Scrappy Mechanic / Miitopia

• Fast-forwarding is done by holding B (and the ZL/ZR buttons in the Switch version) or holding on the touchscreen, while the button to advance text is A. Just pressing and holding a button doesn't work. There's also no way to increase the speed of the text without affecting the animations, for those who read fast, but don't want to ruin the suspense of the game's presentation.
• Buying equipment and weapons for Miis can be very frustrating for different reasons from beginning to end.
  • To start, Miis will only buy new equipment if they want to spend Gold in the first place, and the chances of a Mii wanting to spend Gold are randomized each time the party arrives at an Inn after completing a stage. There's also the matter of even getting the item in the first place, as there is a chance that a Mii might buy an HP Banana or MP Candy instead (although they do give the Gold difference back to you). This means that getting equipment and armor is a game of chance on top of another game of chance that can lead to one wasting more time than necessary to just get the appropriate armor for Miis as they adventure on. And for unlucky players, they may end up getting stuck with low-end equipment near the end of the main game, since they rarely ask for new equipment and buy bananas/candies whenever they get the chance to.
  • Miis will only ever ask for the lowest tier equipment they don't yet own. This can cause you to spend thousands of Gold on equipment you will never use if you're already at higher-level content. This can be slightly mitigated by the catalogue, but good luck with raising, say, a new class after you beat the game. Miis that change their jobs often lag behind the other party members because they refuse to ask for better equipment, and can become outright unusuable in higher-level content just because of that difference. This hurts especially badly because they're usually the ones that desperately need the experience to begin with.
  • To top it all off, equipment and weapons are level-locked, meaning that getting new, stronger equipment and weapons turns into Forced Level-Grinding if you wish to increase your stats, and this becomes much more prevalent during the post-game. Even if you only need one Mii to be at the high levels the game demands to have the best equipment purchasable, the grind to get to those levels is greater and more time-consuming than the Gold needed to get them.
• Some people consider the whole concept of being able to only control the Player Character and the recruits being handled entirely by the AI to be this, which drive them away from playing/enjoying the game. It can be especially infuriating in the postgame, when the player character is no longer required to be in the party. If you don't use the player character, you lose your ability to choose actions in battle because the game doesn't let you grant control to another Mii in their place. All you can do in a player character-less party is use sprinkles and place Miis in the Safe Spot. And while the AI isn't completely awful, it's not great, which is what makes being unable to control them an issue. As examples, Warriors favor Double Slash (hits two enemies) over Spin Slash (targets all enemies) even when there are more than two enemies. Cats spam Steal Grub, even against bosses. Tanks spam Human Cannonball without regard for fights that may break out, ditto with Chefs spamming Spicy Dish and Spicy Dinner. Flowers will use Flower Power even on magic fighters with weak offense, preventing them from using their magic. The Switch version did tone down many of those things, thankfully, but the AI still can't be called great.
• The "sickness" mechanic. Starting at a certain point in the game, a random party member can get sick and thus becomes unable to be taken out for adventures. This also locks him/her out of any relationship boosts (including not being able to decrease the "quarrel" meter if he/she happened to have one!). How long a party member suffers from sickness, if you're not relying on certain bypasses, depends on their level and total EXP gained during their absence (which naturally becomes higher the higher their level is - annoying in itself, because it prevents you from repeating an early stage with enemies that can be quickly curbstomped to wait out the sickness), unless a healthy ally is willing to check on him/her, potentially restoring him/her back in shape, but this one happens at random. This means that it can result in multiple people getting sick and restricting your character pool if the sicknesses last a long time (we hope you've kept your entire party well-balanced...). In the post-game, the player character can get sick too, which, combined with the Scrappy Mechanic mentioned above, results in loss of immersion as you can do nothing but handle the Sprinkles and the Safe Spot during battles. Fortunately, it seems as if getting sick is less common in the post game than it is in the final segment.
• When transferring Miis to either the inn or the villa, you can only transfer them one at a time or by switching two Miis' places. It can be pretty cumbersome if you want to switch multiple Miis between the two locations. The fact that the song that plays in the background is too short to cover replacing more than about three Miis without looping adds to the frustration.
• There's also no way to sort Miis in the Miitopia save data list like in the 3DS and Switch menus to your own liking, instead only being able to sort alphabetically or by whatever role is assigned to them at the moment, which is a burden for those who like to categorize their large cast. Similarly, in the postgame, there's no way to sort your current party members at the inn when it comes to party selection and feeding outside of sending them to the villa and back again.
• Some levels have a fixed event where one or more Miis fall into a hole in the ground, and are out of the party until you reach the next Inn. Obviously frustrating if the game just so happens to choose your most valuable Miis, but even worse if the next enemy encounters are multiple Fiends. However there is at least a way around it. Right after the scene of the Mii falling into a hole, you can choose to exit the level, and then on the map screen, return to the Inn. The Mii will be back, you can add them to your party again and retry the level. The falling into a hole event won't happen again. Not that having to take the time to do that isn't annoying. However, there a specific district in New Lumos which you must be forced to make a sadistic choice—either take the pitfall trap route which will not be reset if you go back to the inn unlike all other pitfall trap segments and claims not just one but two of your Miis or be forced to have an unavoidable quarrel break out between your Miis by taking the other route.
• Food dislikes can be incredibly annoying because it can end up blocking Miis off from otherwise great stat buffs. It's not uncommon to hear of horribly unlucky people who played the game and had a significant portion of their Miis hate any food that buffed their best/important stats. This can be worked around eventually once you unlock the ability to change jobs, but then you have to work with someone significantly farther behind everyone else. And that's not even getting into if you picked the character specifically to put them in that role, or you're looking to have your first ten Miis fill out all the roles.
