Sure, it's the cutest Animal Crossing to come out, but it is also the most lackluster for me. I don't know if I'm like the go-to-guy for Animal Crossing but I think me making a megathread on it a year or so ago with regular updates to the OP even knowing people probably don't really check it out shows that I love the series, but maybe that love for it made me not like this addition as much. I was really excited to play this game initially after seeing all that cool hoo-haa that you could do shown in the trailers as I for one love games with in-depth customization, and I had a pretty in-depth discussion with Fastlex, whom was on the other hand, not as excited. A few days before I got it, I read in GameInformer that they gave it a 5/10, and I was like "What that's crazy!" but I've slowly begun to understand why such a low rating. Albeit this is a spin-off, the biggest mechanic of Animal Crossing that this game fails to capture for me is virtual reward.
Getting new furniture doesn't feel that good and a lot of the house building procedures feels tedious. You have to save every time you finish a build, and that gets annoying when all you want to do is, for example, move a piece of furniture somewhere else. I personally don't care if its somewhat realistic or not to write a report after moving a carpet one space to the right, I just want to do it then and there when I'm in the building or whatever, but maybe that's just me. However it makes sense when you have to move a character's house from one location from the other, but even that gets annoying because that is the only way to upgrade someone's house. I would have preferred if you could just select a higher level floor plan once you get that option once for every future house.
Not to mention the extreme lack of difficulty really makes each villager's house feel less and less unique to build. I wish you had to appeal to a villager's interests more, like for example: "Hey, Axel is a jock, maybe along with some dentistry furniture I should sneak in some athletic stuff for him!" I would have loved some sort of a percentage that you would have to reach until a villager would claim they either loathed it, liked it, or loved it, because then you would maybe feel bad if you just skimped on a villager's house because, I don't know, they're ugly and you just want their furniture set? Hell, even the characters themselves feel less different because most of their dialog loops way more often than in the older games. I think a shining example of the lack of individuality that each character has is in the furniture, because in the older games your character would have a plethora of lines to say about opening dressers and stuff. This character has two, "Oops I opened it..." and "I'm going to pretend I didn't see that." I understand that this game is definitely focusing on the house aspect of Animal Crossing rather than the villager aspect, but all in all the motivation to build a cool house is weakened by the fact that the villager living in the cool house isn't as cool comparatively, but I may be just be biased in comparing it to its prior games.
Maybe I would have more fun with it if I had the amiibo cards or paced out house building so its once per day because I had already gotten all the emotions and finished the city, but I don't know. I don't think I'm going to return it any time soon but given the option I might, I mean I haven't made houses for the characters I know I like and are in the game yet and I haven't actually tried to completely upgrade someone's house so there is a small replay value factor for me. But give it a shot for yourself and judge if its for you, because that's really what matters! However, I think with the new villager interactions, some interesting new furniture (namely the ceiling, rug, and wall stuff), how furniture can be placed now is somewhat of a step forward and hopefully will be implemented in a future main series thing, and it begs the question: Where will the next main series Animal Crossing game go from here?
