The following is an archived post from the Amiibo Dojo. It has been uploaded to the Exion Vault for referential purposes and retains its original publication date; some of the post’s links may not function currently or exist at all.
Welcome! There are a lot of you out there who are adamant about training your amiibo to use aerials. However, I disagree. Aerials are bad, and shouldn’t be used at all – in fact, your amiibo shouldn’t even be jumping. Don’t believe me? I have a whole article ready to persuade to think otherwise. Let the rant...er, I mean, educative post begin!
Why I stopped training aerial amiibo
I’ll be blunt here: if you try to train an aerial amiibo, you’re going to have a bad time. Is that what you really want? Do you desire a poor experience? In early 2015, I sure did, because I wanted to train a fully aerial Ness amiibo who could fight offstage. All that ended up happening was that the amiibo would stay grounded at all times, play defense, and spam up smash, none of which I taught him to do at the time.
If you’re reading this, and teach your amiibo to use aerials, you’re probably suffering from the up-smash problem. The question is – why do amiibo learn to eventually up smash a lot after you teach it to use aerials? Simple: because the up smash is the best tool for punishing aerials. Your amiibo eventually learns to counter your shenanigans. Even if aerials were competitively viable, which they aren’t, it’d be really hard to get an amiibo to stick to using them.
Why aerials are not competitively viable
As you may or may not know, amiibo have great reaction times – moreso than any human. They can perfect shield and dodge with incredible accuracy if taught to. If you’re in the air, you can’t perfect shield, and you can’t counterattack, which is more of a disadvantage than it sounds. Furthermore, if your amiibo uses aerials, its opponent will be able to perfect shield them and respond with an up smash. Said up smash will eventually KO your amiibo. Essentially, in a match between an aerial amiibo and a grounded amiibo, the grounded amiibo always wins.
Also, it’s worth noting that amiibo will almost never go for gimps, even if you train them to extensively. They’ll just hop off the stage about to do an attack, but chicken out at the last second and recover back. Aerials just don’t have a place in this metagame – they’re easily blocked and put characters in a disadvantageous position.
If I haven’t convinced you yet, you’ve got to take my word for it. Aerials alone will prevent your amiibo from winning tournaments. I started out in the same mindset as you might be in now – I wanted an aerial character who stylishly disrespected opponents with flashy gimps. I learned the hard way that that’s impossible.
If you bought an amiibo as a sparring partner, and really don’t want to get into the metagame, that’s fine. You can keep using aerials. In fact, I have a vanilla Villager amiibo who I fight with sometimes, and in these fights, I use a lot of aerials. But if you want to create a champion, equipment is the way to go, and I can help you – for an introduction to feeding your amiibo, click here. If you have any questions whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to post on the Amiibo Dojo Forums (no account necessary), fill out the Amiibo Dojo contact form, or email me directly at amiibocloud@gmail.com. Thanks for reading. Happy training!
