by Doc, Owner, Founder, Impatient Man
These amiibo have been announced for a release date of March 26, 2021, but there’s a high possibility we will have them before then. “But Doc – how is that possible?” you ask yourself as you lie awake at night deep in thought.
It’s simple.
Well… it’s actually not simple.
Amiibo are formatted so that the first 8 bytes of the .bin file denote the character and series that the amiibo belongs to. It’s an identifier number. NTAG215 chips are made so that those 8 bytes are permanent, and can never be rewritten – that’s how brain transplants work, actually. When you scan your amiibo into the game, it checks those 8 bytes and spawns in the proper character accordingly.
Sometimes, Smash Ultimate gets amiibo functionality patched in, but you never see that in the patch notes. It’s why if you have a version of Smash 1.0 (say, through a cartridge on a Switch not connected to the internet), you’ll find your Pichu amiibo doesn’t work on it even though Pichu exists in the game. Ultimate hasn’t been given the Pichu amiibo’s identifier, so it can’t scan in Pichu.
It’s possible that with the upcoming release of Sephiroth, Nintendo will also patch in the identifiers for the Banjo amiibo, Byleth amiibo and Terry amiibo, as they’ve done in previous patches. Typically Nintendo patches in functionality for amiibo in the previous big patch, so this wouldn’t be out of the ordinary at all. There’s only been three occasions where Nintendo hasn’t done that out of the many amiibo patches that have occurred, so it’s more likely that they’ll patch functionality in with Sephiroth than on its own.
Amiibo Doctor modders are hard at work trying to discover these identifiers ahead of time so we can lab out the most accurate information on these amiibo as possible. We don’t publish training guides until real results have come out for the character (we believe that training guides should be based on tried-and-true methods, so we take our time), but the labbing itself will happen as soon as we can get it to work.
Amiibo Doctor 