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GoNintendo 'End of Day' thought - Reader Review - Animal Crossing: New Leaf

by rawmeatcowboy
02 July 2013
GN Version 4.0


Friday is here already! Very excited to have some rest and relaxation. I'm sure you guys are as well, with some of you just getting into your first week of Summer vacation! I hope you're all enjoying that time off! See you in a few, short hours.


Looks like the reader reviews section is catching on! I'm noticing a lot more interaction with our games database. This time we have a review of Animal Crossing: New Leaf from reader Sailing_Day!

Remember, we're always looking for more reader reviews. Just hit up the list here and pick a game, then write up a review to be featured in a later Reader Reviews post!

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Out of all of Nintendo's franchises, Animal Crossing has always been one of their most ambitious. Underneath the simple Nintendo 64 graphics of the original laid an astonishingly deep and complex game; one that aimed to suck you in not for just hundreds of hours, but forever. The game shouted its mantra of complete freedom-- you, the player, were completely free to do with your rural town as you pleased. If you wanted to cultivate it, you could make the greatest town around, or you could let it fall into ruin and let it get covered with weeds. Yet, it was still an oddly rigid and structured experience. There were rules you had to live by, and you could even say there was a right and a wrong way to play the game. But still, the potential shone through brilliantly, and it was fulfilled with its DS successor, Wild World.

Wild World was pretty much the same game downsized for everybody's favorite portable system. However, it did a brilliant job of reasserting the original's claim: this is your town, you can make it into whatever you want. You could lay patterns on the ground to create roads, and you could now customize your character with hats and accessories. It became a much more personal experience, made even more compelling by being one of Nintendo's first online offerings. Despite its numerous limitations, and the unwieldy Friend Code system, it was still a blast to play Wild World online.

The series then went straight into a ditch with the third title, City Folk. The series' Wii offering reprised some of the content that was unfortunately cut from Wild World, but it was so shockingly similar to its predecessor that it led to accusations of it being a mere port, and if you have played this game, you know these are not unfounded claims. Now on the Wii, the identical graphics were officially two whole console generations behind, the online multiplayer featured no improvements and it even featured much of the same music as Wild World. The titular addition to the game, the city, was such a spectacularly bland addition that it was shocking that they thought to base the whole game around it-- all it did was take the previous games' special visitors and consolidate them into one always accessible zone. At the time, it seemed like Nintendo had run out of ideas for the series, but little did we know, they would bounce back and give us something greater than ever before.

Full review here