Animal Crossing: New Leaf

I don’t know if I will play yet today (and if I do, don’t expect much) as I don’t feel too up to it, but I’ve been seeing stuff about the Harvest Festival around and I guess I wanted to talk about it a bit.

To start, I’ll say that 5 people in my household play Animal Crossing, 4/5 which actually can play (as my sister’s 3DS was stolen), and only 2 of us finished–all those counts include me so yes, besides myself, just one person finished–my mom. She finished about 9:30PM last night while I finished about 3PM. She even had me upstairs at one point to help her, but despite diving for over an hour, I didn’t even get a large shadow to show up to try and catch a lobster. It wasn’t even a matter of trying–it was a matter of seeing one appear in the first place. And even then, once one appeared, it’d be hoping it would be one.

Which was part of what caused me an issue–it took me forever to finally catch a Red Snapper. Even when I needed a Sea Bass for a village, it seemed the suddenly common fish that tortured many had finally stopped showing up.

I think the event was creative and fun in idea–but a lot of the fun was lost in the execution due to just how random it got. Not to mention despite all the effort, there’s only 2 items you actually get from Franklin that are unique–the Harvest Festival is for sale all month long afterall and while you do get 2 pieces from him, you can be unlucky like me and get the same piece twice. Thankfully, I already had the set catalogged.

The Fruit Basket is cute, but the Cornucopia really surprised me with how nicely made it is. It’s a lot cuter than I expected. But I don’t think they will catch everyone’s interests. While I definitely preferred the cooking and fun of the event to trying to find Franklin and stealing silverware from previous games, it also felt a good deal harder. Maybe if I was lucky and caught everything I needed on my first try and automatically had what my villagers were looking for (why couldn’t they ever want fruit for an ingredient? Why always some kind of fish?) it wouldn’t have felt so bad. But I wasn’t lucky and the hours spent reminded me of some of the stress of trying to catch a fish that was only available that month or it was the last chance–and I only had a day for this (and not a full day mind you–it really is the holiday here in the US afterall). I think that’s the biggest thing though and even though it’s a game everyone can enjoy, the longer events quickly can become frustrating–especially when it becomes something that relies even more so on luck than anything. After spending 3 days cooking and having dinner with family and etc., I was exhausted. The first thing I did upon finishing the event was just pass out in bed. I was so so so tired. So maybe the event felt more draining to me or frustrating due to that.

I don’t think I’d want to go back to the older events–I really liked this one more. I just wish it wasn’t so luck-based… or that I wasn’t so unlucky.