt, and they had some of their fiercest and funniest spats with Scanty and Kneesocks. You could even argue that personality-clash is at the heart of the series' entire premise, since the setup is that Panty and Stocking were exiled from Heaven for their personalities, and those same personalities cause them to goof up their assignments in Daten City.

New PSG, while it is by no means devoid of this, seems to have it a lot less, and so just attempts to squeeze humor out of the absurd situations instead.

Exhibit A: The Demon Sisters. Now, before every episode of New PSG was done airing, I expressed the opinion that you waste the potential of Scanty and Kneesocks to be funny characters if they aren't allowed to be the antagonists Panty & Stocking fight against in an episode's plot, but now that all is said and done I retract that somewhat. The scenario they chose instead, them moving in with Panty & Stocking, could have been perfectly suited to doing more personality-clash humor; the show's problem was that it usually wasted the potential.

The poster-child for this wasted potential is the episode Bitch Girls 4 Life. It starts fine enough, by introducing the metaphor of oil and water not mixing, so you think it'll be about the angels and demons working through their differences just enough to get the job done, but they lose that focus almost immediately. Instead, we get jokes about weed, slapstick at the diner from the protagonists shooting a bunch of people to figure out who's the ghost, and the humorous things that happen to people who get shot. Only at the end are we introduced to a ghost made of oil and water, and the conflict is entirely too short for anything like the protagonists having a heart-to-heart and/or breakthrough needed to defeat it.

I can only conclude a lot of different writes submitted ideas for that episode and we ended up with a mix that doesn't feel sensible. To the show's credit, The Longest Bitch Yard is almost everything that episode should have been, but it came entirely too late for a series whose big development was supposed to be the angel sisters teaming up with the demon sisters. In the meantime, we got...

Exhibit B: Arbitrary New Character Combinations. For some reason, this series/season was kind of obsessed with doing scenarios with different combinations of characters than we were used to seeing. The obsession is pretty clear, given that they made several parodies of their series title cards for these episodes. And it seems like when they set out to explore these new combinations of characters, they never considered whether anything about their personalities would make them work as a comedic unit. Scanty and Stocking don't really have anything about their personalities that makes their teamup in The Worst Dojo Ever funny. To their credit, they at least try to do a sweeter story about sisterhood there, though it's all too short and shallow to feel impactful. Still, I can't even say that much about Daten City President; Brief and Stocking have absolutely no dynamic, and the episode doesn't spend nearly enough time for them to develop one, so what was even the point of that?

Even episodes whose novel team-ups have potential on paper are occasionally wasted. For example, while I actually like Independence Dick, the characters who go on the road trip almost completely mute their normal personalities to give us an unspoken montage. A montage that has some good bits, but it still feels like it doesn't really matter who the characters are, beyond that they all have the ability to pee standing up. Likewise, the Inferno Cop homage episodes. What's the big joke with Inferno/Impact Cop? That he barely animates, of course. So naturally, the best way to get the most mileage out of that joke is to put him in energetic situations where a character normally would be animating a lot more. But these episodes are incredibly slow-paced. They don't even play a lot with contrasting Impact Cop against Panty & Stocking, because they're really sluggish and under-performing in this episode, too. Instead of milking the opportunity, they gave us a bunch of Internet jokes, only one of which made me laugh...and let's face it, jokes about Internet things tend to age worse than almost any other sort, except maybe jokes about specific politicians.

Exhibit C: Flat-Out Making Characters into Different Characters. This is something I didn't pick up on initially, but upon seeing it brought up in a video it's hard to ignore: This season seemed uninterested enough in its characters that it did parody episodes that turned them into completely different characters.

Now, to be sure, you can make a good joke out of characters acting out-of-character, but for the sake of that joke, it can't be the majority of characters at the same time. Dietto Syndrome is funny because it pulls Stocking out of her element of being able to eat whatever and still look good, so Panty, who always has to watch her diet and workout to look that good, is all-too-happy to revel in Stocking being humbled by the same reality. Panty turning into Shy Panty in the Season Two premiere is funny because everyone else is still in-character and expects normal Panty. Ironically, she becomes nicer at exactly the moment that the normal asshole Panty is the one who is actually needed to save the day, and all of the other characters (especially Brief) remark on that as themselves.

But New PSG goes on to do plots where everyone is turned into a different character, all for the purpose of doing plots that arguably don't fit this series. Shoot for Yesterday, for example, turns everyone into an homage to characters from cheesy old Marvel cartoons. Panty got turned into Kamandi, Stocking got turned into The Thing, and Kneesocks got turned into a crocodile who can only say "crocodile". The comedy of the episode is completely removed from anything that Panty & Stocking is actually about and instead is based totally on reminiscing about how absurd those old cartoons were. They could've made Panty into the crocodile, made Kneesocks into The Thing, and made Stocking into Kamandi, and nothing about the jokes they made would have changed at all.

I will excuse The Sex From Another World from this criticism because alien monster Panty still has a lot of sex as her main behavior, so there is some tie to the original character, but the subsequent Lord of the Kokan The Great definitely falls into the trap. Panty in this episode just-plain is Conan the Barbarian. The plot just is a Conan plot. Sure, there's a sex scene, but Conan had sex scenes, too. It's not called attention to. Most other characters have even less connection to who they are in the normal series. Maybe Brief is the least changed but when he's in a fantasy world where his geeky hobbies don't matter, and Panty is turned into a beefcake he doesn't have a crush on, what's the point?

Compare that to the Season One episode, Of The Dead. It's become infamous for going pretty heavily against the already-loose canon of the series, and arguably a zombie movie parody wasn't a very creative digression, but the characters still acted like themselves in that episode, except maybe Scanty & Kneesocks, since that's a rare Season One episode where they weren't antagonists. Now, you could argue that Transhorners really is more similar to the parody episodes they did in NPSG, but at least it included some of the sexual humor and toilet humor the series was known for. In addition, though, the context is different; that was one episode made at a time when they had no expectations of whether the series would gain fans. Now that the series has gained fans, and those fans waited fifteen years to see more Panty & Stocking, it seems a lot more egregious to waste the comeback on episodes that pretend it's a completely different series, particularly because you also have the other issues I mentioned (and that dreaded three-parter format) already diluting the appeal.

So that brings us back to the main question of this thread: Why is there so much less character-based humor this time around? I'm thinking it might have to do with this series/season having a few too many writers for its own good, with only a small minority of them having worked on Season One. They don't have a great understanding of, or appreciation for, these characters, so they just do whatever they want instead of doing "their job".