by Doc – Owner, Founder, Looking Forward to Being Really Bad At Another Form of Amiibo Training
While I am not able to watch the entire Kirby Air Riders presentation at the moment, I did make it a point to watch the amiibo section of the Nintendo Direct that just aired – and let me tell you, this is a pretty big deal. I’ll briefly run down the limited information that was announced, and then do some opining on what this could mean.
First, we are getting five amiibo for this game – Kirby, King Dedede, Meta Knight, the chef guy, and the Goomba with the spear. (It’s been a while since I played Kirby.) Each amiibo has swappable riders, and based on the English translation of the Direct, it looks like if you swap out the machine that the amiibo is in, you swap out the machine that the amiibo will be using, so you can have any rider with any machine.
Second, Sakurai did confirm that “training” is a thing, and gave us some screenshots of the training user interface which we had already partially seen in the Nintendo Direct. He didn’t go into any details as to what it means to train an amiibo in a racing game, and I’ll admit that I’m rather lost as to how this could work. Yesterday I had drafted up a post with a few suggestions and speculations that I won’t post, but I’ll summarize it here: I have no idea. I’m sure he’ll figure it out though.
What This Means
Well, we still don’t have confirmation that we will be able to pit our amiibo against each other. I would find it hard to imagine that we couldn’t, but there is still the possibility that no competition could arise from this game. That would be a bummer.
I will note that the above screenshot does say “Learn to Ride”. This menu is obviously very similar to the one in Smash Bros, and in that place in the Smash Bros menu there was the option for your amiibo AI to adjust its parameters based on its experiences… but that’s not enough for us to conclude anything about the AI or being able to pit them against each other.
If we assume that we can, then this gives us an idea of what the amiibo meta for Kirby Air Riders would look like: 5 characters, with five machine combinations equates to 25 total options. So the tier list would not just consist of which character is the best, but also which machine option is the best, and if other loadout options exist then those options would need to be evaluated as well.
If amiibo training is at least half as flexible as it was towards the tail end of Smash Ultimate in terms of the capabilities of the AI, then we may have a meta that is really quite small (though I’d bet Sakurai will come out with more amiibo if there are more than five characters in Air Riders). After all, racing is a solvable game, as you can just perfect the lining you drive on, but when you have game mechanics to interfere with the optimal pathway then you have room to compete in. That’s why games like Mario Kart are still fresh even though the lining for the tracks is pretty straightforward, and it’ll also keep whatever amiibo competition for Air Riders there is fresh for a while.
Ultimately…
I don’t expect this will be nearly as deep or intricate as either of the Super Smash Brothers amiibo metagames that have existed, but I do think the simple fact of having amiibo training outside of Super Smash Brothers would be an extremely important advancement for the genre of AI training video games as a whole. This is a freaking milestone, people.
Amiibo Doctor 