I’m not so good with money. There’s a world in which I’ve saved my paychecks and felt safe with my future, but it ain’t this world. If you sold a literal piece of shit and put a Nintendo logo on it, there’s a 50-50 chance I’d buy it. I’m a mark. I’m a sucker. And that’s why I own so many useless Amiibos.

I can’t imagine anybody ever thinking good things when they see that I own two identical Samus Amiibos. Especially if I have to explain that they’re expensive figures that can only be used in three or four games if I smush them against a controller like a little baby testing my hands.

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So thank God that Tears of the Kingdom has landed, because I finally don’t feel like the world’s biggest idiot for spending hundreds of dollars on sheer garbage. Including sheer garbage I picked up from the Nintendo store in New York after I started Tears of the Kingdom. That’s right, not only do I own these overpriced McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, I actually bought more last week. I don’t live in a big apartment.

Just like in Breath of the Wild, using Amiibos in Tears of the Kingdom is so satisfying. If you use Zelda-themed Amiibos, you usually get some useless weapons or armor. Occasionally you get something incredible like specialized equipment or the perfect horse: Epona. Not a Epona. THE Epona. You also get a lot of food, which is useful for cooking and then selling and then realizing you don’t have any food when a three-headed dragon ruins Link.

To be clear, using Amiibos isn’t even vaguely important to Tears of the Kingdom. The equipment you do get is awesome and looks awesome. But much of it can be found elsewhere and any usefulness from the equipment can usually be surpassed by eating the right meal. Tears of the Kingdom wants you to beat the game in any way your little bright imagination can conceive. Whether you use trash I should’ve sold years ago or not, you’ll be fine.

But lord, I love finally feeling like these terrible figurines have a purpose. ‘Why do you keep them if you hate them so much?’. I don’t know. I keep around a lot of things I hate. I still visit my parents a couple times a year, and they’ve done far more damage than a Smash Bros.-themed Mario toy. And, there are some, like the massive Detective Pikachu, which actually don’t look completely embarrassing. A little embarrassing, sure. But completely? No. Only mostly.

I almost didn’t bust out the gang for Tears of the Kingdom. I was lost in the beauty of a fairytale come to life. I felt the wind through my fingers as I gently walked through Hyrule, marveling at the beauty of the day and the terror of the night. Sometimes I’d get hit by lightning a bunch of times and die. There felt like no reason to gather all the mistakes I bought during one breakup or another.

Still, I’m glad I did. I’m glad Tears of the Kingdom makes the Amiibos a fun option rather than a useless option. Or a pay-to-win shortcut for beating an otherwise impossible game. It’s just a way to snag fun costumes and get a few cool items to help with healing. While I didn’t necessarily need the special fire-resistant Goron Divine Beast mask, it’s nice that I can get it a slightly easier way than I would otherwise.

And it’s nice that I can feel like I’ve actually kept these stupid little dolls around for a reason. Perhaps I’ll learn the wrong lesson from that. After years of hoarding Amiibos, Tears of the Kingdom is giving my brain dopamine hit after dopamine hit. Every day when I play, I sit for fifteen minutes going from toy to toy to toy, dropping treasure chests and mushrooms and fish. It’s like opening a gift every day. Link probably feels like the luckiest man alive, and not just because he now has the arm of a hot anthropomorphic dog. I’d say spoiler alert, but that’s literally like the first 30 minutes of the game. And if you read this far and still haven’t played it, that’s on you.

It’s probably not good that I’m deriving so much enjoyment out of using Amiibos in Tears of the Kingdom. I shouldn’t have kept these. They’ve been taking up space on a desk and in a plastic bin for years. I resent them. They’re a curse I can’t throw away or donate. I’m pretty sure if I did try to throw them away, they’d come back and you’d find my dead body covered in little stab wounds.

But God, is it fun to make those treasure chests fall from the sky.

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