Day 31: Crush
It's time to talk about my favorite first boss in the Spyro series, this is Crush from Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage.
Can I just say before we begin that Spyro 2's main bosses against Crush, Gulp, and Ripto are all really great battles. They're all built up perfectly as we see them both in the beginning of the game and in a cutscene showing how they got to Avalar, and they have epic battles with even more epic music...these are legit good fights.
Ranting about how much I love the fights against Gulp and Ripto, however, are for future Lent seasons. So, let's focus on Crush for right now.
In the first phase of the fight, Crush will go to one of the blue tiles that are scattered all over the arena and he'll proceed to stomp on it. In doing so, he'll create shock waves that Spyro needs to jump or glide over. He'll do this two times before moving onto the next tile. As he moves from one tile to the next, that's your chance to attack Crush with your flame breath. After getting burned, Crush will try and hit you with his club, but in doing so he'll accidentally cause a rockslide that will crush him and take away a unit of his health. Do this again and phase two begins.
In the second phase, the tiles will turn red and by stomping on them Crush will create a fireball that Spyro needs to charge to the left or right of it in order to dodge it. The process on doing damage to Crush is the same, wait until he's done attacking then flame him so he can try and hit you with his club only to fail and have a rockslide crush him. Do this again and it's on to phase three.
In phase three, now there's a mixture of red and blue tiles and Crush will stomp on them three times instead of twice, and the shock waves/fireballs come out much quicker as a result. As usual, once Crush is done attacking, hit him with your flame breath. This time however, Crush will try and chase you down so he can hit you. Just keep running until Crush slams his club down and creates yet another rockslide that crushes him. Do this two more times and the fight is over.
Overall, with this being a fun fight that tests your skills with the game's basic controls (and being a nostalgic battle doesn't hurt either) Crush easily crushes his way into my Top 20.