The Confusing Complexity of Skylanders Portals

Hi everyone, quick correction, turns out the XBOX One and 360 have two different portals entirely, and are not interchangeable. This means there is an additional portal for every xbox one skylanders release, meaning there are 3 additional portals or so. The XBOX one portals are interchangeable with the Series consoles. Sorry I didn't catch this before, I don't own an xbox.

Hey Mike, it's canon that the Skylanders characters were actually, physically transported to our world in the form of plastic figurines, right? Does that mean Activision just has both a menagerie of interdimensional refugees, and the technology to send them home, but is choosing to make profit by selling the privlige of sending them home to random kids, and that's just actual Skylanders lore? Am I getting this right?

I personally think the Trap Team portal is the coolest one, just for how rad it looks. It even has a speaker in the little cage part so you can hear nice little random banter from the villains you trap! That kind of stuff just oozes personality.

the reason the rift portal doesnt work with trap team is because trap team required a speaker on the portal so you can hear the villains trapped in the traps, which the rift portal did not have.

3:35 I can confirm that the 3DS portal does work on Wii U, however it wouldn't fully load the skylander rather constantly flicker the intro sequence, although take note that I was doing this with a 3rd party charger and was Playing Imaginators/Superchargers

To add some extra clarification based on what I've been able to learn. Old Portals from SSA and Giants can still scan Swap Force Skylanders, you can try through SuperChargers and Imaginators. The reason why Activision insisted on that Arch Portal for Swap Force was basically because of multiplayer. Original Rune Portals aren't really restricted by the type of toys they scan but moreso they have a hard cap on how many toys the Portal can scan at once: Three toys at a time. Because a Swapper's top and bottom means it counts as two toys, if you and a buddy say... placed two Swappers and a Magic Item on a Portal, that's effectively 5 toys. Something way beyond what a Rune Portal can accept. So Arch Portals and beyond were engineered to handle at least 7 toys. Since the maximum combination of toys read on a Portal in Skylanders would be in SuperChargers with two Swappers, one vehicle, a Trap power up and a Racing Trophy. You try doing that on an Rune Portal in SuperChargers and the game would deny you.

Bro really had to flex his Snowderdash on us 😭

You forgot to mention that if you use a supercharger portal in imaginators and put a trap in, you get 500 gold. Same with the extra items like the dragonfire cannon

it's always nice to see non-skylanders content creators dive into skylanders content, thanks! <33

I don't care about the spring-trap Skylander I care about the Cleveland Cleveland Brown Skylander

I have heard that you can use the SSA portal in imaginators and can even scan in Swap force Skylanders perfectly fine.

random fun fact: you forgot to mention the portal from the Spyros Adventure PC Version! it looks like a classic SSA portal, but came with a wire and USB plug. It also says “for PC” on the bottom. Don’t know if it works with any other consoles as I got all my other skylanders games on Xbox :)

There was one thing I remember a friend of mine showed me back when Trap Team was out; apparently as long as one portal of power was plugged in, while two (older) portals are touching, the unplugged portal (somehow) didnt need to be plugged in to work. It confused the living hell outta me...

As a kid I stole my mother's lipstick and painted on the figures, especially the swap force ones to inact my childhood need for toy blood.

i have a huge tub of skylanders under my bed waiting to see the light of day i would kill for a new skylanders game. i would 100% buy it for nostalgia

I forget where I heard and saw this from, but I believe a variant of the giants portal has a sort of quasi connectivity where if it's pressed up against a portal currently being used, it also gets connected and is available for use despite not being plugged in or connected to anything wirelessly.

1:55 There was also a PC Portal of Power. It was wired and was compatible with PC, PS3, PS4, Wii, WiiU and PS5 when playing the PS4 disc on it. It saved me so many headaches.

Xbox Skylander gamer here, and what you said about the Xbox portals pretty much sums up. It sucks having to switch portals all the time, but if you have the Traptanium Portal, it's compatible for every game. Obviously for the games with no traps in them the actual trap slot won't function, but other than that its a really cool, very compatible Xbox portal. If you are an Xbox gamer looking to get into Skylanders, buy Trap Team first for the portal.

You know, I wish someone would make a custom made Portal that would be compatible with every single Skylanders game in existence. It would look like the portal from SSA & Giants (specifically the glow in the dark portal from Giants) but was just a bit bigger so it could read more newer Skylanders like the Swappers & beyond. It could also have a slot to attach a custom trap attachment where the traps would be inserted & the speaker where you can hear the Villains talk. The speaker could also make different sound effects when a Skylander’s magic moment occurs depending on the element of the Skylander or Villain. Like for example, if a Tech Skylander would be scanned in, the trap attachment’s speaker would make mechanical sounds.

I had no idea I just needed a trap team portal to play all of it's predecessors. This is actually great news for me.