Part 4 of 5 (maybe 6 if I decide to do Gnasty) of my little side project of Spyro the Dragon (Spyro 1) boss revamps.

I'm coming to the tail end of this little adventure, and I had two choices. Either I drew Metalhead (who will be really fun to redesign and I get to draw a gnorc at long last) and left the worst for last, or I just got Blowhard over with so that my watchers had something to look forward to with the last one rather than them going "well, why bother with the last one because it's Blowhard". I went with the latter, because I had to do this guy eventually.

Because Blowhard is the worst boss in this game, design wise and mechanic wise. Look at this. Seriously, Spyro fought this. People only remember him because he had a stupid name. I mean, you can literally kill this boss before you engage him by taking advantage of hitboxes and flaming him through a wall.

The origins of Blowhard

Balthazar Bastienne Igraxon Buhatarium of the Shifting Zephyr is one of the most hated, the most ancient enemies of the dragon race, a race that has commonly come to blows with the dragons and has often fought with them over land and control.

Balthazar...is human.

The human race is pretty scattered among the dragon realms after various wars, with no real human "government" and humanity basically living in fractured clans that don't really interact with one another. The most prominent ones tend to be either farmers or wizards, with humans having a natural resistance to the Magic Crafters' realm's warping magicks. Balthazar had a natural talent for weather manipulation, just a "normal" son from a magic community in the mountains, and his ease at using magic more powerful than all of his teachers and elders very quickly went to his head and soon he decided that he was tired of listening to the dragons telling him what to do.

Blowhard's nickname first came about when he was enlisted into Gnasty's army with his loyal band of fellow weather wizards and was basically an egotistical jerkface to the other lieutenants, especially to Gnasty's other chief magic user, Jacques from the Dream Weaver's realm. In Balthazar's honest opinion, he could've won that uprising that cost Jacques his legs. One verbal argument, Jacques called him a Blowhard, the others quickly picked up on the weather pun, and lo and behold, now all of the dragon realms calls him that - from dragon to gnorc - and he HATES. IT. But don't feel bad. Balthazar is an obnoxious person to be around.

Also, despite the beard, Blowhard is in his 30's. He both never shaves and uses hair enhancing magic to make his beard that long and imposing. If you shaved him, you'd basically get a scrawny beanpole that looks like a hairless weasel.

He also never wears shoes. He can levitate and control the weather; why would he need SHOES?

I will say, it was a lot of fun to make this character...actually look like a fun character that would appear in future Spyro installments.

And yes, I did get rid of the tornado legs, because I feel that while he can levitate himself and make a fine tornado leg for when he needs to move somewhere really fast, he recognizes that he looks absolutely goofy doing it. I imagine his magic forming tornadoes but in different shapes. This casting tornado for amplification, a tornado completely cloaking him for defense, tornado arms when he's casting something reeeeally powerful...