Animal Crossing: New Leaf is simultaneously timely and completely incongruous with today's gaming market. The franchise is more than a decade old, but it feels like Nintendo slowly fashioned it in a furnace labeled 'free-to-play gaming mechanics.' It isn't free, of course, but it has all the hallmarks of that business model.
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- While retaining much of the gameplay from older titles, Animal Crossing: New Leaf marks a large change in the series, as the player now becomes the mayor of the town. With the help of Isabelle and the townsfolk, it is now the player's job to make the town a better place to live.
This makes no sense, and I adore it for that.
Thanks for every Like and Favorite! They really help! This is Part 32 of the Animal Crossing: New Leaf Gameplay Walkthrough for the Nintendo 3DS!
As with Mario, Pokémon, and Zelda, Animal Crossing is one of those Nintendo foundation franchises. New Leaf is the fourth go 'round for the series. This time, the familiar action takes place on the company's 3DS portable system, and it comes out Sunday.
Despite the franchise's age, Nintendo barely touched its gameplay and visuals. Sure, New Leaf has a few new mechanics, and the graphics are sharper, but this is just a refinement of a very old product.
But motion is relative, and while many would argue that Nintendo is getting left behind by standing still, Animal Crossing: New Leaf left me feeling that the exact opposite is true.
What you'll like
One price for endless content
I know it's not fair to compare a free-to-play game to a retail release, but it's impossible to avoid in this case. The popular F2P business model is now a standard. Developers seem to love it, but — as gamers — I don't think we've really decided whether it is good for us.
Animal Crossing is compelling evidence that it isn't.
In Animal Crossing: New Leaf, you play as the one human resident in a town of anthropomorphic animals. Due to a misunderstanding, those citizens immediately appoint you as their new mayor. This gives you a few powers to control certain aspects of the village. Like the previous Animal Crossings, you will get a tiny house that you can slowly furnish and expand by purchasing items and paying off your loans. That means you'll need a lot of money, called bells, which means you'll need a net to catch bugs, a fishing rod to fish, and a shovel to plant fruit trees.
This is where Animal Crossing aligns with most of today's free-to-play games. It isn't skilled based. You are churning through mechanics that simply require your time. The fishing, for example, is just a roll of the dice. You throw your lure into the water in front of a shadow (which represents a fish), and you hope that you pull out something worth some major bells.
Harvesting fruit is similarly time-consuming. Each tree takes four days to produce its prize — and that's in real time because Animal Crossing runs on the same clock as the real world. This means you'll bounce between having nothing to do and too much to do.
However, unlike every free-to-play game, Animal Crossing escapes the underlying feeling that it is always trying to squeeze your pressure points in the hopes that you'll pay an extra buck or two in microtransactions.
New Leaf costs $35. That's it. Once you give Nintendo those 35 American dollars, every single piece of content inside New Leaf belongs to you. All you need to do is to put in the time with the game to unlock them.
After a parade of Facebook and mobile games with countdown timers that encourage players to pay 99 cents to unlock the next level faster, New Leaf feels so respectful.
It doesn't want you to have to think about Nintendo's business model — it just wants you to get lost in its amazing world.
A unique sense of place and wonder
I got to a point in my first couple nights with New Leaf where my character wasn't wearing shoes. We were running through the town in the dead of a spring night. We were fishing and catching bugs. I had the 3D and the sound turned all the way up. I was transported.
Animal Crossing New Leaf Zackscott
If heaven is real, I hope it is exactly like Animal Crossing.
It's a combination of the tranquil pace, the sound design, the friendly characters, and the welcoming look of the world that is so appealing. You have to spend a ton of time in the game, and it's a joy to spend time in.
Gallery: Gallery
Thomas animal crossing. Above: My friend Coco's house. I think it is pretty dope.
That's not new. Nintendo always nailed the atmosphere of this series. The 3D is new, and the company puts it to excellent use. The visual depth adds a credibility to the world that I found deeply attractive.
I play all my 3DS games with the 3D on, but I get why a lot of people don't. For this game, I can't imagine playing it without that extra dimension.
Social and multiplayer
Animal Crossing is all about expressing yourself in a self-contained little world, but it is also about sharing those expressions with friends. In New Leaf, you can do that in one of two ways.
Players can visit each others' towns using local wireless or over the Internet (as long as you exchange your 3DS friend codes). This adds a natural social mechanic where you'll want to find out who has what kind of fruit, what kind of gear your friends' stores have, and whether they want to trade some clothing designs.
Of course, it's not always easy to get players together at the same time. Your town doesn't live perpetually online, so it is only open to visitors when you set your gates open.
The good news is that Nintendo also included some more traditional social features, including Twitter and Tumblr support. Animal Crossing players can take a picture in game at any point by holding down the L and R buttons simultaneously. You can then use the 3DS browser to share those photos to their social networks. We explain the whole process here.
It's excellent for people who spend their time creating designs.
Custom flag. #AnimalCrossingtwitter.com/JeffGrubb/stat…
— Jeff Grubb (@JeffGrubb) June 4, 2013
What you won't like
The occasional overwhelming sense of sameness
As much as I enjoy my time in Animal Crossing, it's hard to ignore that this is the same game I played on the GameCube. It's also the same game I played on the Nintendo DS. It's probably the same game many of you played on the Wii — I skipped that one.
I felt like I could get back into Animal Crossing again after not touching one since 2005. I was right, but even so, this is the same game. That might really dampen the experience for some people. If you exhausted this franchise with a previous release, then I doubt you'll find much worth exploring this time around.
