Animal Crossing: New Leaf ~ A Joint Review

Hello, loyal readers! Tails here.

And Jesseh. I’m also here, and I’m also essential to this, so don’t forget about me!

And we’re doing a joint review of Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the Nintendo 3DS!

This was actually my first Animal Crossing game, so I can’t say I’m really clear on what their, um, old leaf entailed, or whether this leaf is even really new by comparison, as opposed to simply refurbished.

That’s why two reviewers are better than one! I’ve played the previous instalments from the GameCube, DS and Wii, and I can tell you that...it’s not really that much of a new leaf. More of a “smoother leaf”, but I don’t think that’s as marketable a cliche.

But did you play the Japanese-only one(s) for the Nintendo 64? No? Then you can’t be TOO smug about it!

I suppose you’ve got me there!

See? I’m essential to this. I said I was, and now I’ve proven it.

If you can be elected mayor without an actual election, then I suppose anything’s possible! Which is the purpose of this game. Unlike the previous games in the franchise where you’re merely a villager, here you’re actually running the show.

By “running the show”, you mean “running around and pulling weeds and single-handedly funding major public works projects and fetching lazy people fruit”, right?

Just like a real mayor! However, you’re not supposed to run in this game. The game gives it to you as an option, tempting you, but one must resist, lest you ruin your grass and flowers!

Isn’t that bad game design, honestly? They give you this option, but you’re punished in every which way for using it. I know some video games do this with really awesome powers that come with a drawback, for balance. But this isn’t a really awesome power. It’s RUNNING. Is the point just supposed to be to show how laid-back and slow-moving small town life is? Because that’s stupid. I grew up in a small town, and people ran ALL THE FUCKING TIME. And we still had grass! (And it was uphill both ways and the snow was UP TO HERE!)

It’s an interesting move for game realism, but it sort of loses it’s initial appeal after you realize just how far you have to walk to get anywhere in your town. Sometimes you can even comically fall on your face over and over again for no reason!

Hey now, don’t complain about the incredibly stupid tripping-and-falling-randomly mechanic. If it’s good enough for goddamn Brawl, it’s good enough for Animal Crossing!

Perhaps the fact that you’re made to move slowly fits with the game’s schtick for making you wait for everything under the sun. You buy your house and you get a tent until you have enough money to pay it off, and even then you have to wait a day. When I first started playing the game, it was sort of late at night and I had no tools with which to do anything, so this took a while.

Of course, other people who move into your town aren’t required to live in a tent first. I guess the mayor is just a special case! It’s kind of a sore subject for me, because Saharah showed up on my very first day in town, and promptly proceeded to humiliate me for not owning a house and therefore being unworthy of her fine carpetry. And where was she after I actually got my house built? Nowhere for the next three weeks, that’s where! So, yeah. All in all, not the best welcome possible.

Come to think of it, this might be the reason that the person who was originally elected mayor decided not to take the job. They really didn’t seem very upset about having the rug pulled out from under them; maybe they stopped by and realized that they didn’t have a house prepared for the leader of their town. For animals who somehow managed to create this little society, they’re remarkably helpless. Besides, they obviously think any human they see has the ability to run things.

I’m not so sure it’s your species they respect, so much as it’s your pants. And how you’re the only person in town who actually wears them. (If you didn’t, your sweaty human buttcheeks would probably stick to the leather mayor chair.) I’d bet than in a real election, you too would vote for the one candidate who wasn’t too lazy and/or incompetent to cover their own genitals.

I’ve noticed that even though you’re the mayor of this town, they make you go through a lot of stuff to prove your worth, and even then you don’t get to do a lot of mayor stuff. First you have to get your Town Pass Card, then you have to get 100% approval, and then you have to send off for the paperwork to get your Development Permit. Once you have it, you can create Public Works Projects. This is good if you think thousands of dollars worth of government money should go toward stuff like yield signs! For towns that don’t even have traffic!

