Nintendo, Amiibos, Scalpers & this collector's rage!

[gf78]

Long, long ago (ok, a few years ago) when Amiibos began hitting store shelves, my happiness quickly gave way to just giving up as various figures were made exclusive to certain stores. Bowser Jr. Was exclusive to Toys 'R Us. Meta Knight exclusive to Best Buy. Ness to GameStop, Dr. Mario to Target, etc.

To make matters worse, collectors & fans found it infinitely more difficult to obtain them as f*cking scalpers bought them all up to charge ridiculous prices for them. What did Nintendo do?  The Amiibos came, the Amiibos went and didnt see much in the way of restocks.

Fast forward to December 2018 and with the impending release of Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Nintendo starts restocking them. Japan gets theirs in two waves. Easy, right?  America?  Not so much. No official word from Nintendo. Walmart stocks none. Target has Mario & Pikachu. Best Buy has Pac-Man, Ganondorf and a few others. GameStop has Samus and Link. A few weeks later, Lucario, Zelda, Sheik and Toon Link show up at GameStop and are gone just as quickly. Where is the organization?  Where are the other Smash series figures?  Are they going to be released?  For that matter, why is there no restocks on current Switch game-based Amiibos like Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey? 

There are certain Amiibos that I want. Particularly the Zelda, Metroid and Bayonetta ones. But I REFUSE to pay $30 or more each to some scalper c*nt online trying to rip people off! 

Why doesnt Nintendo sell these direct from their store?  Why dont they make more when there is OBVIOUSLY demand for them?  My only other option is to import them from Japan. But after you factor in the shipping cost, you are basically paying the overinflated scalper rate AND waiting weeks to arrive, hoping its transatlantic journey didnt result in your shit getting smashed between there & here.

It's more infuriating than the cheapest boss in the hardest games you've played where you rage quit while chucking your controller across the room!   

[turf]

I feel ya.

I was right there for the first few waves of amiibo. I’m glad I broke that habit. I have too many as it is.

There are a few that I want and missed out on. Number 1 on that list is the Metroid.

I still pick up the random figure here and there. I just bought Ridley when it came out, but I’m not near trying to find them all.

[gf78]

I feel ya.

I was right there for the first few waves of amiibo. I’m glad I broke that habit. I have too many as it is.

There are a few that I want and missed out on. Number 1 on that list is the Metroid.

I still pick up the random figure here and there. I just bought Ridley when it came out, but I’m not near trying to find them all.

Yeah, I bought the first two waves. That's when the exclusive crap started. I sold mine on Ebay for just over what I had in them. Just enough to cover the fees so I broke even.

I picked up Ridley and I'm going to get Young Link whenever he is released.   As for older Amiibos, I want the Samus & Metroid 2 pack, the various Zelda Amiibos and both Bayonetta ones. I would love to have all of them. But Nintendo has made it impossible.

For me, they are physical manifestations of my favorite video game characters. As a collector, for me it goes hand-in-hand with wanting physical games. I have I believe 19 right now. Several of those like Wolf Link, Mario and the Animal Crossing ones came with games.

[bikingjahuty]

The Smash Amiibo, particularly the first three waves were hell to get. I remember two situations specifically that brought my piss to a boil during that time. Rosalina was a Target exclusive when it launched in the US, and I waited in front of a local Target for 2-hours before the store opened. It didn't help that it had snowed the day before and it was about 15 degrees outside. I was the first in line and by the it was half an hour until the store opened there was a line of about 10 people behind me. At 7:55am, 5-minutes before the doors opened, some middle aged guy starts hovering around the entrance and everyone is looking a this guy suspiciously. I know almost immediately what he was going to do as soon as the doors open, and guess what? 8am, this guy sprints through the doors and me and everyone else is trying to beat him to the electronics area, but he arrives at the counter first and says he wants to by every single new Amiibo they got in. Before the crowd can turn on this guy and give him an early grave, the manager walks up and puts this guy in his place and makes him go to the back of the line since she knew everyone had been waiting. Luckily they also enforced a two amiibo per customer policy as well so even if there were some left for him he only got to scalp two. The other story involved me having a bitch of a time getting Pit and me almost throwing down with a Gamestop employee who refused to put the last Pit in the state on hold for me because "the guy before you put on hold and never picked it up so I won't do it for you!" I told the employee that I'm not that other guy and even promised to be there in half an hour or he could sell it, but he refused. Given the Gamestop was clear across town I didn't want to drive over there and it be gone, which I'm assuming it probably was. I forgot how I even got Pit, I think Amazon had them in stock for like 5-minutes and I was lucky enough to get one, but I remember being super pissed after that.

[droaa]

I would probably have a few more in hand but for the life of me I cant find the ones I had before. I put them away in storage in a bag somewhere but no luck finding them

[ignition365]

I should've quit, but I never did.  Have a china cabinet full of amiibos.

[bikingjahuty]

I should've quit, but I never did.  Have a china cabinet full of amiibos.

The Amiibo situation in my gameroom reminds me of that Star Trek episode, The Trouble with Tribbles; they are literally everywhere in the room and all over the place. I really need to find a better place to put them.

[emporerdragon]

For me, since I actually opened them up and used them, found the Japanese imports a godsend, since their prices weren't as effected by scalping fees and didn't have to deal with exclusives. It also helped that I was only focused on the Smash Bros stuff, and eventually managed to acquire almost the entire Smash 4 roster (still need Shiek and Bowser Jr,).

