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The familiar makes up the vast majority of the experience, so if you were hoping for an all-new game, you might be disappointed. Every now and then, you’ll get visits from Lyle the art dealer, or the turnip selling warthog, and holiday events all occur in real time. You can send letters to animals, get invited to their houses, or deliver sundry artifacts from one resident to another. Yet again you can collect fish, bugs, and fossils to give to the museum, you can plant trees, water flowers, and buy new items of clothing. This core will be instantly recognizable to those who have played any game in the series, and if you wanted more of the same, you’ll be absolutely well served. As with every game in the series, your primary goal is to earn money by collecting and selling debris, in order to pay off the loan, build a bigger house, and continue the cycle of owing money to a forest creature.
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Indeed, being the mayor appears to have very little effect on one’s daily life.Īs always, you arrive in a town populated by self-interested little bastards, and obtain a house courtesy of the debt-hungry Tom Nook. While you get to be the mayor of your very own town, your new career still involves indulging the inane babble of twee bipedal dogs and selling bananas to raccoons. The mayor!Īnimal Crossing: New Leaf is not a political thriller of intrigue and seduction. Eventually, as always happens, I’ll get tired of it, and realize every game, no matter what else gets added, will always boil down to fruit and fishes.īut this time I get to be the mayor. Something about it always draws me in, even though I know it won’t be long before my virtual life becomes a monotony of shaking trees, fishing, and paying off loans in a game that perpetuates itself through a constant shifting of goalposts. It was over a month before I realized it was compulsion, not enjoyment, driving me.Įven so, every Animal Crossing excites me. When I played Wild World, I obsessively absorbed myself in it every single day, sometimes making it my first activity of the day. Actually, I still don’t know if I actually like it or not.
#ANIMAL CROSSING NEW LEAF SERIES#
Animal Crossing is a hard series to assess because, to this day, I still struggle to understand what I like about it.
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