Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure is a pretty good game on its own. My brother and I played through it with only four toys, and we had a pretty good time with it. Say what you will about the evil and genius marketing ploy of tying the purchase of toys as in-game characters into the mix, but the overall package is fairly solid and enjoyable.
However, it’s not perfect. Particularly when your lack of toys impedes your progress through the game. My brother and I experienced the scummiest of these moments during the final boss fight.
Up until the end of the game, we didn’t really have any problems beating the levels with our set of four toys. There were some close calls, but we never hit a point where we had to restart because we ran out of toys to use. That is, until we hit the last boss.
Without spoiling the game, there’s a final boss fight that’s pretty tough. We lost three of our Skylanders, and it came down to the wire with my Spyro vs. the last boss. I traded blows with him till the very end, when we killed each other almost simultaneously, though I died a split-second before he did. All we had to do was place a fresh toy on the Portal of Power, and we would have beaten the game…
…except that we didn’t have any fresh toys. Spyro was our last Skylander.
We now had one of two options:
1) Restart the tough and long boss fight
or
2) Go to the store, buy a new Skylander and place it on the Portal of Power to get the ending
I’m pretty sure that the creators of Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure did not have that use case thought out, but it made me sick to know that it even happened. I have no problem with anyone wanting to buy a new figure cause they want to play with that figure, but the fact that I was in a scenario where the only way I could rightfully claim my ending without having to restart was to go buy another figure was not cool.
Out of principle, my brother and I chose to restart. We eventually got our ending without having to resort to the purchase of extra figures.
In Third Person 