It isn’t that the writing is good-and it’s beyond good, it’s ebullient and snappy and very, very funny-or that townspeople never seem to say something out of character. It isn’t just that NPCs will approach to tell you they talked to one of your real-life friends and add “she’s such a fashionista!” and you think to yourself, yeah, she really is. What gets me is how immediately alive Animal Crossing: New Leaf is. One morning, when I am packing my 3DS into my purse-not to play it, but to get streetpasses from other Animal Crossing players while I run errands-I realize I am staying in a very real neighborhood dotted with strangers, each with her own spectacular inner life. A friend puts his clothing designs on display in one of my shops another visitor remarks how amazing these are.
My real-life friends trade me furniture, send letters, leave dryly funny notes on my town bulletin board. Two of these men live in different parts of Australia, while the third is in Malaysia. One late night I’ll host three men in my villager’s house. At 2:00 AM I find a friend in England, where it is 10 AM I take the train to visit his town, where it is also 10 AM. We keep having these protracted conversations in-game: I’ll hunch myself over the machine, jabbing at its onscreen keyboard with a stylus, slow and deliberate.īy evening my town will shutter, so I look for other open towns. I start leaving my town’s gates open while I work at home on my laptop, hurrying across the room toward the 3DS anytime I hear the little reveille announcing a visitor’s arrival.
“I’m writing him a love letter right now,” she tells me. (“Thank you for noticing,” I agree, much too pleased.) Another friend instant-messages to let me know that Kyle, my rock star wolf-man who has a way with the ladies, is the love of her life.
Another friend marvels to me how adorable my villager Bluebear is. Soon a real-life friend is teasing me for what he feels is my wholly inappropriate crush on Cranston, a stork. My flowers are shimmering because someone recently watered them for me. I heard from friends and strangers alike: I should plant red rosebushes close together if I want to grow black ones to reel in a shark, I must close my eyes and listen harder for audio cues if I find myself tripping a lot, I have been temporarily cursed with bad luck. She speaks to you in a chirpy sort of Simlish.īut Isabelle’s guidance was eventually not enough for me, so I took to the Internet with my questions. Other villagers are happy to help you find your way, of course: chief among these is your assistant Isabelle, a blonde canine who is in turns instructive and conciliatory. There are no tutorials here you are left to wing it. From the get-go I had no idea what I was doing, which is horrifying, as I’d already begun my reign as mayor. And there’s an island! And if you play enough, you can go to strangers’ islands, and they can come to yours! But only if you want to do that, because you don’t have to do anything. And flowers! And fish, and bugs crawling around everywhere making noisy bug sounds. You’re a town mayor, right, and you have this house, which can get bigger if you spend enough money on it. What is the point of this game? Who are you? What do you do in it? I’ve been playing for weeks, and I still can’t tell you. But it’s also a social game-not in the nasty way we usually mean “social,” but in the way its reward system sinks its hooks. I know I’ve been addicted in the past: to a browser game called Glitch, for one, and to a Facebook game called Mafia Wars, for a much more humiliating other one.Īnimal Crossing: New Leaf isn’t quite a simulation rather, it’s part of a genre I’ve always called “cultivation.” It’s a game about gardening, really, where “gardening” is an apt metonym for New Leaf’s low-key economy of reaping exactly what you sow. I always swore I’d never play an Animal Crossing game, probably half out of disgust-were a game’s screenshots ever more gooily twee?-and half out of conviction. That friend was a liar: I haven’t played anything else on my 3DS since I downloaded this software. Someone told me it was a good game to not-own-on-cartridge, since I’d want to dedicate only a few minutes each day to playing.
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Animal Crossing: New Leaf is the first full game I’ve downloaded to my 3DS.