That still sounds more legit than the project that Cole, my obvious stoner bunny villager, suggested to me - a public hammock! It only cost 39,800 bells of our taxpayer money........well, mostly mine. The weird thing about the Public Works system, though, is that your town already comes with one bridge pre-made, so of course I have to assume it was built in violation of this law. Sadly, you’re not allowed to track down the devious river-crossing madman (or womadman) responsible - not even as a sidequest. Isn’t it appalling that the culprit of this grave crime against humanity is just being allowed to live out the rest of his or her life completely unpunished?

Well, while you can’t bring this river-crossing fugitive to justice, you can at least build your own bridges! Once you’re actually allowed to do the job they’re so convinced you’re able to do, they don’t let you do very much of it at one time. Your towns start out pretty barren, and you’ll probably want to do lots of Public Works Projects, but you can only work on one on any given day - even if you pay it off all at once right after you pick the spot for it. You also have the ability to make Town Ordinances, where you have the option of four but can only enact one at once - so you can’t have a more profitable town while also being able to play early in the morning, selfish gamers!

While I’m sure it’s an improvement on having no control over these things in previous games, the Town Ordinance system seems really shallow to me. You’re supposed to feel like you’re leading this town, but like he said, you only get four choices that never change. I imagine most people will just choose one - I went with Night Owl - and then forget about it entirely. It would be nice if I remembered to change it to the Keep Our Town Beautiful ordinance before I took an extended break from the game, but let’s be honest, I’m not going to. Hell, I’d already forgotten about them until Tails mentioned them. Spending money in responsible ways is boring - it’s shopping that’s where the real fun lies!

Speaking of spending money, there’s been a few additions and changes to the shopping system in this game. Tom Nook is now running “Nook’s Homes”, and we get the new innovation where you actually get to choose when and if you build or expand your home, and he doesn’t force you to work in his shop for a time either. He also offers things you can buy to renovate your home, like doors, mailboxes, etc. However, make sure you look at what he has to sell FIRST, because once you ask him for an expansion on your house, he won’t let you buy anything in the shop until that’s done, and the thing you originally wanted won’t be in the shop the next day!

Designing my own home is fun and all, but let me just say that as someone who just spent 498,000 bells on a rather tiny basement, it horrifies me whenever I’m told that Tom Nook was even more contemptible in previous games. Thankfully I have people like you to help me see past his attempts to erase his grievous past crimes from the history books.

Instead of Tom Nook running “Nook’s Cranny”, now we have “Nookling Junction”, which is being run by Timmy and Tommy, Tom Nook’s nephews/clones/wards he found off the street and turned into indentured servants. The store is capable of expanding, and you eventually get a convenience store, a supermarket and department store when you spend the appropriate amount of bells.

Oddly, the convenience store is only the first upgrade, but it stays open later than any of their stores. It seems like an odd game design choice to have the stores not linearly improve in all aspects to me, but whatever. It’s hard to complain too much about their store in any incarnation, because Timmy and Tommy are cute as shit. Plus, having multiple sons without any evidence of the existence of a mother of any sort gives Tom Nook villain cred on par with King Bowser himself, which is nothing to sneeze at!

However, “Nookling Junction” should be used as a shop for buying only. If you have things you wanna sell, go with “Re-Tail”, since it will allow you to put items into flea market spaces and set your own price, and they also pay you more bells for your items, which is sort of the purpose of making your fortune in this game.

At first I was skeptical about the flea market concept, but after discovering how easy it is to force villagers to buy something my physically shoving them around the store, I’ve softened a bit. I forced Kitty, an unpleasant export from Taylor’s town, to spend 600 bells on a fucking bucket. A fucking bucket that comes with a built-in roof leak. How great is that? Take that, upper class!

This game has the most bizarre economy I’ve ever seen. You can honestly sell anything besides junk you find in the river and rotten fruit. Where do they find the gold to make these supposed “bells”, which aren’t even bells at all?

I know. This game’s coin-based economy really doesn’t make much cents. (This is every bit as clever as the puns that are actually in the game, by the way - and you’ll never find me complaining about that.) As you mentioned, Re-Tail exists in a particularly odd economic space, where it has a seemingly infinite supply of bells to buy a seemingly infinite supply of random odds and ends they never seem to do anything with. I guess the official explanation is that they’re supposed to be recycling everything you’re giving them, but I’d rather not think about what the process of “recycling” the still-living flesh of insects and fish consists of!