Exclusives were easily the worst part of any of the Toys to Life collecting. I live in a small town in South Dakota, so an exclusive either means that my local store gets 2 for the entire release or I would have to drive 2 hours to get to a place that actually carries them. Though I found the worst exclusive not to be an amiibo, but a Skylander: When Imaginators released, they made one of the most popular characters of the initial wave (The Chompy Mage) an Amazon exclusive, and not a variant like they had done with the past 5 games, but the regular base version. Where the problem was though, was that you could not get him individually. Instead, he could only be obtained as part of a bundle with 4 other figures for $100. This, plus other scarcity issues, meant that I never got a full Imaginators set, as I refuse to pay $50+ for a figure with a $14.99 MSRP.

[gf78]

Exclusives were easily the worst part of any of the Toys to Life collecting. I live in a small town in South Dakota, so an exclusive either means that my local store gets 2 for the entire release or I would have to drive 2 hours to get to a place that actually carries them.

THIS!  The only stores less than sixty miles from me that carried them is a few Walmarts and two GameStops. The only stores within 15 miles of me are a single Walmart and single GameStop. I'm lucky that I'm friends with the local kn GameStop manager and assistant manager. If they have something I want, they'll throw it in the drawer for me. Even black Friday a couple years ago. Dont even remember what it was, but I wanted it and didnt have to worry about the smelly, virgin, redneck mouth-breathers beating me to it! 

[wartoy]

I felt the same I got all of the first round but gave up trying to complete the second wave of Amiiibos.

[mark1982]

I kinda gave up at retail, only if I'm browsing and I manage to see one that I like.

I get the ones I want from Play-Asia, they have a great selection of Japan Imports for Amiibos. They can be pricey though, but during sales you can get them for cheap. Just ordered another batch actually.

[soera]

For me, since I actually opened them up and used them, found the Japanese imports a godsend, since their prices weren't as effected by scalping fees and didn't have to deal with exclusives. It also helped that I was only focused on the Smash Bros stuff, and eventually managed to acquire almost the entire Smash 4 roster (still need Shiek and Bowser Jr,).

Exclusives were easily the worst part of any of the Toys to Life collecting. I live in a small town in South Dakota, so an exclusive either means that my local store gets 2 for the entire release or I would have to drive 2 hours to get to a place that actually carries them. Though I found the worst exclusive not to be an amiibo, but a Skylander: When Imaginators released, they made one of the most popular characters of the initial wave (The Chompy Mage) an Amazon exclusive, and not a variant like they had done with the past 5 games, but the regular base version. Where the problem was though, was that you could not get him individually. Instead, he could only be obtained as part of a bundle with 4 other figures for $100. This, plus other scarcity issues, meant that I never got a full Imaginators set, as I refuse to pay $50+ for a figure with a $14.99 MSRP.

I did the Imaginators set myself. Chompy mage was/is such a pain to acquire. I finally (after 2 years) broke down and ordered one from Germany and its due to be here tomorrow.

As far as Amiibos go, I jumped on the hype train before most people. I was one of the few that got all the pre-orders in the beginning ... but Lucina and Robin were the ones that broke my back. And then I realized I didnt even care about the FE characters so I unloaded all the ones I didnt have much interest in (Rosalina, Marth, Little Mac, Ike, Lucario, Sheik). Now, lol, you can find both of them easily. Oh well. The one thing I seemed to have noticed, however, is that most characters have been remade ... except Shulk.

[kashell]

I just want the Mega Man one so I can put it with my Mega Man stuff.

[aliensstudios]

I got VERY lucky with some of the early waves of amiibo. At the time, I was only picking up characters who I liked so out of wave 1, I preordered Mario, DK and Marth from Amazon. They showed up the day the game came out and that was that. I remember reading about how rare Villager and Wii Fit were so I went to Target the next day and they still had a Villager and I grabbed him. Over the Christmas months I would get Fox, Kirby, Samus and Yoshi. I secured preorders for several more which would become uncommon in the following months like Captain Falcon, King Dedede, Shulk, Little Mac and Pit too. Some of the more uncommon ones I came across in stores shortly after release like Ike, Robin, Mega Man and Wario. Honestly, the hardest one to get was Ness for me. I couldn't get a preorder because of the server crash so I had to resort to importing one from a guy who I had bought some games from for $25. In hindsight, I wish I hadn't spent almost double the msrp on an amiibo who years later would flood Toys R Us bargain bins, but I got the Ness like a month before he came out in North America.

I pretty much picked the rest of the set up piecemeal as they became available, spending a good chunk of my Amex rewards on ones I was missing in 2016. Now, I've got the full set so I really only worry about preordering the new coming fighters. I've found that since 2015 or so, as long as I kept up on preorders, I was able to get all of them for msrp. In general, the whole thing was a pain in the arse.

[hoshichiri]

Why doesnt Nintendo sell these direct from their store?  Why dont they make more when there is OBVIOUSLY demand for them?  My only other option is to import them from Japan. But after you factor in the shipping cost, you are basically paying the overinflated scalper rate AND waiting weeks to arrive, hoping its transatlantic journey didnt result in your shit getting smashed between there & here.

Let me teach you a thing I learned last year, that may be of use here: Go to Amazon.co.jp -towards the top, under the search bar, is a lil' wire frame globe labeled JP. Hover over it. Choose the setting marked EN. You have now set Amazon Japan to display in English. You can search in English, it will auto-translate to katana (fine for most of our needs). Make yourself an account, and have at it- becuase Amazon is Amazon, you'll get far more reasonable shipping than many other sources. Plus, without the import markup from local sellers, you can often get some great deals. I've picked up a $60 CIB Klonoa: Moonlight Museum in excellent condition and a $40 Dreamcast Twin Stick... to be fair, that was $75 with shipping becuase it's heavy/bulky.


There is one catch- very few sellers outside of Amazon Japan proper will ship internationally, and the auto-translation doesn't apply to third party descriptions. By my experience, most sellers are very meticulous about their descriptions, so running the text through google should give you a decent idea of what you're getting into.