5 Things You Didn’t Know About Amiibo

by Doc – Owner, Founder, Author of “How to Pick Up Chicks With Amiibo”

I am a person who eats, digests and vomits amiibo information. It’s a little disgusting, but it makes for great content. A lot of the smaller trivia we have in the ever-rotating Did You Know? message at the top of the page, but there’s some cooler stuff about amiibo that you probably aren’t aware of.

Kirby Games Use Smash Amiibo the Most

While games like Smash Ultimate and Animal Crossing have the most amiibo interaction, they aren’t the ones that make use of Smash amiibo the most often. That title belongs to the Kirby series, who has six games that utilize Smash amiibo, far more than most other series. The next closest contenders are the Fire Emblem series, which has four games that use amiibo (ignoring ports and major DLC updates, like Animal Crossing New Leaf’s Welcome amiibo update).

The Kirby games are:

• Kirby and the Rainbow Curse
• Kirby: Battle Royale
• Kirby: Planet Robobo
• Kirby: Blowout Blast
• Kirby’s Extra Epic Yarn
• Kirby Star Allies

Min Min is All Alone

In the beginning of amiibo’s existence, Nintendo would release amiibo in “waves“. This would entail putting out several amiibo at once, and basically letting people go bananas trying to get them all. Ninty would even sweeten the pot by undersupplying some amiibo and oversupplying others, causing a lot of complaints about scalping.

Waves are still how Ninty distributes the Smash amiibo these days, but they’re significantly smaller in size – gone are the days of having 8-10 amiibo releasing on the same day. In fact, gone are the days of even having 2 amiibo release on the same day. Min Min is the first amiibo since Wave 8, Lucas, to release in a wave all on its own. That’s been over five years!

If we’re lucky, Nintendo will decide to release other Fighter’s Pass amiibo as well, but at this point there’s been no news.

Prototype amiibo Still Surface!

This is cursed:

That’s a prototype Palutena amiibo. You’ve probably seen a few of these several years ago when amiibo were still in the public eye, but guess what? They’re still coming out. And there’s some pretty interesting ones out there, if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s like TCRF.net but for amiibo.

Amiibo Functionality Before Release

One of the cool things about amiibo is that Nintendo is very stern about making sure amiibo characters are recognized across games. In fact, there’s only one instance I know of where that hasn’t been the case – Detective Pikachu doesn’t function as Pikachu in most games that use the Pikachu amiibo.

This had an interesting result in Smash Ultimate, before some of the Smash Ultimate line of amiibo had released. If you had the Animal Crossing Isabelle figure before the Smash Bros amiibo released, you could still train Isabelle just fine. The same was true for Fire Emblem Chrom, Super Mario Daisy, and so on.

1 amiibo = 1 Iraqi Citizen

According to Nintendo’s sales figures, as of Q4 2017 Nintendo has sold 39,000,000 amiibo figures, not including the amiibo cards that had been released up to that point in time. That’s one amiibo for every citizen of Iraq.

If the amiibo were sold for $13 to that point, that means Nintendo pulled in over five billion dollars in revenue from the amiibo figures alone, and that’s just up until 2017. How many more amiibo do you think they’ve sold on the Nintendo Switch, which is a much more popular system with games like Breath of the Wild and Smash Ultimate driving sales?