1. I have been curious about Animal Crossing: New Leaf since I went to Japan a bit before its Western release and noticed that pretty much everyone I StreetPassed was playing it. I only got around to it like six years later. Whoops! Turns out it is some kind of do-your-chores sim and that is more fun than it sounds.
2. There is no avoiding this fact: the point of this game is to waste your real life time. There's barely any skill-based challenge, there's no thrilling story nor captivating conclusion. It's not that there's nothing going on, it's just that stuff just sort of happens and it's no big deal. You while away time doing whatever you see fit and when you are done, you are done.
3. The setup is you arrive to a new town and your task is to build a life for yourself. You are also mayor because this is a video game so of course you are the center of the universe.
4. You are given a few hours worth of tasks to start out w/ to learn the ropes and after that you are pretty much free to do whatever you might want. Mostly, you will do chores to make money and then use that money to by stuff. You can also just wander around, fish, chat folks up and do whatever the hell.
5. This is really a game that's meant to be played in relatively short sessions over the course of weeks, months and years. Everything is tied to real world seasons and time. From the outset, there are important events that require you to wait at least overnight to occur--and I do mean overnight for you, not your character.
6. It is also just kinda boring to play in marathon sessions. It makes up for this by having a really satisfying gameplay loop that works for an hour or so at a time.
7. Your moment to moment activity will largely consist of item collection. There's bugs about, fossils to dig up, fish to fish, fruit and flowers to pick. Your inventory is limited enough that you have to be constantly deciding when to go back and get rid of some of some of your stuff.
8. You have a few options as far as what you do w/ the stuff you find laying around. You will sell most of it but some items can be collected in a museum and some can be planted. The money you make can be used to upgrade your house and build structures around town.
9. You can invite friends to your town or go and visit your friends' towns but, let's face it, its 2018 at the time of writing this and nobody has friends anymore. That ship has sailed.
10. There are a couple things that are a little tricky, specifically fishing and catching bugs. Eventually, you find a few time based type challenges you can engage in as well but Animal Crossing is definitely a game that veers very strongly into relaxing territory. The biggest challenge here is generally just choosing how you are going to waste your time.
11. At first I was impressed by how little you actually had to do any particular thing in this but then I realized that is pretty much the case w/ any game. You don't have to play any of them at all! This just has a striking absence of clear goals.
12. There are a lot of instances where you've got to go through a lot of button presses and waiting to do simple things in this. For example, you endlessly go through the same few conversational prompts upon entering a store for the entire duration of the game. It's like Ground Hog's Day. Given that the object of this game is just to spend time playing it, this is not really not as big of a negative as it would generally be in a normal game.
13. What ends up being remarkable about Animal Crossing: New Leaf is how it can manage to steal an hour or more of your free time by stringing together semi-boring tasks and that you don't even notice it. You are walking around and find a promising spot on the ground to dig up but you are already loaded on fish and flowers so you wind up taking a detour to go to the store and sell off some stuff and get distracted by bug catching before you ever get back to dig up whatever it was you wanted to dig up earlier. There are loops w/in loops and there is always some distraction that seems a little better than whatever you are currently doing. I think this describes very well how it works as a game. It's not the most fun thing in the world but definitely seems better than whatever else you were doing in real life.
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