If you told me back in 2013 that almost every day I’d be playing a game that involved being a mayor and running a small town, catching bugs, going fishing and hours of home renovations then I would no doubt think you were crazy. But still I bought Animal Crossing: New Leaf on its launch almost three years ago and during that time I somehow got sucked in.
Animal Crossing is a simple game. You can sell off the bugs and fish you catch for bells (the in-game currency), which in turn lets you buy tapestries, clothes, furniture, structures and upgrades for your town. You can fill your town’s museum with fossils and marine life that you find or make a trip to a nearby island to go swimming.
I personally really dislike games that don’t actually end. The fact that you have to keep putting in time and effort into a game over a long period of time is just so tiring to me. When I first bought New Leaf, I’m pretty sure I played the game the wrong way. I wanted to makes sure that I finished whatever needed to be finished in the game as soon as possible. For Animal Crossing, I guessed what that meant was getting all the available upgrades for your house and purchasing all the structures for your town. I spent a good week just farming as many bells as I could each day before quickly burning out. Not only is there a ridiculous amount of things to get in the game, there are so many different ways to design your house and town. What would happen is I’d finish up collecting everything I’d need for a certain design, only to change it up afterwards cause I was bored of it already. I rarely stuck with a single design for more than a few days. Yeah I got pretty into it.
To make matters worse, things get more expensive as your house and town get larger and busier. But don’t worry! When it comes to your house at least, you can continue upgrading your house but if you can’t pay it off right away then Good ol’ Tom Nook will hook you up. All you have to do is pay when you can. Here’s the catch though, you can’t upgrade your house any further until you pay up. Suddenly farming for bells everyday became a lot harder. I could be catching whale sharks for hours and make enough bells to get rid of a third of the debt. And even when you did pay up the next house upgrade would be dangled in front of your eyes, except this time almost double the cost that it was before. So you had the choice of either spending even more time generating bells or upgrade it now and worry about the payment later. Now add the growing costs of the of the townspeople’s various requests and things got overwhelming really quickly. Eventually I just stopped. To me, it wasn’t worth making the time investment anymore.
Months late I picked the game back up out of boredom. I remember not even playing it for more than ten minutes. I went to the island to play the wack-a-mole mini game, my favourite thing to do in New Leaf, and then turned it off. Didn’t bother trying to make thousands of bells. I caught maybe two or three bugs and was on my way. A week later I did the same thing, except this time I noticed that some of the flowers had withered. So I walked around the town watering flowers for a while. A few days later it was the same deal – oh but this time I noticed there were a bunch of weeds everywhere! Wouldn’t hurt to clear some of them out I suppose. Might as well dig up some fossils while I’m at it…
And just like that I went back to spending hours on the game almost every day. But it was different this time around because I wasn’t spending all my time rushing to make the most amount of money I could. I enjoyed the game the way it was truly meant to be played. Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s true worth is highlighted once you commit to playing it just a little bit every now and then. That way you can truly enjoy the wealth of content it has to offer, unnoticeable at first. I could make a really cheap and cringe-y metaphor comparing it to the enjoyment of the little things in life, but I’ll spare you the eye-roll and just tell you to give this game a try.
Scripted Journal 