Welcome to your new life! Nintendo exclaims! As if there was something wrong with the current one? Well, unless you already live on an abandoned island ready for development by an enterprising Racoon and his chums, you might find this a nice change of pace.
You begin by being accosted by said trash pandas at the airport. Channelling the friendliest of TSA agents, they begin by gathering the basics about yourself before you move onto the frankly hilarious character customization screen. If you’ve ever pulled out a Mr Potato head from a charity shop shelf, you’d honestly have more customisation options. A short plane trip later and you’ve arrived on your new island home!
Gameplay, such as it is, involves a few main tasks and a seemingly infinite number of minor ones. Overtly, your main objective will be to sink yourself further and further into mortgage debt with your furry striped friend and he offers you larger and more opulent living accommodations. Secondly, make the island pretty. The tools you create to help with these endeavours now break over time, much like every game released since Minecraft which keeps you a lot busier than in previous versions. If that weren’t enough you can also learn to make an Ikea catalogue worth of furniture and nik nacs to decorate your indoors and outdoors. Some of this decorating finds purpose in the Happy Home Academy scoring system but most are there….just because…?
New to Animal Crossing New Leaf is the Nook Miles system. This works as another type of currency you can mostly spend on personal upgrades, akin the Skill Tree in Skyrim, but less devastating. The Nook Miles systems sets out numerous small tasks for the player that quickly become seemingly infinite. I’ll confess to only having previously played the DS version of Animal Crossing, where this system was not in place. In that world finding things to do was certainly more difficult due to the lack of such a system, but for me, the world was so pleasant that while looking around for chums and tasks I’d take in the rough graphical beauty of the place and slowly unwind in its idyllic dual screen surroundings. Now if you’re a certain kind of personality, which I confess I must be, I somehow felt I didn’t have time to do the more mundane and pointless but probably more joyful activities such as talking to my not far from human chums. Often, I’ll be out to do one thing then realise I could stack up a few other things to complete on the way, collect shells while finding wood for an axe, chop a tree while gathering wood for the shop, bash the annoying purple donkey on the head while looking for bits of broken Nokia for a seagull.
The game itself is lavished with detail and grade A dialogue from what seems to be the final evolutions of lost Tamagochis. Your island friends are so charming and adorable you could spend endless hours nattering to them, helping them with tasks, taking exercise classes with them or making new fashionwear they approve off. It’s such a rich experience in fact that any one facet could stand up on its own as a single gaming experience and could draw you in for many hours.
So why not book a flight, order a G&T for the short descent and enjoy your new life! Just try and remember to make it more fun and less stressful than the real one.
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