On Main Street, you have more selection of places to shop, like the Able Sisters, Kicks, Shampoodle’s, and the gardening shop once you manage to unlock them. The Able Sisters is where you can go to make designs for clothes or flags, and you can also buy things that may not look appealing on you, but will be hilarious when given to your neighbors. You’re also finally allowed to wear skirts and dresses as a male and jeans as a female. Kicks is a shoe store, and this is actually the first Animal Crossing in which you can buy a change of shoes, and the gardening shop sells - wait for it - flowers, trees and gardening supplies.

Like axes, which are handy for getting rid of unwanted trees and/or political opponents. Truth be told, there’s not much to the gardening store, but the Able Sisters’ complex is really cool! Designing your own shirts is undeniably cool, and being able to dye my hair blue in-game the same day I did it in real life made me happier than it really should’ve. I was actually looking forward to visiting Shampoodle since before I even actually owned the game, so of course it’s disappointing that it takes, like, three weeks to unlock, from rather arbitrary conditions. And the ability to wear opposite-gendered hairstyles, a VERY cool feature, takes even longer still. Why is Main Street so hesitant to have something, anything cool to do right out of the gate? Even the museum is initially creepily empty aside from Blathers, who doesn’t seem to be completely clear about how museums work at first.

The museum, like in the previous games, allows you to donate bugs, fish, sea creatures, fossils and works of art. Blathers still doesn’t like bugs very much (though at least he flips out less severely than in previous instalments) and at least allows you to do more with the place this time  around. Once you manage to donate to every wing of the museum, which took me longer than it should have since fake paintings are a bitch (screw you, Lionel) you get to add a second floor, and later a coffee shop.

In an odd way too, the museum brought me back to a conundrum I initially faced when playing through Paper Mario: Sticker Star last year. That game also has a museum that expects you to donate one of, well, pretty much everything, and I found myself constantly debating whether to donate a really useful sticker now to get it out of the way, or if I should wait until later because it really would come in handy in an upcoming boss battle. Likewise, I definitely felt the tension the first time I caught a dorado and tried to decide whether to donate it now, or sell it for 15,000 bells that would make the early-game development much less tedious. (For the reference, in both games, I generally chose to donate early and donate hard.)

Good advice, since when I first started playing the game, I foolishly sold a few fish and bugs for the high bell amounts, not realizing that I probably wouldn’t be able to easily catch another to donate to the museum. Sure, it may be tempting to sell a coelacanth or Hercules beetle, but you’re probably only going to find those once, if ever, so hand it over. (No, I wasn’t actually foolish enough to sell those.)

Well, I guess SOME people just don’t have any self-control. Even though self-control is what fishing and bug-catching are all about in this game. I’ve pretty much had to train myself to approach any reasonably clustered bunch of trees as slowly as possible, because I would hate myself forever if I scared away a golden stag beetle I didn’t even see at first. (Like the dorado, golden stags aren’t actually that rare - they seem to sell for a lot solely because they’re pretty and shiny and vaguely golden in color, qualities that Reese is easily distracted by.)

You do get a very handy encyclopedia to show which fish/bugs you’ve already caught, and some do sell for a very decent amount of bells. It does get repetitive fast, but if you’re like me and want to be able to try and complete your encyclopedia by getting one of every species, then you’ll find some enjoyment in it. That is, if you’re able to find the tools easily once you start the game. There’s also a new hobby you can indulge in, deep-sea diving. You do it on the island once you unlock that (we’ll elaborate more later) and you can also buy your own suit to dive off the beach in your town.

So, the deep-sea diving is new? That explains why it doesn’t feel as fleshed-out and generally polished as some of the other activities. Namely, it seems like creatures are able to escape under the insurmountable rope-with-a-bunch-of-buoys-on-it barrier far too often through no real fault of your own. I’ll still do just enough diving to fill up the museum, because I’m a completionist, but I’m not gonna have much fun doing so. Oh, yay, sea grapes for the thousandth fucking time!

