As someone who has always been against Amiibo and not ever interested in getting them but has the TPHD edition on pre-order that has the amiibo, this is a shitty thing to do.
Yes, I actually have it on pre-order but only because the standard edition wasn't at the time and I thought. "Well, I think I might as well just plunge on this... maybe the amiibo will actually add something to the game." Lo and behold (if the description is accurate), it is adding something to the game.
However, it's still a shitty practice. I called this kind of stuff was going to happen back when Nintendo announced these things in 2014 (as I'm sure others did as well to be honest) -- if they were successful. And with the Smash amiibo being the first wave of them, it was a no brainer these were going to be successful. What happens when something is successful? More needs to be done with it and so that means implementing them into more games, whether that's to the detriment of the overall product (such as in this case where now the product isn't desirable to a certain subset of the community due to the amiibo "locking" content) or for a net positive (Mario Kart 8's amiibo implementation or Super Mario Maker's implementation).
And then there's the fact that the many people who like and buy the amiibo have, all along, been voicing "We want the amiibos to do more than just give us skins or help us in games!" And... that's what leads us to situations like this. Like it or not the amount of people who buy amiibo and everything aren't the vocal minority.
Additionally, the people who want amiibos to do more in games can't adequately describe what it is they want it to do -- they just want it to do something meaningful and that meaningful thing (in my mind back in 2014) was always going to be new content like a dungeon (or small dungeon) in TPHD. It wasn't going to be something like, oh I don't know, gives you a new ability or new moves or something that directly impacts the player experience throughout the entire game that isn't just refilling hearts or arrows every time you tap the amiibo to your GamePad. No, it was always going to be straight up content in similar fashion to other Toys to Life games.
And we're seeing it in not just TPHD but Amiibo Festival is another example of bad implementation of amiibos. As well as Mario Party 10. The bad implementation of them far outweigh the positives yet the reason they're selling isn't because of the content they come with, it's their rarity and collectability (yes this isn't a word I know LOL). But that can't be separated in sales data, all Nintendo can read is that amiibo are selling like hotcakes let's do more with them and include them in more of our games! Let's make content for the amiibo to sell them! (When all people do is buy them to have them in their collection).
Basically, these problems won't go away unless the amiibo bubble finally bursts. It sucks they're using amiibo to justify creating new content for a remaster that otherwise wouldn't have gotten said content if amiibo didn't exist -- but it is what it is and the sales data will continue to be good for Nintendo for awhile so expect more and more of their games to have some kind of amiibo functionality for the foreseeable future.
