Did you know that Skylanders is in the top 20 most successful video game franchises of all time? This series was massive and from 2011 with Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure to 2016’s Skylanders Imaginators, Skylanders was the most important thing in my house. My son was hooked from the very first game and we would go on these epic quests to track down the Skylanders, this is the game that really brought the whole “toys to life” thing to life.
The Skylander games are kind of like adventure games with a bit of dungeon crawling. Each character has their own moves and you unlock new moves as you progress and level them up. The twist here is that the characters are actual toys that you buy which then appear in the game when you place them on your Portal of Power, it is all done with NFC chips, but the effect and how quick it is from putting the figure on the Portal and then them appearing in the game is very well done.
While on the surface, Skylanders is the biggest cash grab in history, for example, that first game had 32 characters, multiple level packs, and a few variant characters as well. It only got bigger and bigger with stuff like traps, vehicles, imaginator crystals, and probably a few other things that are skipping my mind as I write this. They introduced some really fun gimmicks such as Giants that were bigger Skylanders, Lightcore characters that would light up, and Swap Force Skylanders that let you mix two characters together. Traps to trap enemies and play with them. I feel that the first four games were a ton of fun and offered a fun and exciting experience for kids, but with the fourth game, Skylanders Trap Team the amount of stuff they were releasing for each game really started to add up.
The idea of Skylanders SuperChargers is great, put the Skylanders in vehicles, but the problem with this was not all kids liked racing games or vehicle games and that was a massive part of this game. Add to this the Nintendo Wii and the Nintendo 3DS versions of the game only being racing and you had a game that probably turned more than a few kids off. The final game in the series, Skylanders Imaginators had a clever gimmick where players could make their own Skylanders and to do this, you used Imaginator Crystals, but Activision was very naughty here in that when you picked an element for your Skylander, that crystal could not be changed! This was a scumbag move if you ask me, but there was a fix. If you put an Imaginator Crystal on a 3DS Portal of Power, you could wipe it and start again…. Take that Activision!
The Skylander games were a lot of fun and to be fair, Activision, Toys for Bob, and Vicarious Visions did a great job of trying to evolve the series and make each game unique. Plus, despite the money they were asking parents to fork out each year, you could always use your old Skylanders in each new game. That is something I feel they deserve a ton of credit for. The thing with something that is popular, you always have others who want to get in on it and that was when we got Disney Infinity and Lego Dimensions. Both of those games were fantastic to be fair and a lot of fun to play, but it was more toys to life stuff and many parents simply could not afford to support three games that all require a whole bunch of toys to get the best out of them. By the time Ubisoft tried to jump in with Starlink, people had well and truly had enough of toys to life.
With Activision now being part of Xbox, I would love to see them try to bring back Skylanders. The toys to life days are long gone, but even if they just put all the past Skylanders games on Game Pass and had the characters unlocked in the game or more than likely make you pay to unlock them, I feel that has the potential to work and work really well.
Were you a toys to life household and if so what are your thoughts on this whole phenomenon?
