darkSpyro

I've never gotten any of the 3DS Skylanders games. Are they good? Should I play them all, or just start with Swap Force?

You'd get better advice in one of the Skylanders boards, to be honest :I
I never played them, but in my opinion 3DS Swap Force is waaay better than the console version, specially with the story. Some said 3DS Giants is lackluster and I never really paid much attention to 3DS SSA.

As I was told from a friend that the SSA 3DS version has a shorter story, but was better.

I prefer the console versions myself because of the humor of Kaos's nonsense. And I like long games. Though I think getting into the 3DS games won't be a bad idea.

I think 3DSSA is the best one. I haven't wrote much about what I think about the non-SF 3DS games, but here's what I wrote about the n-Space 3DS games:

//forum.darkspyro.net/spyro/vi...&page=1#5059821
//forum.darkspyro.net/spyro/vi...&page=1#4927353
//forum.darkspyro.net/spyro/vi...&page=1#4883586

I wrote a post about SA 3DS I was pretty happy with, but I couldn't find it.

Giants 3DS is clearly the worst one. It's the glitchiest and it's designed worse than both other games: overall level design, story, new characters' movesets and Wow Pows... near everything is just really lacklustre and very little is actually memorable. I think SA 3DS' playstyle just works better on the 3DS than the other games and its mechanics and character movesets feel most polished, but SF 3DS at least has some interesting levels and a few of the new Skylanders have good movesets.

If you only aim to beat the main story and get 100%, I don't know if you'd get more than 15 hours out of any. Beside that, beating your own time trail scores and replaying the game over and over, there's nothing to replay for aside from levelling Skylanders.

The only thing about SA 3DS which really, really bugs me is how you can't switch off the time trail mode once it's active. It activates after you complete the other missions in the level, then whenever you return to the level time trial starts. You actually can turn it off in the sequels when you select the level. They give you a choice between playing the time trial and non-time trial mode. (I wish it worked like Rayman Origins and Crash Bandicoot where you would just hit a clock at the start to activate it, though.)