Animal Crossing: New Leaf

I don't make the rules this is game of the century maybe I don't know like atleast better than ragnarok

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I love the game, but I think the graphic quality is improvable and more things could have been added to the video game. But if you want it for a small console, honestly it's fine!

45/100 Animal Crossing New Leaf is an immersive experience full of warmth, where the relaxing rhythm of everyday life lulls the player into a state of quietly fulfilling, mundane bliss, surrounded by friendly faces in a charmingly peaceful setting. The villagers are endearingly vibrant and unique thanks to various personality types, even though their presence starts to feel hollow after some time, mainly due to the lack of many meaningful ways to interact with them and a somewhat disappointing amount of lines of dialogue. Nonetheless, the game partially makes up for it through its astonishingly rich customization options. An immense catalogue of clothes to change your appearance, but also countless furniture and hundreds of items to decorate the interior of your house and the landscape of the town as well, not only through the growth of various kinds of trees and flowers, but also projects that vary from small fountains to new facilities hosting new activities. As time passes, new shops and locals will open allowing the player to shop more, access new features and meet new characters. Slowly but surely, players will discover the incredible richness of the decorative and self-expression options the game has to offer, making for a gratifying long-lasting experience. However, as much as it offers an astounding amount of content and a unique atmosphere, the overly simplistic and excruciatingly repetitive nature of the few available activities, namely fishing and catching bugs, leaves New Leaf thriving more off of ambience than actual content.

For being the fourth entry in the series, the game hasn't advanced much since the first one. You're the mayor of town in this one, which lets you setup Public Works Projects. They're decorations for your town, and they let you customize how your town is. Except you can only make 30 of them, even though there's space for tons and tons of them. Also, the selection of public projects is mostly limited to things like lamps and benches and statues. You can build up to three bridges across your town's river, but you can't divert the river, you can't add a pond or fill in a pond, you can't add or remove a ramp down to the beach. When villagers move in, they just move in any old place that fits, you can't declare where house lots should go. What I'm saying is that, for a game that tries to sell you on the point of being able to customize your town, you don't get access to a lot of very obvious customization options. Houses are about the same as before. You can change the outside of your house some, and you can get several rooms inside of your house. All rooms start off at 4x4, then have a 6x6 and 8x8 upgrade you can buy. Always a central room, a room left, back, and right, and an upstairs and downstairs. You can't re-arrange the orientation of your house's rooms, like having it be a long ranch-style house or a tower house where you just stack it five floors high. Even if the exterior didn't change to match it, it would have been nice for your house's rooms to be arrangable. Of course there's a ton of goodies to put inside of your house, wallpapers, floors, beds, chairs, etc, etc. Once you've picked up an item once, it goes into your catalog, so you can buy it again from Nook's if you sell or lose it. Except some items are "special event" items, so you can't re-purcahse them from your catalog. It'll show the item, and then not let you buy it. Not being able to just buy anything in your catalog is pretty poop. There's a "Mall" section, behind your main town, and you can upgrade it a bit. Re-Tail is in the main area, but all the rest of the stores, and the Museum and Post Office, are in the Mall area. Behind the Mall is the Happy Home section, where the houses of people you Street Pass are displayed, and you can order items that you see in their home. It follows the same rules as the catalog though, so if they have a limited item then you can't order it. Which is, again, poop. The villagers in town are kinda alright, some of them are fun characters that I really like (Ken and Bruce). Except they're a little shallow. You interact with them or not, and based on that they'll usually stay in town. If they decide to move, you can tell them to stay, and they'll stay if you've interacted with them a lot. I say "interact" instead of "be nice to" because it doesn't matter what your interaction is. You can talk to them, send them letters, hit them with a net, push them into pit-falls, whatever. It's all the same to them. They each start off with a house customized to them when they move into town, but they don't have any sort of style as to what things get replaced with what, so they'll just use anything you give them and anything they see in Re-Tail. Their houses end up looking like weird mish-mashes of all sorts of styles at once. The villagers aren't very distinct in how they act in general. Internally, the game itself has like 6 general personality types, and it kinda shows through even without knowing that. There's apparently 110 or so villagers in the game, but you can only have up to 10 in your town at once. It'd probably have been better for them to make fewer villagers that are each more distinct. I guess what I'm getting at in general is that the game has stuff in it, but most of the options are kinda shallow or surface or whatever you wanna call it. There's not many systems driven interactions going on, and the game regularly feels like a disappointment and an "if only they had" sort ****.