Review Notebook: Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Not every keen observation or incisive critique can make the final review cut. Review Notebook brings to you my sometimes inane, occasionally pedantic, but always entertaining raw playthrough scribblings to fill in the critical picture. Choice bits — those that didn’t make their way into the review — are bolded.

• Blathers identifies fossils, saving you the Faraway Museum’s overnight wait
• Circle pad works well for movement, and separating the run and use buttons is a welcome change
• Save anywhere is nice
• The villagers are much more present in the smaller town, staying in the same areas for extended periods of time and coming to and fro in the various shops
• Tom Nook is a lazy son of a bitch
• Neat that the villagers can come up with a nickname for you; neater still that it can spread to others
• The game does a great job keeping a carrot dangled in front of the player
• Gardening gets addictive damn quick
• A museum map would have been appreciated for the now multi-sectioned wings
• The exhibits themselves are much improved, with donation dates and individual descriptions – impressive for such a robust bestiary
• Just had Sally the chipmunk visit my house for a bit. She complimented my aloe. This game does a phenomenal job connecting you with the villagers
• Portia came to the flea market and bought my hammock
• Dpad item quickswitching is lovely
• I do miss the donation-induced blathering of Blathers; they had more personality than the exhibit descriptions
• Villagers display items you give them in their houses
• 13 hours played before I could even begin public works projects or enact ordinances
• Lyle’s HHA actually makes me give a damn about my score
• 180-space dressers make me rock-hard
• I think the music changes into a different arrangement when it rains
• Placing public works projects is a real pain in the ass. Why not make it grid-based with the option to rotate? It’s damn near impossible to put stuff where you want, made all the more frustrating by the games ridiculous proximity limitations. I wanted a streetlight at the end of the bridge; I ended up building it 10 feet away.
• There really ought to be more than four ordinances, that’s very disappointing
• The game could use some more Cyrus-like wait times, where something will take 30 minutes to a couple of hours to complete. It’s a bit cheap how everything takes one day to finish.
• I wish villagers were more interactive. They never catch fish or bugs, they never come up and talk to you (though the “surprise approach” is a fair solution), they never use benches, and their daily schedule seems to consist solely of milling about near the bridge. It’s an improvement over AC GCN, but it could be much better.