darkSpyro

Dear Activision,

I picked up my copy of Skylanders: Swap Force (Dark Edition) at Gamestop on the morning of its release, along with a number of extra figures. I’m pleased with how the figures look and I can’t wait to play the game. However, one of the things I was looking forward to most about this version of the game and the thing that was the final deciding factor that made me want the Dark Edition instead of the regular starter set, was the "mega character poster" which was said to have all of the figures made up to this point on it. I was prepared to come home, take down my old Spyro’s Adventure and Giants posters, cut out the stickers I have already stuck to them, and glue them to the new mega poster. It was going to be a lot of work, but I was okay with it. Unfortunately, when I opened up my Dark Edition set and unfolded the poster, I was extremely disappointed. There were a number of things that I just really didn’t like:

1) The first thing I noticed when I opened it up was that the poster was HUGE! It’s easily double the size of the first two posters put together. It wouldn’t easily fit were I was planning to put it without moving a few things around. But that wasn’t too big of a deal, just a little unexpected. It was this coupled with the next issue that was the real problem.

2) When I started looking at the poster, the next thing I noticed was all of the wasted space! About 70% of the poster was used for the three game titles with the main characters under them. This is the opposite of the first two posters which used 60-75% of the poster for the figure checklist. This should have been the standard and continued to be the format used for the Dark Edition mega poster.

3) Then actually looking at the individual character entries, I was a little disappointed that the only variant characters that were included on the checklist were the Dark versions. I was hoping (although didn’t have too high of expectations) that you might include all variants that have been released and have been announced like Molten Hot Dog and Scarlet Ninjini and the Legendary series in addition to their regular versions, but it did not have them. It would have also been nice if Sidekicks and Adventure Pack items were included, but I know that neither came with checklist stickers during Spyro’s Adventure, so that was a real long-shot.

4) But finally, maybe the biggest issue of all came when I paid attention to the checklist sticker areas. The spaces for the checklist stickers as not colored lightly like on the older posters and the spaces aren’t even big enough for the stickers to fit inside the lines! If I would try to place all of the stickers on the poster, they would get bunched together, either becoming offset or overlapping with each other. This poster doesn’t even properly function as a checklist! I couldn’t believe it. How was this even released?

I’m sorry if it seems like I’m nitpicking here. But again, this poster was one of the biggest draws for me to upgrade to the Dark Edition. I paid $25 more to get two extra figures that retail for $9.99 each. Yes, the dark variants look pretty cool, but usually if you get a bundle with something extra, it’s a better deal, or at least not an up-charge. With the poster being such a disappointment, I paid an extra $5 for a paint job and lost out on the standard Swap Force checklist poster. I’d really like it if a proper mega checklist poster was created and made available to fans of the game, although I don’t know how likely that would be. At the very least, it’d be nice if the standard checklist poster was made available to those who bought the Dark Edition. I mainly just want my disappointment to be heard. Thank you for reading and have a great day.