Need I say more?
Fine, since I'm autistic, I will.
I don't blame Universal/Vivendi/Activision for losing Naughty Dog and Insomniac. Maybe they were a shitty company to work for, but idk. But as soon as they lose the original devs, they immediately start with terrible, short sighted decisions, clearly based on the idea that these franchises will sell on name alone, regardless of how shitty future games are.
Crash Bash isn't the worst game ever, but it's quite an obvious cash in. Things will get worse later. But they were just treading water until the PS2 entry would come out.
So they get Mark Cerny to produce the PS2 entry, and it's gonna be a big open world (like Jak & Daxter is doing, showing that it makes sense), but Universal fires him and tells the team to start from scratch to have a finished product out by Christmas. So we get Wrath of Cortex, a playable but forgettable game. Given the circumstances, the devs must have been great to pull off something this good, because Universal really fucked them over.
Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly is pretty much the Sonic '06 of the PS2 era. Not only a smaller game than its predecessors, it's one of the buggiest games in existence. It has ideas showing they might have given a bit of a shit, but I'm willing to bet they had to finish the whole thing in like six months.
Now, Insomniac and Naughty Dog were pumping out sequels once per year, but the first in each franchise took longer, and they had that later speed by reusing experience and assets. New teams on a new console needed more time.
So in the meantime Universal Interactive and the studio that buys them out, Vivendi, pump out a bunch of mediocre but playable game boy games for both franchises. Except the crossover games. Those are garbage. But whatever. Most of them are okay.
Meanwhile, the guys from Wrath of Cortex are working on a sequel, while the game boy devs churn out a mediocre "sequel" to Crash Team Racing. But they make the Wrath of Cortex guys once again work on a cut schedule, resulting on over 1/4 of the intended game being cut, including an entire playable character, resulting in a playable evil counterpart to Coco, but no playable Coco, so you just have a shit character for no reason. Still, the rest of the game is really good, for what it is, but what it is is ultimately a sad testament to what might have been, complete with tons of unlockable concept art showing what Vivendi made them cut from the game.
But at least it's not Spyro: A Hero's Tail. Now some people will say this is much better than Enter the Dragonfly. It's not as buggy, that's for sure. It almost seems finished. But the devs clearly never played or at least had no love for Spyro at all, as they changed little things, that casuals might not notice, that drastically change the gameplay and show they didn't give a shit. For example, Gems respawn, there are infinite gems, to buy consumable items, so the idea of searching for and collecting every one is gone. But the thing that really gets me is that Square is Flame and Circle is Charge. How do you fuck up the controls on the fifth game in the series? That's like making Mario jump with B and run with A. They clearly didn't give a single shit. Plus the alternate playable characters are worse than ever, just plain boring. This is the game my attention span didn't let me complete, so I didn't bother buying future ones.
So thank god I didn't buy the future ones, because for some reason Activision decided both Crash and Spyro should have all their characters redesigned, and their games should be beat em ups. And Spyro should be rebooted into a more serious "epic" with voices like Elijah Wood, David Spade, and Wayne Brady (Spade and Brady both played Sparx, thinking kids wouldn't notice the difference despite this reboot trying to emphasize an epic continuing narrative).
So after two of these, Crash gets cancelled for good, and after three for Spyro, he gets rebooted into Skylanders, with an even more horrible redesign.
The devs kept trying their best, and the publishers just did their best to fuck them over at every turn and ruin my two favorite franchises. Fuck Activision.