Exion has been creating amiibo training guides and content since August 2015. As you can imagine, we’ve been on the receiving end of many, many amiibo training questions. Many of these inquiries involve amiibo personalities in some way, shape, or form. If you don’t know this already, a Figure Player’s personality is displayed on its status screen in the top-right corner of the amiibo menu (which can be found in the Games & More tab). Personalities range from Normal to Aggressive to Logical and everywhere in between, and we’ll be providing a full list of them in just a moment. For now, know that your FP’s personality shouldn’t be your focus. If you’ve become a member of our Discord community, you might be familiar with our signature catchphrase, “personalities don’t matter”. There is much more to it than that, though, so today we’re going to break down the individual components of amiibo personalities and what they mean for your FPs.

Introduction

There are twenty-five personalities that an FP can potentially have. These include Normal, Cautious, Realistic, Unflappable, Light, Quick, Lightning Fast, Enthusiastic, Aggressive, Offensive, Reckless, Thrill Seeker, Daredevil, Versatile, Tricky, Technician, Show-Off, Flashy, Entertainer, Cool, Logical, Sly, Laid Back, Wild, and Lively. That’s a lot. According to research performed by dataminer Ske, personalities are calculated via a point system based on an FP’s internal values. There are eight groups of three personalities each, with the third in the list being the most extreme of the group.

The eight groups are def (Cautious, Realistic, and Unflappable), agl (Light, Quick, and Lightning Fast), ofn (Enthusiastic, Aggressive, and Offensive), rsk (Reckless, Thrill Seeker, and Daredevil), gen (Versatile, Tricky, and Technician), ent (Show-Off, Flashy, and Entertainer), cau (Cool, Logical, and Sly), and dyn (Laid Back, Wild, and Lively). As mentioned before, personalities are automatically calculated via a point system. Let’s take the def category, for example. If your FP uses its shield a lot, and doesn’t exhibit many aggressive or risky behaviors (including edgeguarding off-stage), it’ll wind up with Cautious, Realistic, or Unflappable depending on its ratio of defensive-to-aggressive behaviors. Unflappable is an example of an extreme personality that only appears when your FP has almost no aggressive traits. The same applies to the other categories, too!

For more information on which traits result in which personalities, check out our wiki page on them — we’ll be updating that as well as time goes on. For now, let’s go into further detail on the training values that make up personalities, because they’re important! There’s no way to see these numbers without accessing the file within your amiibo figure. For more information on how to access that file, you can check out our Powersaves backup guide, our NFC Tools guide, or our TagMo guide. The methods might appear a tad intimidating at first, but once you’ve got them down, they’re no problem at all!

Behavior Values

An FP’s training data consists of several rows of bytes that each controls a different aspect of its behavior. Over time, we’ve come to develop a comprehensive understanding of what each and every one does. If you’re looking for more specific information, or want more help understanding training data, check out our Discord community. In the meantime, here’s a list of everything you can definitively teach to your FP:

• Distance. You can teach your FP to stay close to its enemy or to stay far away. Note that amiibo trained to keep their distance may still run up to an opponent every once in a while — that may be because this value is more like a percentage of the time the FP will play keep-away.
• Whether it’s more grounded or aerial. In tournament play, you’ll generally want to teach your FP to stay on the ground as often as possible. If you’d rather mess around and train it to love the air, you can do that too!
• Whether it walks or runs. Again, in tournament play, you’d prefer to teach your FP to walk as often as possible. On the other hand, though, you can teach your FP to dash, dash-dance, or fox-trot depending on how often you initiate a dash during your training.
• Edgeguarding. You can train your amiibo to use normal aerials off-stage or prioritize ones that meteor smash. You can also control how far off-stage the FP will go, and if they should hang from the ledge and drop down and attack with an aerial.
• There are three values called Feint Master, Feint Counter, and Feint Shooter, and they’re collectively referred to by trainers as anticipation. It’s very difficult to say for sure what these do, but we do have a few observations. FPs with a high Feint Counter value often use their counter moves to intercept attacks, while Feint Master can cause FPs to dash dance and fox-trot at a distance away. We may never know the specific functions of these values.
• Jabs. More specifically, you can train them to extend their jabs into rapid jabs (if the character has one) and keep holding the rapid jab for a long time. This generally isn’t too useful, though. Certain fighters can learn to jab cancel and then combo into another move — mainly DLC ones from Fighters Pass 1 and Fighters Pass 2.
• To hold its smash attacks. If you overcharge your smash attacks during gameplay, so too will your FP. We don’t recommend this, as they often hold their smashes right in front of an opponent.
• To shield, parry, or shield grab. It can learn to do all three! Many FPs have hard-coded options out of shield that you’ll sometimes notice even if you didn’t train them. One example is Donkey Kong occasionally using down smash out of a parry (also known as a perfect shield).
• Item usage. You can train an FP to either go after or ignore items, and you can teach it to specifically go for or ignore Special Flags, Dragoon and Daybreak pieces, Smash Balls, and Hammers. You can also train it to swing handheld items or just toss them away.
• Taunt usage. If you taunt too many times, the FP may taunt every time it launches its opponent a considerable distance. You can teach FPs specific taunts to use, too! The game handles this via a ratio, and the taunt you use most often will be the one it eventually uses.
• Player targeting. In team battles or Free-for-Alls, you can train an FP to target the fighter in the lead or in last place. You can also teach them to take revenge on an opponent who recently KO’d them.
• Moves. FPs save move priorities for every attack they can use. Additionally, there are separate values for each of their special moves; one on the ground, and one in the air. This means you can teach an FP to use a special move while grounded, but not while aerial, and vice versa.
• Air dodging. You can teach an FP which direction to air dodge (neutral, forward, or backward) and how often to do it. We recommend you keep rolling and air dodging to an absolute minimum, even if it means you take a hit.
• Much of the data present in amiibo personalities (as well as data listed here) was recently unearthed and documented by MiDe, so be sure to give their full research document a look.

Each of the values listed above contributes points to one of those eight categories of personalities. Whichever of the eight categories has the most points is presumably picked, and then one of three personalities in the group is selected based on how high the highest point value is. Even with that point system, though, it can be difficult to tell how your FP will behave just from its personality label. That’s why we’ve preached that “personalities don’t matter” — it’s the values that make up the labels of personalities that matter. In short: don’t focus on the label. Use our training guides and raise your FPs to the best of your ability.

Wrap-Up

Special thanks to MiDe and Ske for conducting important and informative research into amiibo personalities! For the longest time, the true nature of personalities evaded us, but we’ve been able to figure them out thanks to talented members of the community. While we’re here, we do have a few miscellaneous points to touch on before we wrap up on this topic for today. First, a lot of new trainers like trying to give specific FPs “fitting” personalities; examples would be Pikachu with Lightning Fast or Ridley with Logical. Don’t do this! Many personalities are tough to get without Spirits. Besides, it’s usually impossible to tell what personality an FP is just by watching it play, so there’s not much of a point in trying to obtain a specific one.

Finally, if you have any further questions, you’re welcome to join our Discord community and ask anytime! If you feel like you better understand how amiibo work now (and thus are feeling more motivated to train one), then check out our character guides! We’ve got competitive and Raid Boss training methods outlined for every single fighter, so they’re well worth your time if you’re looking to learn even more. If our guides have helped you out, please consider checking our Patreon page or donation box to help us continue creating high-quality content. Thanks so much for reading! Until next time — happy training!

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