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The in-game feature known as Pokémon-Amie makes a return in Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, following its debut in XY. Amie takes advantage of the 3DS's touch screen and 3D capabilities to make it possible to interact with your Pokémon in caring ways, such as petting, feeding, and playing games. It's bubbly, rainbow-filled, and timeless.
For some time, I wanted to write a user guide on the mechanics of Amie. In truth, it turned out a wide range of other guides on Amie were already available out there, some very technical, so I might as well sit back and offer more of an opinion column on its various features instead. This is all about how you, my fellow reader, might make the most out of Amie and become a cuddly Pokémon master.
As an overview, Amie makes use of three interrelated mechanics: affection, fullness, and enjoyment, with the first being the one that matters most.
A Pokémon with high affection receives a variety of benefits during in-game battles, including increased evasion and critical hit ratio, as well as a chance to dispel status conditions and survive hits that otherwise would've resulted in a knockout. Battles will also display extra messages for certain scenarios, such as the Pokémon in play reaching red health (Fluffy is in a bit of a pinch. It looks like it might cry...) and healing a Pokémon with a recovery item (Fluffy is thrilled to bits!).
Most importantly, Pokémon with high affection gain slightly greater Exp. Points in battle. For those who don't possess unlawful amounts of Rare Candy, this made partaking in minigames, in fact, a worthwhile option for training your Pokémon to level 100 more quickly. This was up until the release of ORAS, which introduced Super-Secret Bases and made Blissey-bashing huts a thing. As a result, aside from the purpose of turning Eevee into a pink, ribboned fiend, Amie has become another purely aesthetic gimmick, like what most players probably would've assumed it was from the outset.
Anyway, let's say you wanted to raise something in Amie. You'd start by playing some games with it if it were a "fresh" 'mon. The purpose of the minigames is to raise enjoyment (and earn Poké Puffs), as petting a Pokémon increases its affection only when its enjoyment is higher than zero. Petting also lowers enjoyment, essentially pushing you into a cycle of playing games, then exiting to pet your Pokémon. Keep petting until it won't emit any more pink hearts.
Feeding your Pokémon with Poké Puffs also raises affection, so give it all the processed sugar it can handle. Eventually, it will become full and refuse to accept more food. Are you trying to kill it?? Give it some exercise, because playing games quickly lowers fullness. Repeat from step one.
If you manage your time, it's possible to reach maximum affection in an hour or less, hinted with five pink hearts on the Switch screen. Finally, whereas both fullness and enjoyment will decrease over time, affection is permanent, so your loving efforts will have lasting results.
Amie gives you a choice of three minigames, which all contain four modes of difficulty (Easy, Normal, Hard, and Unlimited). Easy mode is always available by default, and doing well by earning a rating of at least three stars in one mode will unlock the next. Advanced difficulty modes earn Poké Puffs of better quality, which raise affection by a higher amount; this should entice you to make an effort at achieving high scores.
Head It is a top-tier game. It's action-filled and, uh, adorable in its premise. Balls of technicolor yarn bombard your Pokémon from above, and the entire goal is to bounce them back up by tapping on your Pokémon with precise timing to increase your score. The points you earn per hit double when you enter "FEVER" mode by maintaining a certain number of hits and continuing without missing and breaking the chain. Most of the time, the yarn falls at a steady pace, but advanced modes introduce trick types of yarn, such as the swift, purple yarn and the slow, wavering yarn. Watch out for these, as they may cost you the game in Unlimited mode.
I've found that the game can be genuinely fun and even serve as stress relief. Every once in a while, I used to enter Amie with my trusty Binky the Carbink to see if I could top my previous high score, which is currently 1700-something (because of the mechanics of the game, the maximum is actually 1999).
If you're an ace at jigsaw puzzles, this game is for you. An image of three of the Pokémon in your party scrambles itself, and it's your job to sort the pieces back in order before time runs out. To make things trickier, the image inside is constantly in motion and changes angles periodically. Like real-life jigsaw puzzles, it helps to complete the corners and borders first before the middle, and the borders always remain the same even as the picture in the middle shifts. I don't have much else to say, except that this game is decently challenging and by far the most time-consuming one compared with the other two. In Unlimited mode, it takes about half an hour to reach a high score of around 35,000.
This game has up to three of your Pokémon stand in front of a deciduous tree. It sounds innocuous enough, until, uh oh, they start demanding to be fed. Thought bubbles appear over each one's head with a Berry icon inside, requiring you to drag the matching icon from the tree to the bubble before time runs out, the bubble disappears, and you miss. In Unlimited mode, this counts as one "strike." This goes on until the game speeds up and you inevitably lose.
