Sneaky and Manipulative ways to train your amiibo

When I was training Villager, I had two ideas on how I could more effectively teach my amiibo what kind of attacks to use. I’m still exploring the possibilities of these methods, but they’re proving very useful to me already. Let’s start with the more effective of the two!

Stages

Ultimate introduced the idea of hazardless stages, which are stages that are recognizably similar to their normal version but have less nonsense running around. Some stages haven’t been effected: Battlefield is the same, and Yoshi’s Island (Melee) is basically the same. Other stages have been wildly altered with their hazardless forms: Pokemon Stadium no longer transforms, Golden Plains doesn’t roll any more, and Luigi’s Mansion doesn’t crumble after a certain amount of attacks. On the surface, having hazardless stages seems to be mostly fluff for the casual gamers to use from time to time.

However, different stages have different blast zones. On some stages, like Halberd, vertical attacks will KO faster: the vertical blast zone is lower than most. On others, like Duck Hunt, horizontal attacks KO faster: the horizontal blast zone is closer than most. So if you wanted your amiibo to use a specific move that knocked the opponent a certain direction, you would pick a training stage where they were more likely to KO with that move.

Let’s say you wanted your Greninja to use his up smash. Up smash knocks opponents up, right? And amiibo learn more quickly from KOs than just successfully landing an attack. So logically, you would want to get as many KOs as possible from your up smash, which would cause you to pick a stage that doesn’t allow you to go up very far without dying (in other words, has a low blast zone). So you’d pick Hazardless Halberd for its low blast zone, and use your up smash a lot on that stage.

There’s a secret detail to this technique, and it’s frankly a bit too effective to be used all the time. This technique was so effective that I actually can’t completely untrain this teaching out of my Villager amiibo, no matter how hard I try. I can’t hype this detail enough, because every time I’ve tried it I have had too much success. Are you ready?

If you specifically want your amiibo to KO with certain vertical moves every time, you need to pick a specific stage. Go to hazardless Shadow Moses Island: the walls on the side are unbreakable, and there’s basically no way to die by getting launched to the side. It doesn’t matter what attack you use: short of getting up to 300-400%, the only thing that can KO you or your amiibo is a vertical attack. They won’t learn to hit with horizontal attacks very much, because only their vertical ones will work! It’s simple, really.

Let’s say you want them to KO with a horizontal move, instead. I don’t have any stages that are half as effective as Shadow Moses Island, but I do have some that help out with the training a bit. If you want your amiibo to hit with horizontal moves, use these stages:

• Hazardless Spear Pillar (you have to keep them in the bottom part of the stage)
• Hazardless Skyworld (it’s difficult but not impossible to KO with something besides a horiztonal move)
• Hazardless Mario Bros (this is the most effective, but it’s hard to KO even with a horizontal move)

Let me reiterate that it’s much easier to teach them to KO vertically than to KO horizontally with this stage list. You will have a much easier time with vertical KOs than horizontal ones.

Spirit Steroids

I’m fairly certain somebody came up with a similar idea during the Smash 4 days. I think somewhere along the line somebody had the equivalent of this in Smash 4 training, but my memory on that is fuzzy (it could be the painkillers from my surgery). However, I’m pretty sure someone had an idea like this previously, so I’m not going to take credit for adapting this into Ultimate.

I’ve written previously on Olimar and his juiced-up Spirits (in fact, I thought I had discovered it first but somebody beat me to it by a few days) and the same idea exists with amiibo training. If you want your amiibo to use a move, make a very powered-up Spirits team. Just slap a Geno or a Calamity Ganon on the top of a Spirits team, scan in your amiibo, play as the same character and beat the bejeezus out of your amiibo using the move you want him to learn.

Here’s an ordered list for you technical people:

1. Make a Spirits team that focuses on attacks and KOs, with as high of an Attack stat as possible
2. Set up a regular battle, but with Spirits ON
3. Scan in your amiibo, but don’t give him any Spirits. Instead, give yourself the Spirits team. It’s supposed to be unfair.
4. RIP ITS HEAD OFF using the moves you want him to learn. Sheik needs to use his forward air? Use Sheik’s forward air against it.

I haven’t messed around with this method as much as I’ve messed around with the stage method, but it seems to be pretty effective. I don’t recommend using this as your main teaching method with your amiibo: instead, this should be used as their initial education, and for corrective education. If you use it more than that, they’re not going to get very good at using the moves you aren’t teaching them. Then, when they’re in a position where they could use a move you didn’t teach them, they won’t use it! So don’t overuse the Spirits technique, or else you risk making them worse off.

If you use this information, please don’t pass it off as your own! I work very hard to make sure that I have new, interesting and useful content, and I would greatly appreciate it if you provided a link to this original post. You wouldn’t want someone to pass your findings off as their own!