1368: Confessions of a Failed Mayor

I played it for a good few weeks on its original release in the name of understanding what the hell everyone was so excited about, but I have to admit defeat and confess that I didn’t really like Animal Crossing all that much.

I’m not saying it’s bad, per se, more that I just don’t really understand the appeal of it. For sure, it does what social gaming companies like to call “invest and express” gameplay far better than any of the shite churned out by Zynga ever will — and without continually begging the player for money, more to the point — but the trouble is that what Animal Crossing offered just wasn’t enough to hold my attention.

There’s lots to do in Animal Crossing, for sure, and the game drip-feeds you new things happening in your town every few real-time days to keep you coming back. MMO-style special events allow you to compete against your friends at catching bugs or whatever, and the game world expands a little over time — though not by much.

Trouble is, most of the stuff to do in Animal Crossing wasn’t very interesting or enjoyable to me. By my last few days playing, I had settled into a tedious routine of picking fruit, going to the island, catching as many bugs as I could put in the box, selling them all, then paying off part of my loan. I’d then close the game because I’d found the experience so mind-numbing that I didn’t really want to play any more. It was feeling more like a job than a game; I was feeling obliged to earn money just to give to Tom Nook, and it just wasn’t enjoyable. By the time I’d done my daily “chores” I just wanted to turn the game off and do something else — usually go to sleep, since I inevitably put off said chores until last thing in the evening.

This is, of course, arguably the whole point of Animal Crossing. It’s a reflection on modern life and the joyless things we do to get ourselves through the day with enough money to put food on the table. Of course, in Animal Crossing you can’t actually starve to death or be turfed out of your house for being unable to keep up repayments on your mortgage, but the feeling of guilt is there — that feeling that you should be doing something more, that feeling that you should be pursuing your ambitions but instead you’re trapped in a rut barely scraping by unless you make some sacrifices in the name of being more profitable. (In Animal Crossing’s case, the sacrifices I was having to make included “playing games that I found more fun,” which was ultimately not something I was willing to give up.)

Multiplayer, too, was confusing. While it was neat to be able to invite friends over, ultimately all I found myself doing when I visited a friend’s town was admire how their trees and houses were in slightly different places to my own trees and houses, and nod knowingly if they had discovered how to make “paths” using designs printed on the floor. I never knew what I was supposed to do when I was in someone else’s town; there was no structure to it, and no real incentive to actually play together beyond pinching each other’s fruit and planting it, or occasionally doing that hilarious thing you can do with Pitfall Seeds. The only multiplayer stuff I found enjoyable were the structured “tours” on the island, and even those weren’t all that interesting or competitive to me.

I certainly don’t begrudge people their enjoyment of Animal Crossing. I just… don’t get it. And I’m cool with that; time to move on.

Pokémon, on the other hand, that I’m starting to come around to. But that’s a story for another day.

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.

1244: New Leaf

I started playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf on 3DS today. I haven’t played an Animal Crossing game since whatever the one on the DS was called, and I didn’t really get very far into that one. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, it’s that it came out at a time when there was all manner of other stuff I wanted to play, and I didn’t give it enough of a chance to get into it. Consequently, when it came to time to trade some stuff in — this was back when I still traded in games, something which I rarely do these days (though I still buy used games) — it was one of the first things to go.

Consequently, I’m still pretty much a complete newcomer to Animal Crossing and the way it does things. And I’m still somewhat confused. But in a kind of good way.

Most games you play these days take a very proactive approach to directing the player’s enjoyment. “Go here,” the game will say. “Do this.” In the case of terrible, awful, shitty Facebook games, more often than not the game will literally prevent you from clicking on anything but the thing it wants you to click on.

Animal Crossing, meanwhile, takes the complete opposite approach. It drops you into a strange world — a small town populated by animals in which you are inexplicably the only human resident, and which you have somehow become the mayor of — and then pretty much tells you to just get on with it. There are characters wandering around who will give you a nudge in the direction of things to do, but for the most part, the game is all about figuring out what the fuck it is you’re supposed to be doing.

And the answer isn’t a simple one. There’s a sense of structure given to the game by the ever-present loan-shark raccoon Tom Nook and his increasingly-unreasonable bills he keeps lumping you with game after game, but other than that it’s entirely up to you to make your own fun. Will you cultivate a crop of profitable fruit trees? Will you spend your time catching bugs? Will you dig up fossils and try to fill the museum? Or will you primarily spend your time bumming around your friends’ towns, stealing their fruit when they’re not looking?

This latter part is where the 3DS version is infinitely superior to the DS version. Theoretically, the DS version featured Internet connectivity and the ability to do things with your friends, but when I was playing I didn’t know anyone else, and as such this feature — which is, to be honest, a big part of the game’s appeal — was completely useless. Contrast that with today, when I went over to my friend Jeff’s town along with our mutual friend Cody, then we took a trip over to a tropical island, swam in the sea, harvested bananas and mangoes and marvelled at Cody’s ability to catch the most enormous fish I’ve ever seen.

It’s an utterly pointless experience at heart, but unlike many of those utterly pointless Facebook games out there which are only after your money, Animal Crossing’s self-contained nature means that there’s always a sense of gentle, good-natured humour about the experience — and, more importantly, no pressure on the player. It’s an escapist experience for you to dip into for half an hour to an hour at a time, not something you play as your “big game”. And yet even in those short, bite-sized sessions — ideal for handheld play — there’s plenty of stuff to do, and enough variety to keep some people playing for hour after hour after hour after hour.

It remains to be seen how long I stick with it, but I’m interested to see how much more there is to the experience over time. Something must be there to keep people playing for upwards of a hundred hours; let’s see if I can find it.