My reason for disliking this is skill isn't much of a deciding factor; the game goes by too quickly to be actually enjoyable, and you'll lose at around the same time as the next person no matter what kind of tactics you try (CONCENTRATE ON THE TREE. WAIT, STARE AT THE WHOLE SCREEN). Straightforward as it is, it's just stressful. Thanks, but I'll be investing my hard-earned free time elsewhere.
Game Freak gives us everything we might expect in a petting feature in Amie, given the neat variety of reactions. Your Pokémon won't like it if you touch it in certain places (which fails to increase affection), poke it repeatedly, or waste Poké Puffs while it's hungry by tossing them on the floor. Each Pokémon also has a place where it particularly likes to be petted, which has the bonus of raising affection more and lowering enjoyment less. If you contact the screen with your stylus and hold it there for a few seconds, certain Pokémon will even give you a high five.
Let's not forget that some Pokémon are hazardous companions, because petting them in the wrong locations will horribly maim you. Pikachu's cheeks are famed for electrocution, Bergmite's upper body and Articuno's head crest evoke frostbite, and be wary of anything with spikes or blades. The list goes on, and getting hurt doesn't allow your Pokémon to gain affection, of course. Some of the effects are only aesthetic and don't cause pain, though, such as petting Ghosts, which makes a hollow sound and suggests that they're just made of air, and petting anything that's a blob, which makes squishy noises. Good luck with Slugma.
Using Amie earns you random furniture for the main interface if the game decides you've played with your Pokémon enough. The conditions might seem somewhat obscure, but this happens reliably by earning a five-star rating in a minigame or raising your Pokémon's affection by one heart icon. Placing decorations is just for show and doesn't seem to raise affection, sadly.
There are two categories of decorations: wallpapers, which serve as backgrounds, and interior items, stuff that you can move around within the Pokémon-Amie space. Interior items are further divided into cushions and objects. Cushions are smaller items that are easier to earn, and most are basically pillows shaped like feathers, leaves, wrapped candy, or other, squishy items. By contrast, objects are larger, unique items with creative themes and designs, ranging from practical furniture like tables and beds to more unusual, abstract pieces, such as crystal balls, snowmen, rocks, flowers and cacti, and bonfires. I'm not sure who at Game Freak thought bonfires in a living room were a good idea, but I'll be keeping those away from my wooden furniture set. Many of the more impressive objects are intended to represent a Pokémon type (for example, the Light Bulb Object resembles a Pikachu and neatly symbolizes the Electric-type).
My preferred setup in the Decorate mode includes the following:
The maximum number of interior items you can place is thirty. I really like this aspect of Amie, pointless as it may be, but I wish it offered more kinds of real furniture and less useless cushions.
Playing minigames is the leading method of earning Poké Puffs, which are mini desserts that resemble cupcakes. This is where Game Freak fell short, in my opinion. I don't know what they were thinking when they decided to make Poké Puffs the only food in Amie, but my biggest complaint about them is it means I can't feed my Pokémon anything else by default. Also, there should be serious health implications from a diet of nothing but sugary sweets. My other complaint is Poké Puffs are basically a non-answer to the question of food in the Pokémon world. What do people there do for meat? Do Berries constitute the only agriculture whatsoever? Some fans have been wondering about the answers to these questions for years, and these dastardly desserts have allowed Game Freak to dodge the explanation yet again.
My disappointment in the roster of food products aside, the feeding mechanic itself is pretty rad. Each Pokémon has vastly different eating habits, varying in speed and number of chomps, and those with arms will proceed to reach out and hold the Poké Puff while taking bites.
As you idle in Amie's menu screen, Pokémon belonging to registered friends, acquaintances, and passersby will enter the interface and decide whether to sit down and stay or move on. If three Pokémon elect to hang out, they'll "talk" amongst themselves and eventually produce a fancy gift box before departing. The gift quality is increased when you set down a Poké Puff from your Play inventory by accessing the Decorate mode, presumably enticing guests to be generous. Possible gifts range from decorations to exclusive Poké Puffs. Although it's cute to see other people's Pokémon bouncing around alongside yours, this feature is more of a novelty than anything, as there's no way to guarantee what sort of Pokémon will visit and which gift you'll receive.
We haven't covered the bottom-left option in Amie, which happens to be just about the least enjoyable gimmick Amie has to offer. This feature has you making facial expressions that your Pokémon indicates for the 3DS camera to pick up. Unfortunately, this is not only mortifying, but also ineffective; you have to really exaggerate those expressions for the camera to see what you're doing, and it rarely works. Your Pokémon will show its disappointment, leaving your strained facial muscles with no compensation. I've never used it much, and there are definitely better ways to increase affection.
There it is: the joys and excitements Pokémon-Amie has to offer. As a bonus, should you have a Pokémon with maximum affection in your party, you can even show it to Bonnie inside the Prism Tower in XY to rightfully earn it a lovely pink ribbon. Enjoy, and have fun!
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