While over 5 million units of Amiibo have been sold, some critics have said that they lack functionality. Nintendo is looking to change that. During the Nintendo Investor meeting, President Iwata stated that Nintendo wanted to improve amiibo by allowing trials of games featuring that amiibo, which functionality will be limited to “highlighted scenes” and will have a time limit.

We are also planning a free-download app for Wii U in which you can enjoy NES and Super NES games with your amiibo in the first half of this year.

With this app, once you tap your amiibo on the NFC area of the GamePad, you will be able to play highlighted scenes of one certain title for NES or Super NES. You cannot play the entire game due to a time limit, but another tap of the amiibo will enable you to try another highlighted scene in the game. We hope that when you tap your amiibo, the quickly changing game scenes will pleasantly surprise you and make you feel as though you have just exchanged a game cartridge.

Even though only Wii U has been compatible with amiibo so far, we are making steady progress on compatibility with the Nintendo 3DS platform. New Nintendo 3DS is equipped with NFC as a standard feature. For existing Nintendo 3DS systems, we will release an external NFC reader/writer in summer this year. On the software side, “Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS” started to support amiibo after a software update in February.

We’ll keep you updated. For more Amiibo news, feel free to peruse our Amiibo tag.