Perhaps the biggest announcement to come out of E3 this year was Amiibo, Nintendo’s smart toy initiative that functions similarly to Skylanders and Disney Infinity. The toys are produced in series, with the first series run characters seen in the image above. Nintendo hinted at how these characters would work in Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart 8, but during E3 the company confirmed that five games will be Amiibo capable once they’re available. The first five games to support these figures are:
- Mario Kart 8
- Super Smash Bros.
- Yoshi’s Wooly World
- Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker
- Mario Party 10
It’s easy to imagine how Amiibo figures will work with the first two games, as Nintendo provided some of the detail themselves. For Super Smash Bros. training an Amiibo figure was billed as the next best thing to actually having a human opponent. Your Amiibo characters will learn from the way you play them and eventually, you’ll be able to pit yourself against them in order to hone your skills with other characters. Taking that concept to Mario Kart 8, it’s easy to imagine you’ll be able to train specific Amiibo figures for that game to have better handling and cornering based on how you drive.
Of course, this plays into the fact that Nintendo has announced multiple Amiibo figurines for each of these games. While the Super Smash Bros. Mario figure will be able to be used with the Mario Kart 8 game, it perhaps won’t be as effective as the Mario Kart 8 Mario Amiibo figure. This creates an incentive to “catch ’em all”, in that if you’re a heavy player of Mario in both Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart 8, you’ll want a figure specifically tailored to the game.
Either way, the first set of figurines being produced are based on the Super Smash Bros. series. After that, perhaps we’ll see figures ready for the three games that haven’t been detailed. How would you imagine Amiibo figures work in a game like Yoshi’s Wooly World, or Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker? Those games don’t have a full character roster that we know of, so it seems like having a Yoshi and Toad Amiibo for those games would be sort of like a DLC purchase, where you can buy the game and the figure together for an extra $10.
Of course, aside from Super Smash Bros. the game IP that Nintendo owns that seems most likely to have figures attached to it is Pokemon. Nintendo attempt something similar with Pokemon Rumble U, but outside of Japan the game hasn’t been too popular. Would you like to see an Amiibo-enabled Pokemon game on the Wii U?
What do you think? How do you want Amiibo to function in the games that have announced support for the figures? With Super Smash Bros. having such a huge roster and Nintendo planning on making Amiibo characters for each and every character, would you purchase them all?
