So what's awesome about Animal Crossing: New Leaf?

I'm looking for a new 3DS game and I've been eyeing the new Animal Crossing game. I've never played any of the previous installments.

Here are my questions.

To those who love this game: What's so awesome about it?

To those who don't like this game: Why do you not like it?

Basically, it's a highly customizable life sim where you play as a human mayor of a town full of anthropomorphic animals. There's something to do every day of every month of every year. You help build the town, manage where things go, expand your house, do favors for your villagers, buy/sell furniture, buy/sell/make clothing, plants flowers and trees, go fishing, etc. You can visit other people's towns online or invite people to your town. Every town is different and randomly generated from the start. Animal Crossing games are known for being incredibly addicting.

The short answer is that it's a really relaxing, but still fun game. I think AC games have a fairly decent quality of gameplay to them, and could be enjoyed by both hardcore and casual gamers alike.

Each game is pretty much the same deal, and you do pretty much the same things, but the newest one is usually the one to get. Your character's initial appearance is determined by how you answer questions, which is annoying, but you can modify your character to some extent as you play the game - there are usually guides for helping you get a certain look, also. Then you usually get to name your town, and the game begins with your character moving to this new town and arriving by train.

Every time you start playing an Animal Crossing game, the town you create will be randomly-generated and unique. You can typically only have one save file per game (and you can restart it), but the beauty of AC is that you can usually have other people visit your town, and visit other peoples' towns. In the Gamecube/N64 original, you could have four players move in to one town, and if your friend played it while you were away and you came back to the game, you would see the town impacted by your friends' actions. But it's cool never knowing what kind of town you will spawn - sometimes you'll have apple trees and other times peach trees, and sometimes you'll have a long beach with a waterfall while other times you'll have several screens' worth of grass and bushes.

Also unique are the neighbors who inhabit your village. There are dozens of different animals - cats, dogs, frogs, koalas, squirrels, birds, lizards - who can move in to your village. And they all have different kinds of personalities and mannerisms. Some will be vain and always talk about working out, some are friendly and will give you presents if you talk to them often, and others can be crabby and only come outside at night. Part of the joy of AC is conversing with your animal neighbors, especially when they have something new or different to talk about.

Usually when you begin the game, your character will have financial trouble, and will need to run errands to help earn money to pay off their house debt. You're usually relegated to a delivery-man/assistant position for a bit, working for the raccoon shopkeeper Tom Nook. Once you pay off a small sum of your house debts, you leave the job behind and can just do whatever you want in the town for the rest of the game. It's kind of a shame that there aren't freelance jobs you could take on in AC, since that could be fun. But in New Leaf you get to be a Mayor, which I imagine gives you some new gameplay possibilities.

You get your own house in the village which you can expand and get multiple floors for as you pay off your debts. You can choose the color of your roof and siding. Inside, you can customize your wallpaper and flooring with different patterns, and decorate your house with various pieces of furniture and statues you obtain or buy from Nook's store. You can collect pieces from a specific themed set, or mix and match. You can even practice Feng Shui. Aside from being fun for customization purposes, designing your home to look nice and well-kept can earn you a good standing with the 'Happy House Academy', which frequently rates your home.

You can also customize your character and buy them different clothes and accessories. You can get different kinds of haircuts and styles, dye your hair any color imaginable pretty much, and get shades or a hat or whatever.

As the year passes in real-time, various events will occur in your town. There are scheduled Holidays every year - real and fictional ones. Check out the game on Thanksgiving Day and you might find something going on, but check in on some Summer Day and there might be a relay race going on or something. And usually once a month Red will open a Black Market shop in town, and every Sunday this one lady comes and sells turnips, which you can buy and sell kind of like a foreign stock market currency. There's often something going on in the game, even if it's just your neighbors going about their daily lives and fighting with each other, or snow falling in Winter.

I will say that you can get bored of AC after a while if you spend too much time on it at once. There is quite a bit to do, but the passage of time always helps make things more interesting. You can go fishing and dig up fossils and net butterflies with friends, and that can be fun, but AC is really a game you can play however you want - there's not a set objective or ending.

Well, sorry that got really long-winded... I wanted to do a good job of explaining what you can expect from Animal Crossing, and I think that is a pretty good overview of it. They're pretty fun games, and especially if you haven't played any of them before, it's worth checking out. I owned the Gamecube version, and then got Wild World on the DS, and I enjoyed both of them quite a bit - and I still plan on getting New Leaf. It might not be new or groundbreaking anymore, but there's really a nice charm to the AC games, and if Nintendo ever decides to act on it then there is probably a lot they could do to expand upon this formula with future installments. I say, give it a go.

