Why Kirby Air Riders' amiibo Training Feature Never Took Off

Kirby Air Riders has performed solidly for a spin-off title, reaching just under two million copies sold as of June 2026. Yet one feature has been almost entirely ignored by players: amiibo training. While Super Smash Bros. Ultimate developed a thriving competitive amiibo metagame with tournaments and dedicated communities, Kirby Air Riders' equivalent has generated no tournaments, guides, or meaningful engagement.

In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, amiibo training became surprisingly deep. Players could teach Figure Players different play styles, customize their behavior, and even train them to taunt. The barrier to entry was low: most amiibo cost $15.99, and with a Nintendo Switch and Switch Online membership, players could enter Battle Arenas and compete in tournaments. Some players even backed up amiibo data to send to tournament hosts, making participation easier across time zones. This accessibility helped build a sustained competitive community.

Kirby Air Riders supports amiibo in its Paddocks mode from day one, but the barriers to participation are substantially higher. Entering an amiibo tournament requires a $450 Nintendo Switch 2, a $70 copy of Kirby Air Riders, a Switch Online subscription, and critically, a $50 amiibo figure. The price increase from $15.99 to $50 reflects rising material costs and tariffs, but the jump creates immediate friction for new players.

The amiibo design itself compounds this problem. Each Kirby Air Riders amiibo includes two figures: a character and a vehicle. While this allows vehicle swapping between owned figures, it creates optimization barriers. The game has three modes: City Trial, Air Ride, and Top Ride. Each mode favors different vehicles. If a player owns only King Dedede with his Tank Star vehicle, they cannot access the Wing Star or Shadow Star that would be ideal for racing modes. To be competitive across all scenarios, players would theoretically need to own all seven available amiibo and train each one to proficiency level 100 on every vehicle. That total costs approximately $350 just for baseline optimization. By contrast, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate amiibo don't learn matchups against other characters, so owning multiple figures provides no training advantage. Players with just one or two amiibo could still raise tournament winners.

Character selection further limited the appeal. Kirby Air Riders offers only seven amiibo: Kirby, Bandana Waddle Dee, Meta Knight, King Dedede, Chef Kawasaki, Sword Kirby, and Noir Dedede. The roster excludes popular characters like Magolor, Marx, Taranza, Rick, and Susie. Nintendo chose to release Sword Kirby, a second Kirby variant, instead of characters with greater variety. Most tournaments would likely feature only the Kirby's Return to Dream Land characters, whereas Super Smash Bros. Ultimate tournaments can draw from over 70 unique characters, with competitive variety emerging around top-tier picks.

Technical limitations have proven perhaps most damaging. Kirby Air Riders amiibo use dual NFC chips: one for character, one for vehicle. This dual-layer design prevents data extraction and backup, a core feature that enabled Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's offline tournament infrastructure. The incompatibility means players cannot send amiibo data to tournament hosts, eliminating a key convenience factor that drove Ultimate's community.

The dual-chip design also created scanning reliability issues. Users report frequent read errors on new amiibo, likely caused by dust accumulating between the character and vehicle's magnetic connectors. Aggressive cleaning with compressed air was necessary to restore functionality on figures less than a year old. For $50 figures marketed as collectible decorations, this durability concern adds to the overall friction.

Additionally, extracting and datamining amiibo in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate revealed the function of every value in their code: shielding, parrying, edgeguarding, running, taunting, player targeting, and more. This transparency allowed players to understand exactly what amiibo could learn. The Nintendo Switch 2 cannot be datamined, and likely will not be for years. Without this transparency, players cannot determine which amiibo behaviors are hard-coded versus trainable, making optimization guesswork.

Kirby Air Riders' faster pace than Smash Ultimate adds another layer of difficulty. The increased speed makes observing and analyzing amiibo match behavior substantially harder, reducing the ability for players to develop the deep training insights that characterized the Ultimate community.

The combination of high entry costs, expensive and unreliable hardware, limited character selection, inaccessible data infrastructure, and technical opacity has effectively closed off amiibo training as a viable feature. While the figures serve as attractive collectibles, they have failed to generate the competitive ecosystem that made Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's amiibo metagame sustainable.