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Amiibos Are Still a Major Problem

Amiibos Are Still a Major Problem

Something concerning game to light during the most recent Nintendo Direct. If you blinked, you might not even have noticed it. Unfortunately, it has to do with Amiibos, and confirms something people had suspected about the figures. Namely, that there isn’t enough room on one for everything.

NFC figures work thanks to a chip inside of their base. When that chip is scanned, data can be read, extracted, or saved. So far, we’ve only had one Wii U game released that actively reads and writes data from and to an Amiibo’s chip, Super Smash Bros . All of the other Amiibo compatible games thus far simply read the chip to recognize it as a certain character and act accordingly. There was no conflict, and all was well.

Except Mario Party 10 is coming on March 20, 2015, and it reveals something we’ve feared: there’s not enough room on one Amiibo for data from multiple games. People can read and write to an NFC figure for the Amiibo Party mode. This means someone can use one of the nine figures compatible with the game as their character, add a board related to them, and customize it. By customizing, I mean an item can be assigned to a character. There’s not enough room on an Amiibo for Super Smash Bros and Mario Party 10 data, so people have to choose.

Now, this doesn’t matter much right now. When it comes to games, Mario Party 10 isn’t exactly critical. So you don’t get a custom character in it. Big deal. However, it is a portend of things to come. Nintendo has indicated that it intends to add Amiibo compatibility for as many games as possible Eventually, that means more games where custom character data will need to be saved to a figure. This means people will have to pick and choose, or spend more money on more figures so they don’t have to.

Amiibos Are Still a Major Problem

Which, frankly, is very un-Nintendo. The company has a bit of a reputation for being rather upfront with its customers. It took the company a while to even get into the DLC game and, when it did, it offered bundles that were affordable and offered an amazing amount of purely supplemental content. The fact that now it’s going to put people in a situation where they might need to consider buying multiple Amiibos for multiple games is disconcerting.

I understand there are technological limitations. Things happen. However, there are also actions that could have been taken to alleviate this concern. The Amiibo price could have been increased, as an example, with the additional money going toward more advanced chips that are capable of storing more data. But, Nintendo didn’t, and we may have to collect multiple, figure-shaped memory cards as a result.

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