- Initially, it's exploring the world

- Then, it becomes about collecting

- Then you settle in, and it becomes a mixture of relaxing and collecting

- Once settled, you play in short bursts to check out what's new, collect the odd item, and continue to relax

That just about sums it up for me. It's a fun game :) I only played the GCN and Wii versions so far though. Haven't played the handheld versions yet. It's definitely a game you can become bored of at some point, and possibly skip an installment due to how similar the games can be.

Good replies, everyone! I decided to pick it up. I went ahead and bought it from the eshop. because it looks like a game I should have ready to go at any time.

Well written. Thanks

Have fun!

It is certainly not for everyone, and I can see why some people find it boring. Personally, I have spent over 150 hours on New Leaf, and I only stopped because I ended up being overwhelmed by other new games, working and studying.

Ya you're right about it's not for everyone. I tried to get into the game, I really did, and I actually enjoyed it, but later on I just quit on the game. I want to get back into it, but I don't think I have enough love for this genre to continue. Heh first world problems I suppose.

I didn't read your whole post and just skimmed it, but I did notice an error. You can have more than one save in Animal crossing, but it will be in the same town. I don't think you can created a second town with a second save though. Both me and my girl each have a char in Animal Crossing New Leaf with one game cartridge and we share the town. I am the Mayor. :P

Oh that's cool, I actually didn't know you could still have multiple residents in a single game. That's how it was on the Gamecube one, but I was actually wondering after I wrote that if you could still play it that way.

I could probably play on my girlfriend's copy then. But I kinda want to make my own town. I wanna be Mayor, dogonnit!

HAHA Lol I know the feeling. I bought me Animal Crossing and my girl made her char first, which made her mayor. I had her delete it and made me a char, then let her make a char. I too want to be the mayor.

EDIT: You can also have more than one char in the same town in the DS Animal Crossing. Not sure about New Leaf, but the DS version will allow you and three others to share the town. I would guess New Leaf is the same, but I haven't tested it to actually know.

Animal Crossing is the sort of game, you're either into or not. It's along the lines of stuff like SimCity or Nintendogs. If you're all about action and saving the day, then AC is definitely not for you. One thing market research has found is that AC much like the Sims and Nintendogs is that it's a popular game with women and being a girl myself, I think it plays on one's instinct to care for something. I love AC the same way I loved Nintendogs or the Chao Gardens in the Sonic Adventure games.

First off, you get a lot of freedom in the game. You know in Minecraft, you're plopped into the world, shown the basics, then you're free to roam around and do as you please. You have some objective namely, not getting eaten by creepers at night but otherwise you can do pretty much as you like. AC is the same way. You're given a town (and in this most recent one can pick a setup) and while the main goal is to payoff and upgrade your house, you can do this at your leisure and in any way you want. You can collect fruit, catch fish, do tasks for everyone or not pay your mortgage at all but most of us want to work for something so you do want to pay off the house to work up to a bigger and better place and New Leaf introduces the mayoral aspect so now your funds are divided between paying your house and paying for public works.

And AC gives you responsibility. If you're gone too long, your town goes to crap. Weeds grow, residents wonder where you went though this newest one isn't as hard on you as the GC one was. And while you could find a gazillion knockoffs of AC on Facebook and mobile devices, this one doesn't force microtransactions on you or make you bother friends for stuff.

It's also one of those games that's good to play if you're the kind who only has an hour or so to spare each day as most of the stuff can be done within an hour or so and you usually have to wait until the next day for new fossils to show up, fruit to respawn and items to change in the store so if you're the kind who likes to play a new game for 10 hours straight, AC is definitely not that kind of game. But you want to keep coming back to it namely because new things happen all the time. I remember when I played WoW, I loved all the holidays and fesitvals they had at certain times of the year and AC does that too. They throw you a surprise party on your birthday. A reindeer visits on Christmas Eve. They countdown to New Years. Of course if you don't want to wait for said holiday, you can always just play around with the 3DS clock.

It's really a lot of factors. Working towards improving your home and town. Discovering new things each day. Trying to fill up your museum or collecing all the Nintendo themed items with the fortune cookies. Also while it has a ways to go, this has one of the better online community setups. I love getting people's street pass homes in the HHA showcase and seeing other people's towns with the Dream suite.