As amiibo’s official release date quickly approaches, plenty of information about these popular figurines has surfaced, giving us a lot of insight about how they will work out. Nintendo’s figurines have the unique feature of being readable by multiple games coming out for both the Wii U and 3DS systems.
Nintendo has outlined a key difference in the use of amiibo figurines between certain games, such as Mario Kart 8 and Hyrule Warriors. These games have a read only feature with the amiibo’s, where you need only connect the amiibo to the game you’re playing and it will unlock special rewards.
However, when connecting the amiibo figurine to a game that both reads and writes data to the figure, there can be no previous written data on the amiibo. If you wanted to connect your amiibo up to a different game, you would have to erase the save data on it first.
Currently, the only game announced that uses this feature to its fullest extent is the new Super Smash Bros. 4, so this isn’t really an issue. However, Nintendo probably has other games in mind that will take full advantage of the amiibo’s read/write feature. This may cause problems for Nintendo in the future, forcing user’s to buy multiple versions of the same amiibo figure if they want it to work with different games without losing their save data.
There are ways Nintendo could fix this problem, such as adding an App to the e-Shop that allows users to store their amiibo save data on the Wii U system so they can load another game’s data on it. We will see whether they end up doing something like this.
amiibo’s release date is right around the corner now, with just over a week to go. With amiibo confirmed to abandon Nintendo’s usual region locking policy, there’s no reason you can’t order from a different region for certain figurines you might want to receive earlier than your buddies.
