The toys-to-life franchise marries real-world figures with a video game. Therefore, various media say that it is an experience of Skylanders more “mature” than their predecessors, to the point of being called a “Devil Child”.
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In a first for the US$3-billion toys-to-life market, Activision Publishing is giving Skylanders fans the ability to create their own characters in the newest iteration of the popular franchise, Skylanders Imaginators. This time around, Kaos is on another quest to take over Skylands, which means deploying your own created Skylanders known as Imaginators using the new “elementally-aligned” toy type called the Creation Crystal. In addition, the system of loot in the game is very similar to other titles in which the items lost by the enemies will be sorted by rarity (common, rare, epic and mythical). They can be used to train your new Imaginators and unlock new Imaginator weapons, provide access to new areas of the game, and bestow Secret Techniques (seriously, Activision have capitalised that, not us) upon your creations. Disney Interactive officially announced the cancellation of the Disney Infinity series, however, lessening the amount of competition significantly.
Given that Imaginators is all about creating your own Skylanders I couldn’t help but inquire about the pie-in-the-sky possibility of kids eventually being able to download a file that would let them print their bespoke characters on 3D printers, perhaps to be placed on an official Skylanders NFC base so that they might become their own functional Skylanders toys.
Developed by Toys For Bob, Skylanders Imaginators supports all 300+ Skylanders toys from previous games. For more information, fans can check out the debut of the Skylanders Snapchat channel or watch the story unfold here and here. Two are included in the game’s Starter Pack, including new Penguin Skylander Master King Pen and Golden Queen. These crystals – which will go for about $10 USA a pop (one comes with the starter pack) – will act as a vessel for each Skylander kids create, and serve in place of the statuettes that represent traditional developer-designed Skylanders figurines.
So, sorry, parents who thought they might be able to save some money by letting their kids make their own Skylanders.
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Skylanders Imaginators is already available to pre-order and will be launching on PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, PS3 and Xbox 360.
