More interesting, but not cool enough
My initial amiibo assessment was after roughly one week of testing. Within one day I trained a few toys to the max level of 50, fed them a few items, and was pretty underwhelmed. Two weeks later and I’m still a bit underwhelmed, but I’ve had a few enjoyable moments with them to help justify my purchase in part.
What changed? Playing with friends and earning more items through RNG methods. After playing around with every current amiibo that’s out there, I chose one to focus on — Marth. I decided that he would have my full attention, and I trained him late into the night with my own Marth tactics, and fed him only the best items.
That fire grew inside me because of a challenge from a friend. He had recently trained up a Peach and Wii Fit Trainer and taught them some advanced tactics, and said I should do the same, and put our amiibo to the test with other friends in an eight-person battle. Marth ended up absolutely destroying the competition (and occasionally me), as I attempted to learn new characters.
The key ingredient? Lots of counter training with my own Marth, and a multifaceted healing special strategy. My amiibo can not only can regain health over time naturally, but he could heal based on his shielding and blocking. I also buffed up his defense above all else, making him incredibly tough to actually KO. As a result we’d often be battling in eight-player chaos, and look down and realize that Marth still had all of his stock.
It’s a fun distraction, but so far the amiibo functionality is still kind of meh for me. Hyrule Warriors and Mario Kart just have “on-disc”/unlock DLC, and I don’t expect the Captain Toad feature to wow me either. They’re damn cool toys, I just hope Nintendo adds more fun features down the line and doesn’t make waves obsolete too quickly.
