The Hacked Amiibo We Should Eventually Legalize

by Doc – Owner, Founder, Not Legalized

Right now, it’s absurdly easy to mod your Wii. Most people can just do some finagling with files on a USB stick, get a serial number for their console, and plug the USB back in to homebrew their Wii. This has made it possible for competitive metas arising entirely out of mods of games to exist (see: Project M).

It’s not hard to imagine that the Switch will someday get to that level, and given the ingenuity of the Nintendo hacking fan base I’ll bet there’s already one or two secret and easy methods that will be revealed to the world once Nintendo stops updating the Switch. It’s conceivable that in five years’ time most people still playing Smash Ultimate will be doing so on a modded Switch with all the bells and whistles, or even with an advanced emulator on their desktops that far surpasses anything we currently have.

I propose that, in this hypothetical but very possible future, we as a community circle the wagons and select a few stable character mods to increase the size of the roster and our choices in the amiibo meta. I think we should expand the roster a bit farther than it has already gone (while staying limited to the content Nintendo actually made for the game) to keep the meta alive and fresh.

The Characters That Exist, But Don’t

Keep a mod like this in mind when you read this post.

So who do we introduce?

For starters, we can easily split off Pokémon Trainer and Pyra/Mythra into their own separate characters. That gives us 5 more options in amiibo training – do you want to submit Charizard, Ivysuar or Squirtle on his own, or do you prefer having all three together? How about using Mythra in a mid tier tournament suitable for Mythra’s power level without having to worry about Pyra dragging her up a few tiers?

I can say pretty certainly that if we split off Charizard and Pyra as standalone characters, the upper levels of the meta would have some stiff competition. Flare Blitz is one of the best moves in the game, and Pyra would probably be the best swordfighter in the game, and in a tier where most opponents don’t have much range. Wouldn’t that be cool?

So we split off the obvious two. Now what?

Well, there’s also the possibility of taking a few liberties with characters. Can we remove Nana so that Popo is in permanent Sopo mode? Or do the same with Olimar and his Pikmin, (“Solimar/Solomar”) and limit his AI to only use moves that don’t require Pikmin? Hell, why not properly implement the Random amiibo?

There’s a lot of real potential to shift around the meta* just with what I described above, and a lot of it has already been done with pre-existing mods but never applied to amiibo. Splitting the characters and implementing the Random amiibo were mods that came into play pretty quickly after Ultimate’s launch, so it wouldn’t take much to get those up and running. I’m pretty sure that save for Olimar, all of those options already have easily-functional amiibo AI in the game that the game handles just fine.

*there’s no way that Olimar is better without Pikmin or that the Icies are better without Nana, but a mod like this lets us introduce the Solimar and Sopo characters to the lower tiers, which keeps low-tier tournaments interesting.

Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, though. At some point you’ve modded the game so much that you’re not actually competing in the game itself anymore. Brawl mods, for example, are legal in competitive Brawl, but only when they adjust cosmetic features and not the game itself. That’s a pretty good principle to follow.

I propose these rules when evaluating whether a mod character should be legal in this hypothetical.

1. The “new” character and amiibo AI must currently exist in Smash Ultimate and have been officially designed. In other words, a mod that allows Giga Bowser (if he has amiibo AI) can be considered, but a mod for Shrek cannot. Sadly.
2. The character can’t have their original attributes modified. Right now, everyone’s copy of Smash Ultimate is the same. I know that when I send my Olimar amiibo to someone else’s tournament, he’s going to have the same AI and character as he does on my Switch. If we start modifying attributes so that one person’s version of a character is stronger than another person’s because of mods, then we don’t have a way to conduct consistent tournaments.
3. Modifying amiibo AI is only permitted if you’re removing behaviors to accommodate the aspects of the “new” character. For example, forcing the “Solimar” amiibo AI to limit itself only to moves that don’t require Pikmin would be permissible, but removing part of Ken’s AI to stop it from SDing would not be permissible. It’s okay to modify Solimar to work without Pikmin because the whole gist of the character is to function without Pikmin, but it’s not okay to modify Ken because Ken already has a unique, Nintendo-made amiibo AI.

I suppose I should wrap this up by making it clear that I have no idea how feasible this actually is on a technical level beyond the existence of the mod that I linked to above. I’m sure someone has already made mods for a lot of this but never combined them, and it may be really technically hard to make something like that happen. That’s not my wheelhouse.

Obviously this kind of DIY amiibo meta will never be the mainstream, but you’ve gotta admit… if we ever get to the point where modding can actually be this easy and widespread, this is the coolest outcome for the amiibo meta.