darkSpyro

As we all know, superchargers wasn’t the BEST game. It was good in certain aspects, but it failed to do a lot. There was a lot of ambition in SSC, and it only delivered partially.

It wanted to do many things, but wasn’t very good at any of them.

Failure #1- The Vehicle Aspect, AKA How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love To Drive

Let’s look at three games before SSC. Giants, SWAP Force, and Trap Team. They all had gimmicks.

Giants had zones accessible only by its giant characters, namely. However, you could avoid these zones if you wanted. Sure, you might miss a soul gem or two, but if it’s what you want, you can do it.

SWAP Force had its SWAP zones and dual-element gates. You could avoid both of these zones as well.

Trap Team, of course, had its villains. You do get two traps with your game, but you could easily go for a “Pacifist Route” and opt not to trap. It’s that simple.

Superchargers, however, did not allow for this freedom. You had to have used at least ONE land-type vehicle for the duration of the game. Even the final boss was reduced to a rail shooter with your car. Now, this would be fine, if this wasn’t a dungeon crawler-esque game. The structure of this game wasn’t MADE for vehicle use like this. The abrupt shifts from “big open space with car” to “raceway with car” changing the controls as well shows this.

In addition, these oh-so titular vehicles became a lot less important in Imaginators. You could still race, but those 20-something vehicles you bought can just be put on once and left to collect dust. And for switch owners?- Have some imaginite parts and go home.

Plus.. they weren’t very interesting toys. Sure, some of them roll. Some of them spin. And i’ll give credit where credit’s due- Buzz Wing was ****ing awesome. But they don’t really have personality other than the really ****ing awesome bug one.

Failure #2- The Plot Was Really Bad.

Vicarious Visions got pretty ballsy with the plot. The idea of a game where Kaos has already “won” and you have to pry skylands from his tiny little hands sounds cool on paper- But the execution was very, very, VERY badly done.

Let’s review it’s worst points, shall we?

The Darkness was half-assed.
Defeating “The Darkness” was too easy.
The final boss of “The Darkness” was atrocious.
Ridepocalypse was horrible. The worst level. Ever.
Battlebrawl Island is the only level in the game in which you can play the game like an actual skylanders game.
The elemental vehicle zones were patched in, thus explaining their half-assedness.

And my biggest gripe..

THE COMPLETE AND UTTER BULL**** THEY DID WITH THE GLUMSHANKS ARC.

Seriously.

In case you don’t know, the academy gets the succ from Kaos’ sky machine, and the NPCs have to get outta der. Glumshanks stands there, sacrificing himself to keep Mags from getting Kaos’ doom succ. This series of events amplified his character from Megward The Wizard into a fleshed-out character that had his own motivations and goals. So when he performed the ultimate sacrifice, it made his character a lot more important. After all the abuse he’s endured from Kaos, his journey through skylands during the events of SSC allowed him to know he is more than what he was told he was. In his dying breath, he sacrificed himself to protect those who rescued him from the one who had abused him.

BUT THEN, THEY ****ING SAID “OH HARDEE HAR HAR PANDEY ASS FOUND HIM HES ALIVE HE’S NOT DEAD RATED E 10 PLUS HAHAHA”

****. VICARIOUS. VISIONS.

That entire scene, the events of the past 8-ish chapters, THE EVENTS OF MOST OF THE ****ING GAME, MEANT ABSOLUTELY GOD DAMN NOTHING! THE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT WE THOUGHT WE HAD WAS WORTHLESS. WE LEARNED NOTHING. GLUMSHANKS LEARNED NOTHING. THE NPCS LEARNED NOTHING. ALL BECAUSE VICARIOUS VISIONS DIDN’T HAVE THE BALLS TO LET SOMETHING SEMI-MATURE HAPPEN. THEY TOOK THE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.. AND BUTT RAPED IT.

Oh and it was all too edgy.

Failure #3- Lack Of New Characters.

Skylanders Superchargers has the lowest total number of completely original characters, with only 10 new skylanders. Yes, there were remakes. No, they do not count. Just because you give stealth elf a gun, she doesn’t become new. It’s still stealth elf. We don’t want another one of those. We want another Scorp, dammit. And a mantis skylander. And a gargoyle. Kiss my ass.
And some of these characters aren’t very well received. Fiesta plays poorly, but his design was good. Astroblast was meh, but he’s defensive, git gud with him. Splat is waifu. Stormblade had curves.

