Character Customisation in Skylanders Imaginators has a Costly Drawback
The big draw of Skylanders Imaginators is that you’ll be able to create your own Skylanders using the game’s customisation tool. To do so you need a physical Creation Crystal toy of the element you want the Skylander to belong to, and then save your creation to it. By teaming your creation up with the new Sensei toys, it can learn special abilities. This sounded like a fun system to add your own personal touch to the game and have interplay between your custom Skylanders and the ‘real’ ones. But Game Informer have reported that the game will place an incredibly frustrating restriction on these custom Skylanders – they can’t be fully reset.
When you create your character, you assign a class to them. This, in combination with the Skylander’s element, affects the moves and abilities they can learn, and which Senseis can improve their abilities (Senseis of the same class as your Imaginator can pass on their talents). Naturally, you’ll want to experiment with these combinations and see which fit your playstyle. You might even come up with a better character concept later on that requires you to change their class. Well, you can’t. Once a crystal has been assigned a class, you can never change it. Even if you wipe the crystal in-game, it’ll retain the class already assigned to it, unlike regular Skylanders whose ability trees can be re-specced if you reset them. You can alter your Imaginator’s physical appearance, but you lock in what abilities they can learn from the beginning before you even get a chance to try them out. If you want to create an Imaginator of that element with a different class, you’ll need to buy an entire new crystal. And if you buy one of these crystals second hand, you’ll just have to pray that it’s of a class you want.
The worst bit is that, speaking to Game Informer, Paul Reiche the co-founder of Toys for Bob tries to justify this decision as being good for the player – “We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a sea of options, and that there weren’t so many different factors affecting the gameplay of the character that you couldn’t focus and create what we thought of as a class,” he told me. If you could constantly shift absolutely everything about it, you almost lose the fun of having a particular kind of character and the distinctions that we have. So as we were building it, we didn’t know to what degree people would be changing their characters. What we have found is that they settle on a physical form for the base character pretty fast. Then they’ll adjust gear, because it has stats. And if something shows up, like a new tagline piece or voice, they might experiment with that. It sort of resolves itself in less than an hour, and then people stick with that character and press forward. It is primarly to give people a direction. We think that helps define the name you give it, the appropriate voice, the color set you choose.”
The whole point of customisation IS to have options. Just because some people can’t make up their minds and spend a long time in the creation aspects, doesn’t mean everyone has to be forced into this system. And who cares if people do act that way? If that’s how they enjoy the game then just let them! This is a really aggravating decision when you consider how much you’re asked to spend on Toys to Life games as it is. Hopefully the team reconsider, and open up this option before the game releases.
