1258: Crossing Over

After a bit of time playing Animal Crossing, I think I sort of “get it” now.

Well, as much as it is possible to “get it”, anyway.

See, the thing with Animal Crossing is that it is precisely what you make of it. If you want to play it as a financial management sim and try to get all the upgrades to your house as quickly as possible, you can do that. If you want to play it as a collectathon game, attempting to fill the in-game encylopaedia and museum as well as your virtual house with everything the game has to offer, you can. If you simply want to play it as a means of chilling out for a bit without any pressure… well, you can do that, too.

The nice thing is that it doesn’t railroad you into any of these activities. It encourages you to try things for yourself and see what you enjoy. There’s no obligation to keep doing the same thing over and over again — though you’ll find that there are certain things that are more enjoyable or profitable to do more often than others. The game also keeps introducing things at a good pace as you play, too — new characters, new shops, new gameplay options — and continues doing so months and months after you started playing. It really is quite impressive how much content there is packed into a game that is ostensibly about nothing at all.

One of the things I never really explored in my last encounter with the series on the DS was the multiplayer stuff, and I believe that the 3DS version adds a considerable amount more depth to the multiplayer — i.e. you can actually see each other, wander around together and interact with one another. This is surprisingly entertaining, though it’s a little frustrating that some game mechanics simply “switch off” when other players are visiting, leaving you unable to take advantage of them.

I played for a bit with Andie earlier, and it was great fun. We wandered around her town together, then took a boat trip over to her town’s tropical island, and played some of the “Tour” minigames, in which you cooperate with one another to achieve various tasks — catch a certain number of bugs, retrieve and reassemble fossils, fish a certain number of fish. The nice thing about these games is that they encourage you to work together to a certain degree, but also provide a mild competitive element in that whoever “worked harder” gets a slightly larger reward at the end of the game. It’s not a massive extra reward, no, but it’s enough to put a nice competitive spin on things and keep them interesting.

I’m certainly enjoying it now — for a while after starting to play I was wondering if I was actually enjoying myself when I was playing, but I’m well and truly into the groove now. I’m interested to see how my little town develops over time, and how the game grows, changes and evolves — and the nice thing is, because so many other people are playing the game at present, it’s possible to share all this fun with other people. It’s a social game in the very truest sense, and one that encourages people to laugh, play and enjoy themselves together, rather than simply to spam each other with facile Facebook wall posts.

Good job, Nintendo.