What could amiibo support look like for Animal Crossing: New Leaf?

This November, amiibo support will be added to Animal Crossing: New Leaf, four years after its initial release in Japan. It’s an unprecedented update from Nintendo, but breathing life into the old game makes sense after Happy Home Designer and amiibo Festival just didn’t live up to the Animal Crossing formula we know and love.

Animal Crossing is the ultimate cutesy junk collecting life sim, and many old hands may be wondering, as I am, what’ll happen when I go back to the town I haven’t visited in three years? Did I leave the right Town Ordinance on so that my villagers would water my flowers and take care of weeding? Will Alfonso have moved out after I sent him that rather pointed letter

Thankfully, New Leaf is a fair bit more forgiving than previous entries in the Animal Crossing series. I won’t return to a ghost town and a telling off from Tortimer. It’s most likely that I’ll have to pull a few dozen weeds and deal with the locals passive aggressively mentioning that I seem to have been away for a while.

So what can we expect from this update?

Villagers On Demand

The Animal Crossing amiibo cards were released alongside Happy Home Designer last year were rather spangly, but unless you were in the mood for playing doll’s house or simply keeping them in an album like some kind of amiibo fanatic, they were somewhat wasted.

We can expect compatibility with all four series of cards, and it sounds like using the cards will make each character visit your town. The villager cards may give you the chance to enamour the character enough to move in to your town. For special character cards, it seems more likely that they would give you a gift once a day.

Themed goodness

Then we have the rest of the amiibo figure back catalogue. As most of the Animal Crossing amiibo figures also have amiibo cards, I’d hope we see different unlockables for each. Using your Villager amiibo in Happy Home Designer unlocked a fancy dude statue, and I’d be happy enough with one of those for each Animal Crossing amiibo figure.

For the rest of the amiibo figure catalogue, Nintendo’s hinted towards themed items from their properties, which could mean items in the vein of the Fortune Cookie unlockables (red shells, Bullet Bills, Pikmin plant pots, and so on), or clothing items for you and your villagers to wear.

No NES nonsense

Guys, it’s just not going to happen. Yes, Animal Crossing on the GameCube featured 19 NES games that were fully playable, but in the age of Virtual Console games for a fiver, it’s unlikely we’ll see their return alongside this newfound amiibo support.

Sing us a song

Maybe, just maybe, using the K.K. Slider and Kapp’n amiibo cards would summon our two favourite bards to play out a random tune on the fly. The Kapp’n’s sea shanties tell tales we all identify with, like the time the wife ate all the crisps, or how the taxman’s out to get us. K.K.’s songs get you into the groove like nothing else.

I’m hoping for a few new tracks too though. My request?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=E413-Oi_j5A