Failure #4- Three Way!

SSC has not one, but TWO competitors!! Lego Dimensions and Disney Infinity 3.0. And considering TFA came out that december, boosting the star wars toy sales.. We weren’t too good. You know, and the game was bad.

It was bad, okay!?

In conclusion, SSC was bad. It had good qualities, but around %70 was bad.

That’s it.

I haven't played it, but I honestly don't see what's so bad about it. I can understand it being the least favorite, but, I don't know, this makes the game sound like Sonic 2006 levels of bad. If any of you try to not judge the game like a Skylanders fan, and judge it like any other game, would your opinion be the same? I'm not challenging or doubting any of you. After all, I haven't played it. I just genuinely wanna know if it's a bad game, or a bad Skylanders game. From what I've seen, it looks like a pretty solid entry, with a few problems here and there.

Quote: Crash10

If any of you try to not judge the game like a Skylanders fan, and judge it like any other game, would your opinion be the same?

I strive to look at both points of view when criticising anything, so I'll gladly give my take on my limited experience on the game. As a video game, Skylanders: Superchargers is a mixed bag for me. I don't mind the story all that much, though just putting Kaos into a situation of "I win muhahaha" and then liberating Skylands wasn't great. It also didn't help that the Skylands don't like they're in much trouble as a whole, unlike Spyro's Adventure where the Darkness slowly but surely sets in around the hub.
The combat goes back on what SWAP Force rectified in my opinion: movement speed. Every Skylanders game barring SF feels like it could do with the slightest bit more speed, and only one or two characters felt fast enough. Being by the same developer I'd expect that to return, but it's still ploddy. I'll use Magna Charge and see if he fares any better when I review the game. Superchargers does make up for it though with flashy moves (Donkey Kong is a blast to play; BARRELS FOR ALL!) and high damage numbers, but I've been overpowered for 3 (maybe 4 when I play TT) games now, with bosses being the exception.
The vehicle stages suffer from weird controls - you steer the car in accordance to where the camera's facing, almost like this is a survival horror game. It's hard to explain but it took some getting used to, and three levels before I realised I'm not controlling the car insomuch as the camera is. I really hope this is just the Wii U version of the game, but if it's not I can see where the criticism comes from and it's rightly deserved. As the Angry Video Game Nerd once said, "what's the most important thing about any video game? HOW ABOUT BEING ABLE TO ****IN' PLAY IT?!"

As a Skylanders game, again, it's a mixed bag. The story will seem unfaithful to many, however others may be glad of the Darkness' independence and recurring villains. I also agree greatly with a concern that Drek95 has with SWAP Force (and I think SC) in that the series started to lose its identity with such games. Yes they're flashier, but they don't have that same essence as to what made Spyro's Adventure a Skylanders game. It's basically a VV Skylanders game, only with more style and less substance.
Would the game be better without the Rift Engine vehicles? Debatable. Without something to replace it, no. Likewise, because I can't stand the loose and wonky controls I'd rather the vehicle sections be removed. If they fixed the controls I'd say it was a good video game and a passable Skylanders game, but for me the former is the most important, and in my list of priorities controls are equally as important as fun.

The more I play Imaginators, the more I find myself missing certain aspects of Superchargers.

First off, your claims for the story, I think I'd have to disagree. While certainly not perfect, VV actually went and tried to do something with the story to set SC apart from the others. By starting the game off with Kaos having won, it ups the stakes. This isn't just about trying to prevent Kaos from doing something like Giants, SF or TT, it's taking back control. In your year of absence since TT, every npc you've met, every level you played through, is under the gloomy control of Kaos, and you, and every Skylander across Skylands have been forcefully booted out.

This is also the last game that tries to tie the physical toy aspect into the story, after Imaginators gave up. And unlike the umpteenth giant explosion that blows everyone around it away so hard that they land on Earth, Kaos ripping apart reality and sending them to you feels more dangerous, more unique, and more real in what Skylands is capable of.

The Darkness as a villain was dumb, and handled poorly, but the idea of the main threat from SA (The only other game in which Kaos is treated as a legitimate threat rather than a nuisance - also in which Kaos already won before the story starts) returning is a nice return to form. Should SC have been the final game in the series, I'd have been happy with the story, since beating the Darkness once again, though under different circumstances, makes for a good callback to how the series started. And ending with Kaos powerless and residing at the Academy as an ally to the Skylanders completes an arc for him and develops him as a character. This opened up the franchise to a future of more villains, more powerful than ever before, rather than just Kaos in another powered-up form. Y'know, before that's all forgotten at the start of Imaginators.