While I fully agree that the deep-sea diving gets far too repetitive, it is a welcome addition to the hobbies you can do in this game. I like that they added a whole new realm to collect creatures from, even if it’s hard as hell to get things other than what you’ve gotten a million times before. And the jellyfish make me cringe. Have you ever been stung by those in real life? Those things HURT.

You mean they’re NOT just the mildly irritating Pitfall Seeds of the Sea?

I am officially going to start calling them that now.

No matter which of the critter-catching hobbies you choose to pursue, there’s always at least one that you’re gonna get completely sick of seeing because they’re so goddamn common. With diving, it’s the sea grapes; with bugging, I personally have a bone to pick with fruit beetles. In the world of Animal Crossing fishing, the sea bass seems to be similarly infamous, though I noticed that whenever I’m carrying one around, my villagers seem bizarrely prone to approaching me and pretty much throwing bells and presents at me to get their hands on one. A few have gleefully informed me that sea bass are “trendy”, which I hope is comforting to them even as it clashes with every single other thing in their homes. Surprisingly, animals don’t seem to have a natural knack for interior design!

From my own experience, neighbors will either let you give them something completely outlandish, like a bear suit, or they’ll ask for something extremely specific that’s exactly the same size of another item. Sometimes you actually see these things in their homes, regardless of whether it matches the rest of their home decor. It’s interesting to see a neighbor with a desert motif - complete with dead animal skulls, the sick fucks - and have a big pink armchair sitting somewhere.

My villagers also really like to buy up all the balloon furniture I put in the flea market, and those items always invariably clash with whatever vague theme the rest of their house might have. Personally, though, the thing I find the most off-putting about my villagers is that very few of them seem to actually own beds. Blaire has a bathtub where one might normally put a bed, so I can only assume she sleeps in that. Or possibly inside her horribly mismatched balloon closet, it’s hard to tell.

Much like in real life, you’ll really get along with some of your neighbors, or you’ll really despise some of them, or you’ll have some that are just kinda “eh.” For example, my neighbor Peggy always seems so glad to see me I feel genuine joy when I talk to her, and when I have to talk with Lionel, the douchebag who’s sold me two fake paintings (no, I am not going to be letting that go) I tend to not want to do him any favors. Get your own fruit, jerk.

The writing in this game is actually really good, and that’s actually one of the first things I noticed about it. There’s so much personality! Sooner or later, everyone’s going to say something so bizarre that I can’t unlink them from it in my brain. Like Biff, the dumb jock hippo, offering me his “gym-worn fire hydrant”, in an incident that haunts me to this day. Or Pashmina lamenting the cancellation of her favorite magazine, Big-Top Borscht, featuring nothing but reviews of borscht served at circuses. A thousand pages of that.

The writing is charming to the point where you honestly fear offending any of the neighbors you like. It’s much harder to do in New Leaf than in the previous games, where you could only write a letter with too few lines and have people get pissed off. Now I can refuse to bring them an arowana and withhold precious medicine and they’ll keep being my villager minions! Muahahaha! ...though, of course, I’m too nice to actually do those things to these cuddly characters. But other mayors have a good opportunity to have an outlet for sociopathic or sadistic tendencies. All this in an E-rated game!

And then sometimes they’ll come up to you and ask you to give them a new greeting or catchphrase. They’ll just blindly trust whatever dumb thing you tell them to say! They’ll be thankful for whatever dumb thing you tell them to say! They’re so sweet and innocent and trusting that I just feel bad about doing anything to humiliate them too badly. That’s the effect this game has on me! Even though there’s virtually no concrete downside to being a colossal dick (though Snooty villagers will take rather short-lived offense to things like giant isopods, or being told their home is “great”), I just enjoy seeing how happy they are when I do things for them too much to spoil that in any way. There’s a rumor going around Kakariko that the mayor is a “pro listener”, which is a really nice way to say “spineless doormat”, but I’ll live with it. :)

There’s even rumors going around Cerulean that the mayor is a “pro fish and bug catcher” and a “pro tourist.” Meaning that I have nothing better to do with my time and I like spending more time in other people’s towns. :)

It helps that I’m the first one between us that got Shampoodle!

