Patreon Letters - 25th November, 2017

Hello friends, M here. Writing in the middle of the Thanksgiving weekend is a little like working a night shift, in that I'm pretty sure I'm writing into a void this weekend. But I do have something on my mind, and that something is Animal Crossing. 

I've been a huge fan of Animal Crossing since it first came out in America on the Gamecube. It might be my favorite thing Nintendo makes? I don't know. That's a fierce competition and while I want to say that I'm not sure I can actually commit when WarioWare exists. Or Mario. Or Rhythm Heaven. Or Kirby. Ugh its so hard. You understand. 

Anyway, I'm only saying that to let you know I'm something of an Animal Crossing die hard. I've put hundreds of hours into three of the main games (I skipped the Wii one). I've written about my year playing New Leaf daily. And so I was both excited and hesitant to get into the newest Animal Crossing release, the mobile Pocket Camp, when it released this week.

Nintendo's mobile games have been an interesting trajectory. If you haven't been following along, here's what they've been up to:

• Miitomo is basically the world's dumbest platform for dress up, a strange toy of an app with an awful dropping game in it for good measure, and the fact that it exists at all is destined to be one of those Nintendo trivia pieces in ten years. 
• Mario Run is a really cool game, but it's an actual video game you spend money on, so it was not only not-profitable-enough for Nintendo, but it's also a strange take on a Runner that has really cool ideas, but it's more of phone game with Mario themeing than it feels like a Real Mario Game. It's still Core Mario, though, for what it's worth. 
• Fire Emblem Heroes mixes all the anxiety of Fire Emblem strategy (to me anyway, I'm bad at strategy games) with the endless grind of gacha pulls to summon your favorite sword wife from the slot machine of life. People seem to really like that game? I know friend-of-the-show Heather Alexandra still plays it. Most of my friends play Granblue, which I assume is similar? Gacha games make me feel queasy, so I don't know much about them. Sorry. 
• Now Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, an attempt to replicate the 'full' Animal Crossing experience on your phone. Which means fishing, bug collecting, tree shaking, furniture making, interior decorating, loan repaying, etc. Which is the thing I really want to talk about. 

Pocket Camp is absolutely the closest one of these has gotten to replicating the game it's a mobile version of. Animal Crossing is mostly here! It's all the sights and sounds from the games, the subset of villagers that made it in are as cute and ridiculous as you remember, and the strange vertical screen actually ends up making the world feel very cozy and small in a way that suits Animal Crossing. At first glance it's just one of these games. Sure it has some timers and a paid currency, but Animal Crossing was always about the long game. Who cares?

The problem is, in making a game that is a pretty good simulacrum of 'real' Animal Crossing, the gaps really start to show if you're at all familiar with the original games. So let's talk about the list of things that end up really standing out as your resident Animal Crossing Expert. 

There are only two dozen villagers, it seems like. Maybe that number expands, but I'm level 21 in game (a new villager shows up every level) and it feels like a small subset and that subset is the same for everyone. There isn't that jealousy that your friend got a villager you desperately want or the hope that maybe that robot frog will move in when your third stupid mouse leaves. You're all going to have the same villagers until the end of time. 

Those villagers aren't as interesting as they should be. When they loiter around your camp they're often doing the cute animations one would expect from AC villagers, but when you talk to them their reactions and requests are funneled into only a handful of categories based on what type of villager they are. The divides between a Cool villager and a Cute one are obvious and grating when you unlock a new character and immediately he sounds just like the cat you had in hour one. They don't have the more charming dialog that villagers used to have when you'd just roll up and ask them about their day. You can't change their nicknames, so every sporty type will call you brosephine until the end of time. That by itself should be illegal. 

Gathering has no sense of discovery. You'll quickly find the 8 bug types and 8 ocean fish and 8 river fish in the game. Some of them are really rare and you'll never see them, but it doesn't seem so far like the game rotates them out by season or anything because there's no collection mechanic because fish and bugs aren't collectibles for their own sake, they're grinding materials for villager requests. The removal of Blathers and the collecting really takes away what, to me, was one of the key components of Animal Crossing. So much time was spent making sure I would get each month's new bugs and fish, and that just doesn't exist here. It's just another resource to gather en masse.

