Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Animal Crossing: New Leaf will waste hours of your life. It makes no attempt to tell you that there's any point to the various mindless actions the player can make; it's comfortable being a game about collecting fish and making sure the virtual rooster living next door to you is having a nice day. I'd normally frown at the kind of real-time linked 'progression' that New Leaf offers, but it's there to teach you that this game is best enjoyed as a little ritual once ever day or so for a while.

It also teaches the player a valuable lesson about deforestation, with the player's greed pitted against the promise of thousands of bells if they demolish the game's tropical island.

It's a game I don't like liking. I'm not sure if I even do anymore, and whether my rating is based on enjoyment or guilt for abandoning my townsfolk to a life of weeds and aimless, mayorless wandering.

this game is genuinely perfect from the atmosphere to the music to the main street to the town to the villagers, everything is perfect. No matter what you do in this game you will be completely immersed and it will be extremely fun. The problem with New Horizons is even though I loved the designing aspect, I was not immersed at all. i didn't enjoy talking to my villagers or running around catching bugs and fish, everything just felt like a chore. In this game though I could do those things for hours on end. The online multiplayer, the scores for decorating the house, the progression, the main street unlocking more buildings, everything in this game is just so cool.

This game makes me feel like a crazy person. I am simply incapable of understanding what there is to like about it. I played it for about two weeks, dutifully going through its mindless day-to-day activities, swatting away the endlessly repeating sequences of dialog boxes associated with those activities, waiting for something interesting or memorable or funny to happen, waiting to feel some tiny pull of compulsion to keep playing beside the knowledge that other people seem to really like it. Nothing ever came. I didn't even dislike it. This game is just... nothing. There's nothing here. It's a fidget toy that requires your full attention. All the time I spent with it felt like flushing my time down the drain. Eventually, a gnawing sense of the opportunity cost of playing this game versus doing literally anything else with my time became too much and I had to give up.

There isn't anything 'fun' about this game. Let me clarify that, otherwise the score I gave it seems terribly inflated. Animal Crossing is a game in which you collect virtual items and talk to virtual townsfolk for your own amusement. The only real 'goal' is to pay-off loans, with all but the first being optional. There is no endgame, per se. There's no story, no narrative; Animal Crossing is exactly what you make of it. If there is anything fun to this game, it's what you bring to it. It's like popcorn at a movie. You hardly notice yourself eating it, but you love the smell before hand. It's a game that seems fun at first, but somehow becomes a chore that... yes, is still fun if you want it to be. Imagine if Minecraft severely limited your toolset, your crafting possibilities, and instead sent you on fetchquests - this is what Animal Crossing is, and for some reason I feel bad for liking it as much as I do.