I don't know what I would have had Nintendo change, but I feel like this is a franchise they could take a lot more risk with. That they try almost nothing new is really disappointing.
Clunky interface
What's even more frustrating about Animal Crossing's stagnation is that Nintendo doesn't just keep the good stuff. The decrepit inventory management, conversation system, and interface design also all made the jump to the 3DS.
Every little action in this game take just a few too many button presses. Donating fossils to the museum requires you to first get the curator to identify them. If you have more than one, he doesn't let you automatically contribute them. You have to advance to another menu where you can finally hand them over.
Menus to purchase items are all nested in conversations as well. So that means you'll always have to run through the dialogue to make a purchase. If you're holding the stylus, you can use it to select options, but it doesn't give them to you in big boxes like the recent Pokémon titles. Instead, you have to click on tiny text prompts that are difficult to hit.
This outdated design exists throughout. I think the designers might believe it has some kind of charm, but if it does, it didn't work on me.
Conclusion
Animal Crossing: New Leaf is a delightful way to spend a lazy afternoon. It does have stagnation issues — this is basically the same thing we played on GameCube, Nintendo DS, and Wii — but the magic is still real.
Still — it's hard not to view this aged franchise with awe. It eschews all the monetization, player-engagement, user-acquisition crap that modern developers like Zynga are obsessed with, and instead it presents a complete experience for one price. That's hard to reconcile with the constant push for additional revenue streams you get from nearly every other publisher.
That absence of DLC and microtransactions makes Animal Crossing a gameplay refuge. It stands apart from what gaming has become.
Pubg mobile pc system requirements. Many argue that free-to-play removes the barrier to entry and enables more people to experience amazing games. Yet Animal Crossing: New Leaf proves that maybe free-to-play builds up new barriers within the games that prevent us from truly embracing and loving the experience itself.
I hope Nintendo never stops making games like this.
Score: 88/100
Animal Crossing: New Leaf is due out June 9 on 3DS for $35. Nintendo provided GamesBeat with a digital copy for the purposes of this review.
Animal Crossing is one of those franchises that grows on you. At first, you're not exactly thrilled about playing a light role-playing/task-completing adventure, but the more you get to know your villagers and broaden your presence within the Animal Crossing community, the more you really get to embrace it and find new ways to expand your experience. This was certainly the case with previous releases for the game on the Nintendo GameCube and Wii systems, and no doubt it'll repeat the process with New Leaf when it makes its 3DS debut this spring.
Like before, you'll start your journey as just another member in a small village, filled with distinct animal and human characters that seem to work together side by side, though their personalities differ from one another. After all, there's no one like the guitar-strumming dog K.K. Slider. But this time around, there's a progression system, one that forces you to work your way up into better living standards, and making friends that help you broaden your place within the Animal Crossing world.
When you first begin your journey, you start in a tent, practically living out in a park. But it's not like you're homeless, as you actually have things to do around the area. It's here that Animal Crossing opens up in a number of ways, with dozens of inhabitants to chat that give you stuff to do. The better you perform within the game, the more your customization opens up. Soon enough, your small living quarters become larger with the use of a house, and the ability to outfit it with all sorts of furniture and surroundings, ranging from a wooden clock to a bathtub to a ping pong table. (And yes, if you prefer, you can put them all in the same room. Feng shui, baby!)
In addition, things can change pretty much on the fly with your character, as you can also design them however you please, with either a more distinctive appearance, or perhaps someone who's just off-beat, like a bear in a raincoat or something along those lines. With the use of a graphic overhaul, you really see these details come together on the screen, so that surroundings and villagers stand out better than before. Even in a 2D setting, you'll be able to tell the difference. And in 3D – well, suffice to say, the world definitely opens up for you. From what we've seen, it's a startling, yet not overwhelming, effect, one that should help those find comfort with the 3DS system.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf gives you plenty to do, between conversing with villagers, completing mini-game activities, rearranging stuff on your person and in your house, and even side duties, such as farming. Granted, this isn't an in-depth experience like, say, FarmVille, but you still get basics down enough that you'll feel a sense of progress with your character, adding to the game's replay value.
The game community isn't just limited to offline AI-driven characters. New Leaf will make use of Nintendo's StreetPass, with 'robust communication features' that will be put into place. Though the publisher didn't quite break down how these would be used just yet (it's still a process in development), we're guessing that you'll be able to hand down messages and items to fellow users, and maybe even mini-game challenges, to see who's the best in the community when it comes to getting things done. And no, you won't have to worry about installing some chatting device to talk with them, as you did with the Wii version. The 3DS seems prepared for such a situation.
Perhaps the biggest dynamic that you can expect in Animal Crossing is passing seasons. Over the course of spring, summer, fall and winter, you'll see changes in your village, and not just to the extent of weather. New villagers will come in to talk to, lakes that you'd normally fish in will be glazed over with ice only to thaw out again, and so on. We have yet to see these changes in action, but they sound quite promising. It'd be novel if Nintendo could figure out how to add in holiday events as well, in case people feel like passing Christmas messages to one another, or something along those lines.
But like all Animal Crossing games, New Leaf will be quite approachable for gamers of all ages and skill levels, with a simple approach to completing tasks, making friends (even K.K. Slider, that sly dog) and building your virtual collection. The most dedicated fans will get mileage out of this game, but newcomers and 3DS owners will find plenty to enjoy as well. And if Nintendo can put the StreetPass features into effect in just the right way, we'll really be getting somewhere in this town.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf hits stores this spring for Nintendo 3DS.
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