I got a New Nintendo 3DS recently and picked up Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I’ve found lots of articles stating that the game has new Amiibo support, but few that tell you what to actually do.

  1. Find Wisp’s lamp. If you just created a brand new town you may have to wait a day. At some point Wisp will whisper to you. Walk around until you find a lamp and pick it up.
  2. Put the lamp somewhere (I suggest your house) and talk to it. Wisp will tell you to place your Amiibo on your New 3DS (or on the Amiibo reader if you have an older 3DS). Wisp will turn into that character.
  3. Go to the campground for your town. It’s a separate screen and there should be a road sign pointing to it on your map. You should see an RV on it belonging to the Amiibo you chose. Go inside. Now you can talk to the character there. After he or she welcomes you, talk to him/her again for an option to buy stuff with MEOW tickets.
  4. You can only load in one Amiibo per day (but you can reuse the same figure again).

The thing that tripped me up was step 3. I don’t think Wisp tells you to go to the camp site to find the Amiibo.

On Amiibo in general, I think Nintendo did an amazing job with the figures themselves. They’re all totally on-model for every character I’ve seen and the paint jobs are very well done. In-game, though, I’ve yet to find a great use for them. Lego Dimensions does a superb job with this where you play as the mini figure select and often have to move the character around the little pad during the game to solve puzzles. Amiibo games just let you get like new costumes or whatever. That doesn’t mean, even knowing that, that I haven’t bought a bunch of them.

See also: Griffin’s amiibo corner