I'll admit, I dispised the notion of vehicle gameplay, but I honestly don't care about it as much now. They break up the gameplay a little too frequently, and I agree that Ridepocalypse was a complete waste of time. However, to combat this, levels were long and broken up into chapters, which I think is perhaps the best feature to debut in SC.

I get why the returning cores came about, but it didn't bring anything aside from discrediting these versions as stand-alone characters. Keeping the same movesets we could have had a Life Chameleon or an Earth Mole which could have had much more of an identity than 'Stealth Elf in a Jumpsuit' or 'Terrafin with a gun'.

I agree with the point on competition. The market was over-saturated, and all competitors had brand recognition far greater than Skylanders ever will. Of course it's going to sell poorly in comparison to previous instalments.

In hindsight, compared to Imaginators, I would say SC has far more good than bad going for it. It feels very similar tonally to SA and evokes a sense of nostalgia for it. Gimmick aside, it felt like a step in the right direction for the franchise, so I find it a great shame that Imaginators went and undid everything it had going for it.

I agree with basically everything you've said, Zap, except for maybe the story: I do get many of your points but I can't ignore the fact Glumshanks nearly dying was stil one of the emotionally strongest moments in the whole series.
A flippin' shame they shown him safe and sound after a coupke minutes, sure, but I can't forget those goosebumps.

I think their biggest problem was focusing too much on vehicles: this may sound painfully obvious, but take a moment to think about it.
Trap Team started the whole side-gimmick figures thing, but what they wanted to highlight were villains, not traps; same goes for Imaginators, the characters you can create are what matters, not the Creation Crystals themselves.

In SuperChargers' vehicles where the big news... And they were just that.
Vehicles.
They litterally treated simple vehicles as if they were the most groundbreaking innovation since fire was discovered.
They were fundamental for the lore, they make up a good 60% of the entire game, they have the best figures quality-wise, hats are shaped after them, they truly offer the only form of replayability, at least one of them ir required to simply be able to play the game... They were even the focus of the St. Valentine's video.

Great Lord, V.V., enough with your mechanical fetish.
Vehicles aren't incredible if they are just vehicles.
You can't base and entire new installment of a dungeon crawler/platform series on them.
That's just bound to fail.

Glumshanks' issue was just cutting the plot before it did the impact. If he came back after a while, but was questioning everything now that he nearly killed himself for some folks he doesn't even know, it'd be great development. But he gets rescued literally the next level over and becomes the next mcguffin location giver, and the rest of his dialog in the game is just exposition. It erases all the progress he made as a character.

Though unfortunately we know half the reason; they changed the level order. But not for one second they thought about removing Rodeopocalypse with something better? That one was just the epitome of my issue with the game - it's not a Skylanders game with vehicles, it's a skylanders-themed vehicle adventure.

The UI is vehicles and races. The Academy is full of dumb techy ****. They name a random clockwork building the Land of the Undead when Undead Fiesta is in the same game, the Skystones game and lockmaster puzzles are engines, nearly every enemy is now in powered armor/vehicle or a robot, and it goes on and on. It tires you visually and tires you even more when you've played better vehicle games and know they have no right to put it on your face so much.
Imaginators is less impressive visually, but its theming is on point. Magic place is magic themed, tech place is tech themed, inbetweens have both. The UI is super clean and doesn't go either way, after all, you can create characters on any place of the fiction spectrum. Nothing pollutes your view.

Yet it did better than Imaginators right? You can hate it all you want, but it's not the worst failure of the series technically. But also, in your "plot" section, several of the worst offenders part you posted were things that have no relation to the plot. Darkness being too easy, elemental zones being patched in later, the darkness being atrocious. None of those effect the plot, just the gameplay, which are two different things. To each their own, but like I said, if one of the games was the "failure of the series" As people like to a sign the title, it would be Imaginators having sold far less than even Superchargers. But that's just my two cents.

It literally sold half of what TT did. It didn't sell well, Imaginators only did worse. It's not a separate experience that resets every year, people hate SC, people don't come back for Imaginators, GinjaNinja.

