185. That's how many days it has been since the newest Animal Crossing game, New Leaf, released.
185. That's how many days I've played Animal Crossing: New Leaf.
I've played the same game, for at least 30 minutes a day, for half a year. Sometimes I don't even want to play. It will be nine or ten in the evening and it will hit me that I haven't played Animal Crossing yet. On days like those I will do the bare minimum of my daily Animal Crossing routine. The bare minimum being: watering flowers, digging up fossils, talking to villagers, and checking the stores.
You know, the bare minimum seems like a lot when I write it out like that.
However, on the days when I don't play out of some bizarre combination of obligation and guilty, I will sometimes get the wonderful feeling that the first Animal Crossing gave me. I would describe it as joyful peace... or peaceful joy. Now, though, that feeling is sprinkled with a little nostalgia.
You see, although I am an unabashed lover of the series, New Leaf is the first Animal Crossing since the original Gamecube game that I truly enjoy. I played the DS and Wii iterations of the series, but both felt like half-steps or half-measures. The series had grown stagnant. So stagnant, that I would still play the original over the sequels with far more to do. More fish, furniture, fossils, and flowers are great, but neither of those games matched the charm and quaintness of the first Animal Crossing.
It is hard for me to even pin-point what exactly Nintendo did with New Leaf that they didn't Wild World and City Folk. Could it be a simple as the broadening the 'rolling globe' effect when moving around your village? Perhaps. The village does seem more vast and welcoming than in the previous two games.
Much more likely, however, is that changing the player's role from villager to mayor injected the series with a newness it had been missing.
Although Animal Crossing is part-life simulator, part-resource management, and part-social network with anthropomorphic mammals, reptiles, amphibians, etc., it is first and foremost a RPG. So, by giving players the option to change their village how they want, Nintendo gave players the level of personalization they didn't even know they were craving.
