If you’ve ever played a game in the Skylanders series, then you know there’s not much more to it than running and gunning. It’s more about the driving concept behind each new game, such as combining characters, playing the bad guys, adding vehicles, etc. Well, that and listening to Kaos cackle on about his current doomed plan to muck everything up for everyone. The latest game is Skylanders: Imaginators, which allows players to finally build their own characters. Although the first place runner Crispykills basically just uses Quickshot. Yeah, when I said run and gun, I meant literally. Here is the Speedrun on Twitch.
Optimization in Skylanders involves a little RNG and timing platform movement cycles to minimize standing around waiting. On lower difficulties the enemies go down in droves so the runner can focus on clearing them out efficiently without having to do much in the way of dodging. The real question here is: why the heck are we stopping to help bake a cake (at around an hour and thirty) when the world is in danger? Welcome to the Skylanders franchise, where you come for the characters and stay for… the characters. And pretty much nothing else matters to you.
There are several videos of individual-level runs with their own times. Because players have the option of starting chapters and going back to previous ones at will, this series is perfect for segmented runs – optimized routes that take the fastest times from all levels and put them together. They have the benefit of being able to do a stage over and over until as many mistakes as possible are avoided. Combined, it would ideally look like one flawless run of the overall game.
Do you have a favorite Skylander? Is it Pop Fizz like it ought to be? Want more adventure platforming craziness? That last part I can help you with: a speedrun of Banjo-Tooie. Enjoy.