When the Skylanders game was first released I was kind of hooked. I played that game…a lot. I came to a new area that required a new element and immediately went out and bought new figures. I tried to get as many people hooked as I could so I didn’t feel so guilty because if other adults were hooked too it wasn’t so bad, right? (Not that Alex counts as an adult).
When the bloom was no longer on the Skylanders rose I found myself eyeing Disney Infinity figures, but it just wasn’t the same. Skylanders felt much more…grown up to me. It was a rogue-like lite. A training version so to speak. But in this game your heroes grew too tired to fight until the next battle rather than dying for good. Much more appropriate for children in the end and wildly exciting for a then 4 year old Peanut who tried to extend the narrative wherever she could (hence the ducky). And then came amiibo, just as cute and familiar as the Disney collectibles, but still not nearly as useful in game. Oddly I was ok with that. Pea and I played the actual Disney Infinity 1.0 game a couple of times, but we kept collecting the figures. From time to time we would get curious and plop a new figure down on the portal just to see what their game was and what world they opened up, but there just wasn’t enough game there to keep us going.
The same has pretty much held true for the amiibo. They have, so far, not added very much to the games that we have (nope, we don’t have Super Smash Bros.). They sometimes open little mini-games and in the new Mario Party 10 game they pretty much serve as a dice rolling mechanism in the virtual board game, but really that’s about it. Even more maddening about the amiibo is that they are releasing multiple versions of the same characters (that all do the same thing…nothing), but oddly it’s usually the ones that we don’t have that have the cooler poses. Earlier this year I drove around town looking for the special Splatoon amiibo because I just had to have the 3-pack with the squid and it is with great shame that I admit that they still sit unopened on my games shelf. Pea and I have played a lot of Splatoon, but it has never occurred to us to actually open the amiibo to see what they add to the game (or not). The figures have become, for the most part just that, figures, not an integral part of the game or a substantial power-up. Just something cute to play with.
However, when you make the figures a necessary part of the game (and that model has its own problems–i.e. limiting game play in a game that you have already paid full price for) and make that game a good one you have a different story. And while experience has shown me that the Skylanders game itself is a solid one mechanically that would not be enough to get me to keep buying the same game over and over again, just to see different characters do the same thing and I was really happy not knowing that there might be something to pull me into the next iteration of the game. And then Pea discovered that Stampycat was doing a Let’s Play of Trap Team and she had to watch it. And she asked me to watch it with her. Enter Skylanders Trap Team, with trappable villains who get stored in a little dungeon on your portal and you can bring them out to fight for you (but you have to have the proper elemental trap to hold them and use them), and there was a new storyline with more elemental bosses and not just the evil Lord Kaos…I was hooked and Activison had gotten me good. So while we did have (literally) a small bucket of Skylanders we quickly found that we were also going to need traps and trap masters for all of the elements (the usual eight Magic, Earth, Water, Fire, Tech, Undead, Life and Air plus two new ones–Light and Dark)that represented in the game. So, let’s count this up. That’s 10 elemental traps and 10 elemental trap masters so we were looking at a couple of hundred dollars easily if we were going to complete the game with a minimum number of purchases. And that was on top of the initial outlay for the game itself (N.B. that the game starter pack included one trap master and two traps for about $80 dollars retail).
So we’ve been playing Skylanders and getting new Trap Masters and traps when we can. Using the figures and traps as rewards for our incentive chart has been a huge help because, thanks to Stampycat and his Let’s Plays, we’ve gotten not only more drawn into the narrative of the game and all of the stories of the villains that we must fight. It’s been fun. Seeing what new Skylanders can do before we get them, weighing options, and deciding which ones we should acquire next. And one of the most amusing (and interesting) things to watch her do has been problem solving. Not just the way that she problem solves in the game (which for her sometimes is all about hiding and self-preservation), but also in the way that she talks “to” Stampy when he is playing the game and we are watching. She can strategize with the best of them, especially when she doesn’t feel that her Skylander is in any immediate danger (the game has a spatial mechanic that won’t allow us to stand too far apart when we are playing co-op).
So while we play together and slide deeper down that rabbit hole of traps and trap masters we are definitely having some fun along the way telling stories, fighting bad guys, and waiting for the next fun collectible game.
