Spyro Advance is an action platformer game for the Game Boy Advance.

This is an English re-translation of Spyro Advance, the Japanese localization of Spyro: Season of Ice for the Game Boy Advance. This translation was accomplished by using RayCarrot’s SpyroGBALocPatcher to extract the text from the English release, and manually correcting the text to accommodate for the different text string order in the Japanese ROM. In addition, several graphics from the US/EU release have been reimported into the ROM in order to better fit with the Western designs.

Spyro Advance received numerous bug fixes and slight quality of life changes that make it a much more enjoyable casual experience when compared to the US/EU releases of the game, such as:

• A much needed map for the current world the player is in (brought up by pressing SELECT during gameplay. Note that in-game maps do not exist for the Sparx levels, Speedways, and Grendor’s Lair.)
• A revised Atlas Index.
• A ‘Save Game’ functionality in the Pause Menu not present in any other release that allows the player to save the game without exiting or entering a new world.
• Several graphical bug fixes, such as the Llama NPCs in Market Mesa having proper rotational sprites.
• Several strings of unused dialog being restored, such as returning to the Professor in Time Machine Lab without all 6 Sporks.
• Slightly modified Gem placement in multiple levels.

The entire game (all NPC dialog, cutscenes, and Dragonfly X) have been properly re-translated! There shouldn’t be any bugs that weren’t already present in the JP release. Note that this patch will increase the ROM size from 8MB to 16MB, in order to ensure the game works on real hardware as well.

A huge thanks to RayCarrot for explaining how Digital Eclipse’s Spyro titles handled text and developing the tool to create this hack (https://github.com/RayCarrot/SpyroGBALocPatcher).

• Database match: Spyro Advance (Japan)
• Database: No-Intro: Game Boy Advance (v. 20210227-023848)
• File/ROM SHA-1: B6C54447B0256A6E0CA0B6D3DC6FAAE1C1DF54D7
• File/ROM CRC32: 42DD5DD9