Ok, my opinion on the game from your categories. May sound like I'm defending it but blah blah opinions blah:
1: Vehicles
I... sorta liked them. I'm a fan of racing games, so I found this pretty, fun. On the other hand, in the main story it all goes downhill, especially since half of the vehicles can roll downhill. They were implemented into the story well, but as for into the gameplay? Not really. You could just make the vehicle sections optional, but I doubt I would ever do them again afterwards aside from the playthrough. Oh yeah, and Count Moneybone was a HUGE step back from SSF 3DS. As for the Vehicle functionality, some were good, others were the Shield Striker, others did nothing, and like you said, Buzz Wing wins in that category.

2: Plot
I mostly disagree here. I liked the way they had a darker theme and stuff. Some points you made are true though...
The Darkness fight was bad
Elemental Zones patched in to "expand gameplay" even though they were in the academy.
Battlebrawl was like you said.
I liked Ridepocalypse, but that's an unpopular opinion.
The Glumshanks thing wasn't as bad for me, I thought they would instantly bring him back after 5 more levels. It was actually >5 minutes. Still incredibly terrible though.

3: Lack of new characters
I liked the remade characters, purely because of the new movesets. Eruptor became faster, Stealth Elf became stronger, Jet-Vac... um... Gill Grunt was fun.
But I liked it in Giants when it only had 16 new guys. Quality over quantity.

4: Competition
Yeah, pretty much.

But yeah, SSC was good in my opinion. Just good.

Doing what Zorark did

1:I liked the vehicle sections, but I will agree that some of them could've be a bit less linear. For story purposes, they were absolutly pointless.
Hey at least the kart racing was alright

2:IDK, I enjoyed the story, it was a nice twist and felt complete. Also, Glumshanks had to stay alive, otherwise the rating might have gone a bit awry.
The Darknesses character was cool, but his boss fight was a Pain in the ***
I enjoyed rideapocolypse, it was an excellently executed small chapter, although that's just my opinion
I also don't get the edgy part, what do you mean

3:
Sometimes less is more, and I found the characters to have better designs and attacks, also I liked the remakes, sure they were the same, but they were new at the same time

Competition:Yeah, they can't do Jack-**** about that can they?

Overall, Superchargers was alright, although, I prefer the other games, it was good

The kart racing was alright, but had no balancing whatsoever. Want to win a single race with an Instant? Too bad. Is there a Gold Rusher on the race? Hope to Eon he never gets in front of you or you can kiss that position goodbye.
Goes back to the issue of wanting to be Mario Kart, not only it's just a coat of paint, they miss on the entire point of being a race of skill with RNG, rather than who has the better weapon for the ENTIRE race.

I thought SuperChargers had a good story, tho? I do agree that Glumshanks should have died to make that scene more powerful.

This is one of the most painful games I have ever played. Even removing my "love" of the franchise, it's a bad game with little to no enjoyability.

In saying that, let's not blame VV for the bait and switch of Glumshanks is alive, after all TfB refused to keep Mags as a disguise for Luminous (which was a poor decision IMHO).

Quote: Bifrost

It literally sold half of what TT did. It didn't sell well, Imaginators only did worse. It's not a separate experience that resets every year, people hate SC, people don't come back for Imaginators, GinjaNinja.

Using your logic, it's actually Trap Team's fault then. The prior installment usually dictates whether the public will buy the next one. Sc selling poorly in the first place is certainly due to the public growing tired after TT.

Outside of price-points, I thought that Superchargers was a decent game. The story at least attempted to be more mature, and they actually introduced interesting lore with the Rift Engines. The levels were fun and unique, and all the characters at least had interesting concepts attached to them.

They really failed on two things: A. Making any Skylander have relevance in Post-Game content. B. Disheartening the power of choice. The first one is really a fault in VV's approach; vehicles were a brand new thing, and they wanted to highlight them as much as possible...too much, leaving all the other Skylanders behind.

The second thing was because there was little need, or want, to change Skylanders, as it was really the Vehicles doing all the work. Even then, if you upgrade a particular Vehicle enough, there's really no need to switch even that. One of the most highlighted things in the franchise, the choice to be whoever you wanted to be, was lessened in Superchargers. That sort of diminishes the want to play the game, as you begin to ask yourself "Why should I play as these other characters? They don't really give me all that much..."

