You're offered up a big menu of choices, but very few things are must-do.Įven completionist anglers can fish one day, and then forget about it for awhile, because the time-scale is so large that there's no real benefit to focusing on one thing and one thing only, and there's so much to do that it's easy to get distracted, too. In my recent interview with producer Katsuya Eguchi, he put it like this: "We've tried to lighten the stress of town life and made sure it's somewhere players want to go, not somewhere they have to go." This is actually the most forgiving iteration of the franchise yet, and that's part of its success. And you'll suffer no real penalty for not engaging with any of them. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want, from the game's array of activities, as little or as much as you wish to.
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Gundam series outfits created by Japanese blogger Mojioīut you don't have to get that involved, and that, in itself, is maybe the best sign of the completeness of New Leaf. Town customized by popular Japanese ACNL blogger bibi This has lead to, for example, recreations of outfits from popular characters in fiction, blogs where clothes that vastly outshine the ones Nintendo included are shared by their designers, and elaborately customized homes and towns with a totally original look and feel. You can also design outfits and fabric patterns - which you can then share online. It's that these activities often appeal to entirely different interests and instincts within players. And you can set a goal that stretches into the future: since the game runs in 100 percent real-world time, some fish are only available in certain seasons of the year, for example, so a completionist would have to play for a long time to bag each and every one.īut completeness extends beyond the nature of the game's activities. You can get interested in something, abandon it, and pick it up later when you realize there's another reason to do it. You can start doing something for one reason and change your mind. And the two of you can fish, together, with different objectives in mind.īut here's the thing: this illustrates not just the flexibility of one single game system, but also the fact that your relationship with it can change over time. You can fish with a friend in their town, too. You can fish for the rarest fish, fish to fulfill a request from a townsperson, or fish because you want to display an aquarium with a shark in it in your in-game home. You can sell the fish for money, donate them to the museum, fish to fill up your encyclopedia with all of the fish in the game, or fish because it's relaxing and lets you unwind after a long day of real-life work. While there is a great breadth of content to explore, let's take fishing as an example: You can fish in your town's river and ocean, but it splits off from there. There is always something to do in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. The first is one that only really becomes apparent over extended play, and that's completeness. There are a few major things that I think really bear discussion. It also contrasts interestingly against superficially similar games from other developers.Īs I've played it daily for the last month, I've tried to think about what makes it special. Animal Crossing: New Leaf deserves attention. The game industry generally recognizes Nintendo games are high quality, but I'm not sure how often we really reflect on that.
Was it? Animal Crossing talk is now widespread on English social media - a phenomenon that Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said helped push it to its massive success in Japan. While the original DS version, Wild World, was certainly popular, it wasn't this big. I don't remember this franchise ever being quite such a big deal. Animal Crossing: New Leaf has sold over 4 million copies in Japan since November.
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