The free to play grind really crushes creativity specifically where it comes to furniture. I can build neat furniture I guess but the game incentivizes building the stuff villagers want to get them into your camp. That means i'm always strapped for materials because I'm building ugly shit I don't want just because I really want Chrissy in my camp because she's cute but she has awful taste. And getting those materials is actual hours worth of work. 

Because crafting is your main mode of construction the shops have been very de-emphasized. Nooks has three items on a rotation I still can't discern because it doesn't match the rest of the game's 3 hour timers. They're often bad items, and they're always overpriced because you gain bells so much slower than in other ACs. The Able Sisters and Kicks rotate so its either shoes or clothes on any given rotation, but they also only have three and I've already seen repeats? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO LOOK CUTE ON THESE GARBAGE TIMERS, GAME?!

At least so far, it looks like there's no special events. You can get Tom Nook or KK Slider in your camp, but that's just by building a special item and I think (I haven't made them) that means they just hang in your camp now for good. Which sounds like the opposite of a special event. But it doesn't look like the game has Gracie, or Joan, or Gulliver, or any of the other many surprising visitors who can drift into a town to change the focus for a day. And that's not including the holidays. The game launched in time for Thanksgiving, but there's no traditional Harvest Festival event with Franklin the Turkey. Which means there's probably no special events at all. Which, frankly, sucks. 

None of this is even touching on the leaf tickets, and the ways in which many of the timers can be sped up or your crafting materials shortcutted by spending a paid currency. The game offers them up pretty steadily, to be fair, at least as far as I can tell to date. But all of it reinforces the general free to play ethos: everything is scarce because you need to come back when the timers recharge to get more of those scarce materials, and if you get frustrated maybe you should spend a few bucks to get this one thing done faster. One time ain't gonna hurt anyone. Until the next one time. And the one after that. So it goes.

Nintendo has said that they want their mobile games to mostly serve as advertisements for the actual games they intend to release, and honestly if that's their motivation they're doing a very good job, because so far my ~5 days with Pocket Camp have mostly just made me want to go back to Happy Home Designer and make some damn houses without worrying about an economy. Like any advertising, it's maybe not for me, because I look at it and see just how poorly it captures a lot of the nuance that makes Animal Crossing special. I have the real thing, why would I spend more time in this poor substitute outside of sheer boredom? Especially when undoubtedly a new Animal Crossing for Switch is currently in development. 

But I wonder whether this is actually going to sell people on real Animal Crossing. I feel like Animal Crossing is a known thing. If anyone was on twitter during the release of New Leaf, it was everywhere for like three weeks as the entire internet collectively became mayors. Being shown a hollow version of the Animal Crossing loops, stripped of a lot of the charm and warmth, left mostly as dopamine milestones on the endless treadmill of grinding those levels, leave me wondering how you sell people on the 'real' version of this. That version has no leveling, no microtransactions, is just a cozy, surprisingly deep world to interact with in that aimless, Animal Crossing way. Will anyone who isn't converted already buy new hardware for that? Will Nintendo actually know how to upsell those people on that game without just showing them that the time they spent in Pocket Camp is shallow bullshit compared to what they could get in New Leaf or whatever comes next? 

I know this: the closer Nintendo gets to making their mobile games look like the games they're based on, the more the difference show and the harder I bounce off the game. Mario Run might end up the most interesting version of Nintendo mobile games by default because, for all its weirdness, it's trying something new (for Nintendo) and has the economy stuff that drives these sorts of games stripped right out of it because it's just a game you buy. And I'm left with an Animal Crossing I don't think I like or want to play, but maybe I'll keep around out of a stupid sense of brand loyalty.

Video games are stupid, but not as stupid as me for caring about them like this. Long live Nintendo, I guess? That's a bleaker ending than I intend it, but honestly, I did plan my day yesterday around being able to shake my apple tree four times without using fertilizer so ... fuck video games.

Until next time.