But you don’t need other people’s towns to visit to go on vacation! In New Leaf, they introduce the island, run by taxi driver turned salty sea turtle himself, Kapp’n. For a mere 1,000 bells round trip, he’ll sing you two corny shanties and give you a ride in his boat. The songs are honestly one of my favorite additions to the game, another positive aspect of the writing. Also, don’t let the ticket price fool you - you’re going to make an extreme profit every single visit, so long as you don’t just go and turn right back around.

Especially at night, where you have pretty good odds of hooking at least a few sharks and, if not, you can at least take solace in the HORRIFYING INFESTATION of rare beetles! Then again, this is one of those things I need to be careful not to overdo, because grinding for bells on the island is very repetitive. I fear I’ll completely burn myself out on this game forever if I don’t watch myself! I usually have to do it in short bursts, intermittently going on one of the tours just to clear my head. (My personal favorite? The Elite Ore-Hunting Tour. It’s almost like a little puzzle!)

The tours are run by Tortimer, the former mayor in the previous games, and they’re essential if you want to earn medals to buy items on the island, or if you just want to do so for recreation. The island sells things like clothing, deep sea diving suits you can use in your own town, furniture, and Club Tortimer memberships, which allow you to visit the island and do tours online with friends. Or strangers that you gave your 3DS friend code to, either works. I personally earn medals in order to gain mermaid furniture, since I’m one of the players that choose a specific theme of decor and home exteriors.

Whereas my house is basically organized like I organize my room in real life. I have a bunch of stuff that doesn’t exactly better, but I keep thinking that if I arrange it in just the right way, it’ll actually look sort of decent. And, y’know, it’s nothing special, but I feel oddly proud of it. Because it’s my house, and for some reason that’s exciting.

When describing Animal Crossing to others, I tend to tell them that it’s a game that sounds really boring when you describe it, yet when you pick it up and play, you can’t stop. And it is! It’s very easy to burn yourself out on this game by getting exorbitant amounts of bells, getting the biggest house you possibly can, etc. So you should definitely be sure to pace yourself.

That was the hardest part for me to learn. I’m kind of an obsessive girl. I have a tendency to get baked and play games for hours and hours at a time, so I actually struggled at that. Week one, I played till I made myself a little queasy from all the repetitive tasks - I’m weird like that, weird things make me feel sick. Week two, I was already getting really burnt out on it, and I figured it would just be a matter of days until I just set it down and didn’t come back for a long time. And then, I think I finally started to understand it. Now it’s more of a game that I pick up in the morning to check up on everybody, and then come back a bit later in the day to tend to my village itself. The end result is that I still haven’t missed a single day. I’m a pretty damn good mayor after all.

To sum up my thoughts on New Leaf, I give it an 8 out of 10. It definitely gets my vote for favorite game in the franchise because they not only smoothed out a lot of the little details that were giving people trouble in the previous versions, but they also added enough little changes and surprises to keep things interesting. It still has the Animal Crossing feel to it, but it’s not just a repackaged version of the original. It loses points for the way it constantly makes you wait to get anything done, and the way it can lose it’s replay value if you’re not careful. However, I would definitely recommend this game.

I’m really torn on my score, so I’ll be a lazy copycat and give it 8 out of 10. Or 4 out of 5 if that makes it easier for you. 136 out of 170? That’s an overly complicated rating system, but whatever. I keep running into little things that frustrate me with New Leaf, like the fact that it is physically impossible for me to carry more than ten heavy and space-consuming letters at once. Or the fact that bells I pick up don’t automatically stack - money rocks become an exercise in frustration if I’ve allowed myself to get distracted by too many collectibles before I found it. But, at its core, this game is ridiculously charming. It seems to go so far out of its way to make me feel happy that it’s getting easier for me to look past its flaws and just relax. Besides, it’s a game about a bizarre alternate universe where elected officials are not corrupt and callous individuals who disagree with each and every deeply held belief that you have, and how is that not awesome to imagine?

Tails l Cerulean l 5129-0977-9651 l cherries!!

Jesseh | Kakariko | 2277-8007-7856 | oranges!!