Many fans like the YouTube personality Scott the Woz expressed an attitude of nonchalance towards amiibo after it became obvious that not much was being done with the plastic figurines. Then there were other games like Dark Souls: Remastered whose functionality with the Solaire amiibo did absolutely nothing other than using the "Praise the sun!" gesture.
Any Mario costume could unlock a Mario-themed costume in, say, Yoshi's Crafted World, and that was the end of it. This was evident in games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Yoshi's Crafted World, and, more recently, in Monster Hunter Rise.
What amiibo fans began to notice was that many games that boasted amiibo functionality with a wide variety of figures only featured themed costumes and little else. Many games only featured themed costumes and little else. Nintendo had its own website dedicated to the topic, but it was especially confusing to navigate. The functionality of amiibo varies so much that fans needed to make amiibo compatibility charts so people could keep track of what amiibo were compatible with what games.
That's a level of distrust that you generally don't want to see from your customers, and it's a mistake that probably cost Nintendo a lot of money in this market. Fans worried that Nintendo was only making amiibo-compatible games to squeeze money out of them. It didn't help that Happy Home Designer and amiibo Festival felt like shells of their predecessors. Multiple Reddit posts showed the lack of variety in stores, and those who weren't Animal Crossing fans or persons looking to collect all available amiibo were kind of turned off by the idea after the Great Animal Crossing Flood. There were so many of them that they quickly had to go on clearance because stores were desperate to get them out. In actuality, it over-produced the Animal Crossing amiibo, which arguably did not have the same wide appeal as the Smash Bros. Nintendo seemed to want to learn from its previous mistake of under-producing the Smash Bros. However, upon the release of Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer and Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival, everything seemed to go wrong.įans worried that Nintendo was only making amiibo-compatible games to squeeze money out of them.
The Super Mario and Splatoon lines of amiibo also saw some popularity as they released, with a truck full of Splatoon amiibo even being stolen in the U.K. With the baffling decision on Nintendo's part to restrict certain amiibo to certain retailers such as GameStop and Target, amiibo like Shulk and Rosalina became extraordinarily rare, and that much easier for scalpers to profit off of.ĭespite frustrations with how the waves of amiibo were handled, collecting them became something like a game for fans, with multiple communities popping up across Facebook and Reddit to share information. These figures were insanely popular, flying off the shelves faster than Nintendo could produce them. This support continued for the 3DS Smash Bros.
Their main selling point was to allow players to "teach" their amiibo how to fight through training. The first line of amiibo released in 2014 alongside Super Smash Bros. But as time went by, the opinion on whether amiibo are a nice addition to games, or whether they are a greedy cash grab by Nintendo, has fluctuated more times than I can count.
line Peach amiibo, in any game that supported a Peach amiibo. In addition, Nintendo reassured that amiibo would work across several games - this meant that your Super Mario line Peach amiibo would work just as well as your Super Smash Bros. This pleased many fans initially, as some figures to be released depicted characters that did not receive any significant merchandise - or at least, not very often. The figurines facilitated this through the Near Field Communication (NFC) chips stored in their bases, which could be scanned and read or write data to themselves or a game, depending on the title. Starting in 2014, during the Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Wii U era, these plastic figurines promised a whole new way to interact with your games while providing some cute memorabilia for your shelf. Amiibo were Nintendo's answer to the "toys-to-life" phenomenon that Disney Infinity and Skylanders made so popular.