Despite these faults, I feel like Superchargers was better than Imaginators, excluding the lack of focus on the Skylanders. Imaginators relied too much on you wanting to make your own Skylander to fuel post-game content, especially after you complete all the chapters (sans LIM since that never released!). There's really not much point in playing one you unlock the final piece, as everything you do after that just gives you repeats. You don't get any bonus clip, no achievement, no nothing. Just the satisfaction of being able to create a non-resettable creation however you want. Not to mention having a story that earns "3 Stars out of 10" in my book, especially after the grandeur of Superchargers.

Hexin, I think you estabilished you don't care about reasonable arguments. Not discussing a thing with you.

Wonder if all Airships would've worked, though. When you get a single good Land vehicle upgraded, that's it, you won't touch the rest unless you can really spare the money, same for other terrains. If they were all the same type and gameplay, it'd give more room for balance and better gameplay. Shame too, I actually found a while ago that someone made a uni project based on that years before SC was made :I

Would anyone want a link to my How I would have Done SuperChargers topic? It's more about game-play then it is story, but if anyone is curious, then I can post it here,

Quote: HeyitsHotDog

Would anyone want a link to my How I would have Done SuperChargers topic? It's more about game-play then it is story, but if anyone is curious, then I can post it here,

Please!

I'll just do a copy and paste


Main levels

As you all know, the glaring flaw of SSC is it's heavy focus on vehicles, especially in the main levels, where they interrupted the classic, combat platforming gameplay. As much as I loved SSC, I admit this is a horrible thing about the game and was WAAAAYY to prominent. Earlier today,, I thought about how SSC could have been amazing if they focused on the classic gameplay more, while encouraging use of vehicles. Here's what I think should have been done


At the start of a level, before the cutscene, you get into your land vehicle and drive to the level and then get off and the level's cutscene starts, after it ends, you go on foot and are able to explore a much more expanded version of the levels we actually have with a good amount of secrets and combat parts. The entire level either ends on foot, or with a land vehicle moment. During the adventure, you can also do sky or sea vehicle missions, which always end in a new area for you to explore thats just as fun packed and big as the previous area, when hence forth you are there until you reach the end of the level, which is shared by all 3 level routes. This gives you 3 big ass areas for you to explore and also adds good reply value as you would have to explore the level multiple times to get everything with out pushing vehicle moments in your face, not to mention it crushes the linear level design. The areas also are counted as chapters, you if you don't want to go through the sky section again, you can just go to where it leads and explore it then. This also decreases usage on the vehicles with making them pointless or worthless.


Side content

Take all of SF's content and cram it into Superchargers. Also have challenges focused on all 3 vehicle types, for people who do like vehicles. Even bonus missions that focus on both while also having bonus missions focus on combat only.

Story

Nothing really other than Glumshank's being in the ghost train instead of him being held hostage as a prize in the level directly after his sacrifice. Alo have Flynn torn at the loss of Glumshanks instead of being a total asshole.

Ridepoclypse

got to be honest one of the only reasons I liked superchargers was because of some of the characters

When it is all said and done, I can still look forward to going back and playing all of the Skylanders games. And I do. Except Superchargers. I don't want to race, I want to do stuff with my characters.

I hadn't played a racing game in a while so it was novel to get a Skylander into a car for a minute. And done of the chapter designs were original and really neat. But then I beat the game easily and felt quite disappointed.

It's about characters, not cars.

acti's distribution that was what failed the most, then they added microtransaction garbage afer the ganme was released and stuff, but you also got all the wii owners that didnt want to upgrade to a ps4 or wiiu at the time. they got a totally different game than the rest, so of course they was disappointed.. the game (that wasnt a pure racing game wii/3ds) wasnt that bad, you could online coop the whole game, at least we finally got that after asking for it for years. and you could play as moneybone.

FINALLY SOMEONE WHO AGREES WITH MEEEEEEEE

I feel superchargers had the best themed levels of the entire series. They were amazing and creative, but the lack of on foot action hurt the game in my oppinion. Vehicles took away what made playing a character with its upgrades and paths you chose useless. The vehicles just dont have that kind of gameplay as much as they tried.

Quote: diddy50

I feel superchargers had the best themed levels of the entire series. They were amazing and creative, but the lack of on foot action hurt the game in my oppinion. Vehicles took away what made playing a character with its upgrades and paths you chose useless. The vehicles just dont have that kind of gameplay as much as they tried.

Eh, the themes themselves were good, but with some exceptions the color palette was lacking. Too much orange, wood and bronze compared to TFB who makes a color with various materials.

I really like SuperChargers, but I do agree it had its faults. Like, there were too little characters and, at some point, the game felt so different from the past ones that it didn't feel like Skylanders.

