Ideas for Amiibo implementation in Yoshi’s Woolly World

When Nintendo at E3 announced its lineup up games supporting the company’s new Amiibo figurines, Yoshi’s Woolly World was one of the games on the list. This left me very curious about how they plan to implement this.

Our current conception of how figurines are integrated in to video games is based on the two games on the market today, Skylanders and Disney Infinity. Both have chosen to integrate their figurines as playable characters, but as Nintendo has shown with Smash Bros, this doesn’t have to be the case. In Nintendo’s upcoming all-stars fighting game the figurine will instead be connected to an NPC, who the player can then fight and level up. Of course neither of these solutions seems to fit Yoshi’s Woolly World. Seeing how the game clearly wasn’t conceived with the Amiibo figurines in mind, I’m thinking they will likely have a minor effect on gameplay. My guess is that the figurines will probably be limited to altering the background and maybe the music somehow. For example loading the Starfox figurine could have Fox McCloud come flying by, not in any way affecting the gameplay, more as a piece of Nintendo fan service. For the Mario figurine I thought it could similarly trigger Mario themed fireworks, seeing how there have been fireworks in pretty much every Mario games since Super Mario Bros. Or if Nintendo really wanted to mess with their fans, they could have the Mario figurine set off the hated Baby Mario sound effect from earlier Yoshi games. The figurines could also be limited to just altering the music, for example the Animal Crossing Villager could change the music to some nice Animal Crossing tunes. I could actually imagine the Animal Crossing music being a good fit for a Yoshi game.

Personally I would be satisfied with such a relaxed approached to Amiibo integration in games like Yoshi’s Woolly World and have Nintendo put more effort in the integrating Amiibos in games like Smash Bros. and Mario Kart, which seem a more obvious fit.