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Tuesday, August 28, 2018

You Should've Been Able To Use Amiibo To Unlock Smash Bros. Characters The Whole Time

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - What's wrong with it?

An interesting discovery happened over the weekend: people reportedly saw that, on the Canadian Best Buy website for the Wolf, Inkling, and Ridley amiibo, it said that if you tap the amiibo while playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, it will instantly unlock that character. These descriptions are immortalised in this GameXplain video, but if you go to the website now, it was rewritten to remove the word “unlock” and replace with the wording “enjoy fun in-game extra features in compatible games”. Cover-up? Correcting a mistake? Who knows, but I want to discuss the idea of it, not whether or not it's actually true.

First of all, in Super Smash Bros. For Wii U, if you ever tried to use an amiibo for a character you haven't unlocked yet, you would be able to fight that character as a Figure Player, but it wouldn't unlock the character for your own use. Same with one of the DLC characters if you've kept your game version up-to-date. That means if bought a Cloud amiibo but haven't bought the Cloud DLC, you can fight your Cloud amiibo but you can't play as Cloud. Keep in mind the amiibo costs several times more than the DLC.

Why shouldn't you get the DLC with the amiibo? Why not be able to unlock a normal character with their amiibo, in a game where unlocking characters is already super-easy? It's also great for tournament organisers who can have a giant amiibo collection and then unlock all the characters for all of the game set-ups across the tournament. It's a lot more scalable than the alternative.

(And here is a group photo of my amiibo collection, which isn't giant, but...)



amiibo collection Wedding Bowser Yarn Yoshi Koopa Troopa Jigglypuff Little Mac Kirby Lucario Link Splatoon Link Zelda Ganondorf
Left-to-right: Wedding Bowser, Blue Yarn Yoshi, Pink Yarn Yoshi, Bowser,
Green Yarn Yoshi, Link, Koopa Troopa, Zelda, Ganondorf, Little Mac, Falco,
Jigglypuff, Squid, Inkling Boy, Kirby, Inkling Girl, Dark Pit, and Lucario.


It's not “pay-to-win” any more than regular character DLC was, but at least you get a collectible out of it too.

For Super Smash Bros. Ultimate specifically, you're only going to start with the characters in Super Smash Bros. back on the Nintendo 64. The unlock method for the rest isn't known (but I can guarantee you that amiibo aren't the only method, making their usage completely optional) but based on the direction the series has been going, it probably won't be too difficult to unlock all the characters.

I know I would rather unlock the characters by fighting a CPU to get them, which is what happens in the other games in the franchise except for Super Smash Bros. Brawl if you played through Subspace Emissary to get characters. So I wouldn't use my amiibo collection to unlock everyone — and you can note that my refusal to ever buy a Bowser Jr. amiibo means I wouldn't be able to unlock myself, anyway.

While I don't know who of Mario, Donkey Kong, Yoshi, Kirby, Link, Samus, Fox McCloud, and Pikachu I would use to start Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (I used Donkey Kong in Super Smash Bros. on Nintendo 64, but I'm leaning towards Kirby here) until I unlocked Jigglypuff and then the rest of the characters I actually do want to play as, I'm not that desperate that I'd want to skip what would surely be a short amount of time at most where I only have access to the original eight playable characters.

I'll be investing at least hundreds of hours in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate over the course of several years. I can withstand a little early installment weirdness in the first hour. Others might not be able to. That's okay to me. Let them have that choice. At the very least, it'll make the first month of the game's online mode very, very interesting.

Sucks for anyone who wants to main Pokémon Trainer right away, though.



Ludwig doesn't really understand how anyone can be against this optional method of unlocking, so if you aren't a fan of it, please explain yourself in the comment section below. Again, nothing in this article is to be read to mean that this is actually a method of unlocking characters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate... but it should be if it isn't, and it should've been in the previous game.


As somewhat expected, amiibo aren't a legitimate unlock method for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but here are the legitimate unlock methods.

2 comments :

  1. There is nothing inherently wrong with allowing the amiibo to unlock the characters as long as they are properly stocked. While the stores have been reducing space for amiibo for some time now, amiibo have been easier than ever before to pre-order without worrying the retailer will sell out in a couple of minutes, for the most part anyway. Since these new figures will be sold at a higher MSRP than the original Smash line, then they might as well have some extra feature to justify the price.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Even if they're not properly stocked I don't see what'd be wrong with it.

      Delete

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