basically, amiibos are just cool collectible figures that occasionally provide a neat little in-game trinket for certain games. being collectibles themed around and overseen by a video game company, this makes sense.
some may disagree with hiding in-game trinkets anywhere for any reason. that’s actually fine. i kinda disagree with it myself to a certain extent. but i don’t know why anyone would assign the kind of importance to in-game trinkets that i have seen with regards to amiibos. at the very least, they’re infinitely better than hiding cool little trinkets behind preorders, because there’s a real chance of getting an amiibo, and you actually get a physical thing for it (even if you don’t own the game!).
there’s this belief that amiibos are more about the trinkets and less about the actual figure. this is very mistaken. if that were at all true, why bother putting so much effort into making the things?
I feel the same way about the value of the physical figure. That’s why I like amiibo a lot more than I used to! The Smash 4 amiibo all had pretty lousy designs lifted straight from their Smash 4 character art, regardless of how well it translated to a 3d figure. Howver, once they started making new ones with cool poses and higher quality production in general, I liked them. The unlocks are usually pretty trivial (one exception is the Samus Returns ones), so I never feel I’m compelled unethically to buy them. Mario doesn’t NEED to wear the dress, and in other games this coujdl be a paid DLC anyway. But I find it reasonable to pay $15 for a cute statue that also lets mario wear a dress.
DLC in the form of toy figurines would have probably been my jam when i was a kid, but then, idk if i would be that impressed if it was commensurate with the rest of current technology like it is with current kids
This is the sort of thing that motivates the “back in my day we used to have to walk uphill both ways in the snow” cliche, huh.
much like its fellow millennial-based brother, the fidget spinner, amiibos are totally i thing i like having when someone gifts it to me but would never put myself in a situation to actually buy one (and much like the fidget spinner, through no fault of my own, i have ended up with 4 of them)
so if people wanna unload a spare K.K. Slider one, you know where to send it to (me)
amiibo are pretty brilliant from a marketing perspective and pretty infuriating for someone who just wants to see everything a game has to offer without hunting potentially rare, expensive, and out of print figurines they don’t even want (they are worse than traditional DLC in that regard). speedrunners are divided on amiibo use because the things they unlock are not always trinkets. breath of the wild with amiibo is a very different game to speedrun than botw w/o amiibo
amiibos are an adorable/terrifying idea if you zoom way in to “marketing” but in the context of actual reality i mean yeah they are 100% ugly branding totems that are, at best, the moral equivalent of wearing dirty sneakers into bed
They make the most sense as children’s toys. I suspect Nintendo conceived of them that way and were surprised by the big uptake among older collectors and completionists. Nobody but families ever bought Skylanders after all
right now, botw is the bad apple, yes. i try to ignore that game. at the same time, i can’t help but remember the tingle tuner.
however, with samus returns, a lot of that is can’t-have childishness. the game already has a traditional hard mode, and samus returns is already a fairly hard game to begin with. the end result is that fusion difficulty is COMPLETELY STUPID and not worth nearly as much as the fusion suit (cool in-game trinket) that you also get.
again, i’m not the biggest fan of not having it unlockable in the game somehow, but this is so much more benign than what pretty much everyone else is doing. glad to hear odyssey is doing that anyway! that’s the ideal, have these secrets that you can just unlock easily with an amiibo.
I think the best usage for amiibos I saw was the Splatoon ones that apparently can save your character customisation so you can use it in a friend’s game.
I got the Animal Crossing triple pack with KK slider and the two Llamas because I had a gift card and KK slider is cool. I was pretty mortified when my niece found them and started bashing Reese and Cyrus together to make them kiss.
On the topic of Mario run buttons earlier, the run button is one of my least favourite aspects of old Mario games. Holding the two face buttons at once just feels awkward to me. Playing Super Mario World on the SNES mini just made me wonder why they didn’t put the run function on the new-fangled shoulder buttons, since that game barely used them
I bought a KK Slider amiibo for five bucks and when I used it he visited my town in a van and gave me a 3DS with his face on it that plays Panel de Pon.
I am probably going to buy/pirate some amiibo cards so I can finish filling my town with cats.
OK I looked up Amiibos and apparently they are fetish figures for altars and if you Collect 'em All and place them in the right arrangement you can summon fifty l00t crates
I want to send all the high quality figures you can get of video game characters back to myself in 1991 when I was desperate for even a Mario figure cake topper.
no! I was assuming you didn’t grow up on the NES so you never naturally developed a way to cover one button while tapping an adjacent one with a different part of the same thumb