Also, Fiesta. I love his design and I have a really good memory with him, but there's one thing - his gameplay...stinks. His attacks are so slow and weak, and it's so easy for him to get swarmed by enemies and then KO'd. It's difficult to play with him, especially in Imaginators, because he always ends up being defeated by the first wave of bad guys he encounters. Still, love the design and personality, but he needs a serious buff.

Superchargers only "failed" because it didn't re-invigorate interest in a franchise that was already on the downhill. TTL in general were losing market share (Infinity failed that year). It didn't sell as well as earlier games, but that wasn't because people didn't like it - it was because people decided to in general bow out on the franchise. Figures sales did flag later in the game even more, and that can be attributed to the game itself not holding interest - but Imaginators figures also slid late, giving the impression people were getting tired of Skylanders faster than they did with previous games.

Imaginators was a great addition to the game, but by now people were just tired in general of Skylanders. The franchise needed a major mix up of the formula, something TfB and Activision have been extremely hesitant to do. VV was a little more aggressive on this front, but with the yearly release schedule, there was only so much that could change from year to year. You can make yearly iterations last longer for things like Madden and Call of Duty, because you buy the game and maybe a little DLC, and be out under $100 for the full experience (not to mention online competitive games tend to have much longer life), but to do the same with Skylanders it takes hundreds of dollars, or a TON of patience and luck on sales.

VV doesn't get any prizes for being "aggressive" by making a semi-racing game. It's one thing to be Beenox's actually pretty good spinoff, another is to have a game changing gameplay to something, arguably, worse when gameplay wasn't the problem in the mainline series.

I thought the plot was great. We got Darkness backstory, the Core of Light getting completely destroyed, and, surprisingly, Kaos character development. I thought the Glumshanks sacrifice was good but they could've at least had another level or two in between him getting sucked in and finding him. His character development still stayed after they found him too; you could see in Trap Team that he started taking a liking to the Skylanders and in Superchargers he came full circle.

I may be unimaginative, but whether I like the game or not had very little to do with whether I like the content of the cutscenes. It's good for a laugh, and I realize there has to be some sort of plot to tie the missions together, but I didn't really much care whether Glumshanks and/or Kaos dabbled in good-guying or not. I mean, the story-driving cutscenes are really just a glorified, "...but our princess is in another castle!" (And it pains me that most of you weren't even alive when that reference was current.) I personally don't enjoy any level more or less because I've been given the specific assignment by one of the NPCs. But that's a minor point in the debate about SC. I mean, I'd consider SF to have the weakest story, but I like that game the most.

What I think the debate boils down to is, what role, if any, OUGHT vehicles have had in the world of Skylands. Some people think there was no place for them at all, because it was such a departure from the previous games' singular style. Some people wouldn't have minded vehicles as the gimmick if they had been implemented better as a part of the story, or simply if the devs had been able to "MarioKart up" the controls a bit better.

Honestly, it may have been a mistake to bring in a gimmick that changed the style so much, but Activision had gone about as far as they could go (short of imaginators, which, as I understand it, they'd been working on since year 2, and just flat out weren't ready for) with the gamestyle, and we're honestly taking a calculated risk. It just didn't go their way.

I actually consider their attempt very impressive, even if not their execution. They had the Herculean task of creating multiple driving control styles, when racing was new territory for them, AND implementing those styles in a way that the storyboarders could actually dovetail with. From there, they had to create "racing rules" that could be believably modified between destroy-the-baddie and MarioKart-esque booby traps.

Then, they had to do that for two more different vehicle types, and THEN had to make enough changes vehicle to vehicle both in look, speed, handling, etc, that there'd be a uniqueness to each one of the same type (here I thought they fell shortest. I honestly don't discern much difference which air vehicle I'm playing with, and the boats and cars aren't much better).

Lastly, because they DID have to accommodate the different driving/racing environments, they also had to figure out how to connect them all into the story of each level, BUT stay true to the whole "only what comes in the starter" rule, and not make the Water and Air portions hokey.

Considering that once they greenlighted the vehicle gimmick (again, this isn't really an argument whether they should have or not), they were BOUND to all of the above stipulations, I thought they acquitted themselves quite well. The only thing they did flat out terribly at was the controls, and they simply weren't going to get the polish of a MarioKart with one year of dev time. MarioKart has been in continuous development for literally two decades, AND they've never had to multitask their racing by making some of the race- AND task-based.

