People need to vote with their wallets and not support these practices. I'm a pretty big Nintendo fan, but even I can't defend everything they do. I'm not down with this amiibo stuff.

The only acceptable way I can see amiibo being used is if they gave you extra lives in a game, extra ammo, more Pikmin, stuff like that. But to lock an entire mode behind an amiibo purchase is not cool, imo.

Also, do we know for sure that this mode is locked on the cartridge and not the amiibo itself?

Gotta politely disagree. I really don't think we should be so forgiving or accepting as you put it. If other games and companies like Fallout 4 and Bethesda give new difficulty modes (survival) as free DLC (correct me if wrong, i believe it was free/don't remember paying for it), there is no reason to accept Nintendo doing this. I think boycotts are silly but for anybody who cares about healthy practices in gaming should really think twice about buying the amiibo. If Nintendo can't find a way to make amiibos more appealing in less toxic ways, that's on them.

I understand every company has some shady practices, there are no saints here, but I feel this specific case is fairly straight forward.

The Amiibo can only hold a small amount of data, I would be very surprised if one could have a single megabyte of storage.
So yeah 100% sure it is either on the card or needs to be downloaded seperately.

Nintendo needs to try and walk a fine line, where you want the Amiibo to do stuff, but it cannot be too cool.
Surely that takes a lot of effort to ensure that all consumers are satisfied.
Clearly they have slipped off that line this time (and perhaps with Wolf Link).

I will be buying the game, but I don't want plastic statues taking up space, so I will not be getting the Amiibo.
Honestly I couldn't care less about the added mode, but that is me.
Even if the mode was in the game for free I quite likely would not play it, that is just not who I am.

That being said it is perfectly reasonable that people feel that they are being taken advantage of, 'cus they are.
Being taken advantage of is pretty much the the natural state of being for a consumer in this industry.

Personally if I cared about Amiibo, I would probably find even the giving of items to be a game design travesty.

Jesus. Can you permanently be banned from writing threads? There's a problem with practically every single one of them. In this case it's

" Now the shocking, absurd, and greedy cash grab that makes even Capcom, EA, and Activision look like non profit organizations! In order to play the hardest game mode (Fusion Mode) you must buy an amiibo to unlock it! What?! "

The hyperbole. This isn't something that's really worse than Capcom or Ea or Activision or Ubisoft's buisness practices. Just writing it in a hyperbolic shocking way doesn't make it worse than those companies. MULTIPLE companies have done this. And Nintendo already did it with Zelda's paid DLC, so what's the point of pretending like this is something new?

Watch Dogs 2 had hard mode dlc, Metro Last Light had hard mode dlc, even the fucking Last of Us had it in it's original PS3 version.

Writing this off as exclusively bad cause Nintendo or cause some "toys"(lmao) is dumb.

Is the package as offered worth $39.99. That's all we really need to worry about.

This pretty much wraps this up right...
If only life were that simple.

We, as consumers should always be asking and aiming for better treatment, even if that means the bankruptcy of the companies.
But, well, it is not hard to see that there is, maybe, a slight bit extra going on here.

Unfortunately the individual consumer has little power here as long as people keep buying Amiibos as shelf candy.

The reality is though, that I will have moved on to Mario Odyssey by the time I would care about an extra difficulty mode. Maybe I'd feel differently if I were a huge Metroid fan, but if I were a huge Metroid fan, I would probably get the Amiibo.

This thread reminds me of watching this.
If the OP thinks that Metroid is a new boundary, I kinda want to see his response to this game.
I guess in a way it is the best horror game ever made... or something.

Never been a fan of the Amiibo model.
Not only are many of the things not available to be purchased online, and the amiibos tend to be rare (making a lot of content locked forever), but they keep pushing the amount of things that is locked behind the Amiibo.

Just buy the cards, they are just 1 dollar.