• While meant to be for balance and to give the game a bit of charm, personality and humor, some personality quirks can be downright aggravating in harder battles.
  • Heroes with the "Laid-back" personality will sometimes hide behind a teammate causing them to take the hit. This has a high likelihood of causing a falling out between the two of them. The thing is that the resentment is one-sided because the laid-back character is unaware of it, causing that resentment to last way longer than it would normally if the frustration was mutual because the laid-back character is unlikely to ask for forgiveness. And if this character happens to provoke the ire of multiple teammates at once, even simple common enemies will become incredibly difficult to beat, as the team will be too busy fighting each other. Careful about combining this personality type with a job that often makes teammates angry, like the Chef or the Tank.
  • Kind Miis may sometimes try to spare an enemy, which can fail and just cause the enemy to strike the sparing Mii, raising resentment among one random party member. Even if it does work, players may dislike the "Spare" quirk altogether due to the fact that it means losing out on any grub, EXP, and gold for each enemy successfully spared- particularly if the spared enemy is a Snurp.
  • Stubborn Miis sometimes refuse healing. This is frustrating when their HP is very low and subsequently die from the next attack because of it. It can also result in the rejected healer becoming mad at the Stubborn Mii, inducing a one sided quarrel.
• The Anti Poop-Socking mechanism kicking in after a few ventures. Players complain that this breaks game immersion because the game keeps asking them whether they want to continue playing or not after ten minutes of playtime, and that it at first appears as if a Mii wants to interact with one in different room. At least it has no annoying dialogue, just one/two resting Mii(s) and the two options, as well as a really calming music box track.
• For many players, the multiple times where your party members are kidnapped and your main character's class is forcibly changed count as this, especially so if you were unaware of something like this happening, and you made your starting party people you wanted to have around for the whole game or made your main character's starting class the one you wanted them to always use.
• Some people find being unable to choose who carries HP Bananas and MP Candy annoying. Miis can only carry two HP Bananas and one MP Candy at one time. Some players also prefer to use them only for when HP is low enough for being unable to survive another attack, which the AI clearly doesn't agree with as they often eat HP Bananas at inopportune times. such as when a Chef is preparing a feast to heal all party members at once immediately afterward, or if the player character is down and the opponent can be felled in one hit.
• You also can't sell HP Bananas or MP Candies. Which gets seriously irritating when your AI companions hardly use MP Candies but tend to use HP Bananas on a frequent basis. Plus, you'll end up getting enough sprinkles to easily cover MP costs, rendering the value of MP Candies far less than it ought to be (it doesn't help that the game assigns two Bananas and one Candy to each party member by default). Add in the two monster families that steal HP Bananas, one of which (UFOs) steals two at once and is extremely common in quests and Uncharted Galados, and it's not uncommon to be in postgame, running low on HP Bananas while having hundreds of spare MP Candies.
• Events that trigger an unavoidable quarrel between two of your party members, especially when the game then literally throws you right into battles that are already difficult enough on their own. This is even worse when it starts happening late-game (like in a certain district in New Lumos); needless to say, if you happen to have a Chef and/or Tank in your party — or even a Mage or Imp (as well as a Vampire) since they have no abilities that can lower resentment — this can make the process longer than it has any right to be while your Miis are getting their butts kicked into next Tuesday.
• The Nintendo Fan only can scan one new amiibo figure at a time each time you visit her. This means the player has to reenter her space and go through her dialogue again before scanning more. This can make scanning lots of amiibo cumbersome, and it's not helped by how if you scan an amiibo figure you already scanned or an invalid amiibo type, she will allow you to try again on the spot.
• A small but important aspect for Mii creators: The lack of proper author attribution. Unlike in Tomodachi Life, Mii characters generated from Miitopia have no creator name attached. The use of access key in the Nintendo Switch version was thought to alleviate this, only to turn out that a key treats any Mii whether imported from another player or created by the players themselves as one and the same in the key owner's Mii collection. Unless the origin of the Mii is clearly stated or shown by the creator, there is no way to tell whose Mii originally belonged to.
• While the original version of the game allowed people to search for specific Miis, the Switch port removed this. The only way to get certain Miis is to have an access key (which can be hard to search for), grab them from a friend if they happen to have one (which requires having friends in the first place who also played the game), or to hope the Mii can be found in the Popular section (which only contains a limited number of Miis that had been uploaded in the original game and is filled with multiple repeats, and lacks many characters from more recent media). While this might not be a problem for party members, it does affect the NPC characters. While you could randomly assign characters in the original, you now have to choose characters individually. Not only does this get rid of the surprise factor of having the game itself pull funny castings without you knowing at first, but if you wanted a specific role to go to someone, you can't just easily search for them. This is seen as a downgrade by many returning players.
• While it is kind of understandable as to why it works this way, if a person deletes their Miitopia save data, their access key stops working entirely. Since the game only has one save file, anyone who wants to replay the game will likely have to delete their save data if they aren't paying for Nintendo Switch Online on two different accounts (Having online services is pretty important for finding Miis in this game). So if you find a cool or fitting Mii you want to include in your own playthrough, be prepared to find out that the access key containing them doesn't work any more.
• A minor one: The fact that the Roving Photographer can snap a scene when the HUD is being pulled up in the Switch version and, given he does this when your Mii is put under the effect of a status move, it's quite common, since you'll probably open the menu to access the safe spot when this happens. On the 3DS, the main battle HUD is relegated to a different screen, leaving only the battle message as the only non-scenery part to be caught in frame. On the Switch version, being single-screen, the new HUD takes up almost half the screen, losing the hilarity of the snapshot due to much of it being blocked.

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