On top of all that, it WAS the best overall story and level design.

Just nothing that racing wasn't a new territory for VV like you said. They've already worked on racing games before, so...

Quote: Bifrost

VV doesn't get any prizes for being "aggressive" by making a semi-racing game. It's one thing to be Beenox's actually pretty good spinoff, another is to have a game changing gameplay to something, arguably, worse when gameplay wasn't the problem in the mainline series.

Because serving up the same game again and again worked out great? If TfB had their way we would have still been playing a game built on for the Wii and still wondering why the heck our character's still haven't figured out how to jump. Dialog would still be unskippable, and you would have to listen to it every single time you buy an upgrade from Persephone. I enjoyed Trap Team, but it was so obvious TfB was suffering from "Not Invented Here" Syndrome after Swap Force made so many improvements. They flat out said they would have removed jumping if they could have gotten away with it.

Gameplay WAS the problem with Skylanders, it still played exactly the same. Take an average level and many could not tell you exactly which game it was from. That works fine for the first few iterations, but you can't do it for six games and expect people to continue to drop hundreds of dollars a year on the franchise.

Yeah, no.
I couldn't respectfully disagree more.

TfB is once again given waaaaay less credits than they deserve.
Just because V.V.'s idea of "innovation" is making everything different simply because they can, doesn't mean TfB doesn't try to shake things up a bit as well.

They might have not shown it with Trap Team, even though that's still debatable, but I'm pretty sure Imaginators has seen a lot of novelties (both good and bad, mind it).
A cars-focused Skylanders game will never be a smart idea in my eyes, no matter how they present it.
They could have created a great Skylanders game with a vehicles side-gimmick, instead they tried to force that concept everywhere they could.

SWAP Force might have had a lot of problems, but the flow and gameplay weren't part of those, in my opinion; here, they messed them up as well.
But sure, let's keep saying that Skylanders failed because it tried to stay true to itself, instead of throwing everything out of the window in favor of freshness and ground-breaking changes no one really asked for.
After all, it's not like every content-creator's deeper wish is to keep its creation going without twisting it beyond recognition; they just want them to go nuts (and bolts).

One last thing (spoilered because it's probably a highly unpopular opinion):

While it could have done without jumping at all, TfB clearly saw value in vertical gameplay. Their incessant need to add jump pads which never worked right (particularly in two player mode) is an example of that. They saw the need for vertical gameplay, they just didn't want the players to do it without their express permission in specific locations. Jump pads suck.

Swap Force wasn't just change for the sake of change, they did things the players wanted. Jumping, cutscene/dialog skipping (which they took away in many cases in Trap Team) and most notably moving the franchise forward technically with a much higher fidelity engine that was more appropriate to higher definition consoles. Does anyone mind that Skylanders looks really great on XB1 and PS4, and not look like a game that is more at home on the Wii? The Wii was an important market, but it definitely shouldn't be the base platform - it is much better to downgrade to the less capable console than to add minor upgrades to the more capable consoles.

Vehicles were a good idea, in fact many here were very excited about it. It just didn't turn out all that well. But that doesn't make it a bad idea, it just could have been done a lot better. The racing in particular and changing the controls for arena racing just wasn't satisfying.

I'm a developer, I've been on the design team for many products (not games), and I've often found myself moving off teams to other projects then brought back to upgrade previous work. That sometimes means I come back to find changes that I wouldn't necessarily have come up with, but that doesn't make them bad. I've had less experienced developers change my work to things I never would have thought of, sometimes good and sometimes bad. But, I've in many cases learned a great deal from these things. They have come up with ideas that might not have been perfect, but when you look at what they were trying to do, you can often find genius in the most unexpected places. A good developer is willing to learn from these, a bad one discards them out of hand for simply being different. I like to see what others come up with to change things I created. I just get the sense that Trap Team had far too much undoing things people liked in Swap Force simply to undo them.

Swap Force is when Skylanders was at the pinnacle of popularity. I think that is because the game felt new and fresh again. It had some issues, but it just felt right and looked great. The next three iterations just never felt new and fresh, with only Superchargers really feeling like it was trying. Imaginators was a great idea, but it really just feels like Giants again. Imaginators are great fun to make and play, but the game is the same - you just have more attachment to your character because you made them (which is really just a progression of the limited customization in Swap Force). Swap Force wasn't great just because the toys were cool and swapping was neat.