Almost every Nintendo fan is eagerly awaiting Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s release date of June 9th. It’s been 5 years since the last entry in the series, has it been worth the wait? Find out in our review!
When you’re running around town collecting goods to sell, you’ll encounter the local townsfolk. It truly is impressive how Nintendo was able to craft using such compelling characters with such basic interactions. Animals ranging from elephants to squirrels live alongside you creating a lighthearted environment for their mayor. Each animal’s quirky personality and silly catch phrase goes a long way in creating a character that the player can quickly understand and build a relationship with. Animals will often ask for seemingly trivial tasks to be completed for them such as catching a butterfly, trading furniture with them or even just going to visit their house. You are then rewarded for your efforts with one of that animal’s pieces of unwanted clothing or furniture. My favorite so far was when I received a letter a day after visiting Sally the squirrel's house. The letter was a thank you note with a gift attached. Inside the gift box was a skeleton. I couldn’t help but laugh at how the game’s AI most likely had no regard for the item it sent me and I just happen to get a skeleton in the mail on my second day as mayor.
Once you’ve completed your daily errands of digging up the local fossils and catching a few fish you’ll need to sell your haul and then do what most young people would do when they have a fair bit of money. Go shopping. Luckily, shopping is now not nearly as much of a hassle. Aside from the town hall and secondhand store, all the shops are located on a strip of road just North of your town past the train tracks. Instead of running all around town you can simply do all your daily store runs at once. Nintendo has a done a great job in removing a lot of the tedium that can build up after doing the same tasks every day, for example you can now assess multiple fossils at once at the museum. While that may seem like a change too trivial to mention, after playing the game for days and getting around 50 fossils, it’s nice to not have to go through a tedious menu 50 times, once for each fossil.
That about sums up your time spent in Animal Crossing. Fishing, digging up stuff, planting flowers and decorating your house. Unfortunately, that is about all you do and after about 20 minutes of gameplay a day you have already done everything you need to do. In 20 minutes I have dug up all the day’s fossil, found the day’s hidden gem, checked the shops to see what they have in stock and sold the fossis or fish you had on hand. After you’ve completed your errands for the day it feels like you have nothing to do. You could attempt to redecorate your house, but the store only offers 2 pieces of furniture a day. You could catch fish but after a few hours it fishing goes from a relaxing stroll on the beach to a tedious march up and down the beach searching for fish. When you catch the fish you can either put them in the museum or sell them. If you sell them you get extra money to either pay off your house or buy more furniture.
