Got the Metroid Dread amiibo

Better late than never, I guess. The figurines are quite nice, but not perfect. The E.M.M.I. has this pretty amazing pedestal to it, where it looks like a broken off part from an E.M.M.I. Zone. The attention to detail is quite excellent with both of these with all the robotic parts.

The new Fusion Suit is awesome and probably my favorite design for Samus in the series, where it's nice to have a small figurine for this. However, I'm not a big fan of the crouched pose. I guess they wanted to do something different from the previous amiibo, but it makes this one look too small and you also get one of these plastic supports on her right foot.

With the E.M.M.I. you have all the robotic parts in great detail and the red eyeball is also reflective, so it really looks like it might be glowing with the right lighting. But I don't like that it doesn't have the shielding on the head, where this looks more like a prototype design. The white E.M.M.I. still appears in the game like that, of course, but only for a brief moment, right before you blast it to smithereenes. But to me this just doesn't look complete and I'm not sure why they didn't went with the full design, which looks a lot more "organic" with these petal shields.

Here is a comparison to the previous Metroid amiibo that were released four years ago together with Samus Returns for the Nintendo 3DS:

They are smaller in scale, but naturally this comes with their postures. Together with the amiibo from the Super Smash Bros. series, there are now eight Metroid amiibo in total, which is pretty nice. Well, half of the are just Samus in different suits, but this comes with the territory and also isn't much different for Zelda, where almost half of the collection is made out of different Links and it's a miracle that we got Zelda herself for Skyward Sword HD. I won't be surprised if Metroid Prime 4 also gets two amiibo like that, one for Samus again and one for Sylux.

As for their functionality, I will take the additional Energy and Missile+ Tank for my upcoming Hard Mode run. Those will be useful for sure, but of course this isn't anything exciting or any incentive to actually own these figures. But that's okay. They certainly have listened to the negative feedback that came with Samus Returns, where the new amiibo for the game unlocked a Metroid radar and the Fusion Mode difficulty, while these things should have been available to everyone.

In general it's not easy how to deal with the amiibo. Of course Nintendo wants some ingame reward, so that fans have an additional incentive to buy these figurines and so that it's also fun to actually use them. But fans are buying them anyway, no matter what they do, and this shouldn't take away from players who either can't get their hands on these figures or don't want to.

So, this is a balancing act. I can only keep saying how Breath of the Wild did it best with Wolf Link and some ingame cosmetics based on past Zelda games, which were cool, but didn't really belong into the game world anyway. Metroid Dread is entirely on the "don't need that" side, but that's better than locking away a third difficulty mode with them.