Welcome to the game of the most awkward control scheme(for a PS4 Controller)! And also real time! Yes, the game uses your computer’s own time and date for the game’s time, basing even holidays.. and your own birthday in the game.
This is a unique game. It simulates community life. You know.. actually helping others (except in a game)? That’s pretty much what it is. However, it’s more of the dark side of life. As in, mortgage that a certain Raccoon (named ‘Tom Nook’) gives you for wanting to own a house.
What, you really thought you were going to be able to own a house for free? This isn’t Minecraft (and there’s also no Creepers). I’ll get more on this cute, but also annoying rodent later.
The game first starts of the player being introduced by Rover, a talking cat. He wants to help you get you on your way to a bus. If you have a saved game, you can use this to load your game.
For people with the previous game “Wild World” from the Nintendo DS, you can move your save over. For people like me, you can start fresh.
Once on the bus, you can set your name, pick your gender by picking the “I’m not a boy!” option(if you’re a girl). After that, you can pick the town name that you’ll be staying in for the rest of your virtual life. I named mine… “Failvile” (wanted to call it “Failville”, but I had to use one less ‘l’ due to a character limit).
After the bus ride, it’s time to discover the very.. very bad way of moving your flailing-armed character around. This is a point-and-click movement game, instead of the standard “left for Left, right for Right” setup. Why in the hell did they make it like this!?
Bah. Obviously, this isn’t that bad using a Wiimote and the Nunckuk attachment (what this game was designed for). I should think about actually buying one of these on eBay. Be able to play these games on an actual Wiimote instead of a controller. Of course, I’ll also have to buy a Bluetooth device and a Balance Board for it to detect the VR signals… wow, that’s a lot of money and hardware, and I don’t got the room. I don’t even have a port on the back of my computer for this Bluetooth device, let alone the space for a balance board.
Maybe a PS4 Controller isn’t that bad. 😛 I did manage to … somehow get the cursor to work. It just spins around like it’s high, and it’s kind of a bitch to control.
Back to explaining the game, you head to the Town Hall to begin the preparations of purchasing your first house. You can pick one of the 4 available houses. I picked one near a river. After checking out the closet-sized house and leaving, this is when you’re finally approached by the Raccoon, Tom Nook. He’s the former owner of these houses, and the owner of a 24 hour store. He wants to give it to you, but then slams you with red tape.. saying it will cost you 19,800 Bells (‘Bells’ are the currency in the Animal Crossing games). Since you’re flat broke, he tries to think of how you can pay off your steep loan… then gets an idea by you working for him part-time at his shop.
First you must meet the locals of the town you named (before you can get to work). For this, you really need to master the map. This is another job for the awkward controls! I have to get my spinning cursor over to the buttons to access the map. The map alone is the bare bones of the entire navigational system. There’s no waypoint system, or a minimap. It’s just you checking the map every so often to make sure you’re still going in the right direction.
So you meet your fellow townfolk who are so happy to meet an actual human in an animal-based town, and hope to be friends. Once you find everyone and head back to Tom Nook, he expects you to wear a part-time uniform. Then you do odd jobs (emphasis on “odd”) for him, such as delivering something and sending a letter to specific animals. Thankfully what makes this easy for me (that the same couldn’t be said if I was using an actual Wii console), I can use my computer’s keyboard to type in the letters instead of flail around with the right stick of my PS4 Controller. There’s a config option of Dolphin (in the Wii tab) to ‘Connect USB Keyboard’.
Anyway, you get these odd jobs done, and then you’re finally on your own. However, you still need to pay back that 19k. Thankfully he’s a nice rodent, and allows you to take your time to pay it off (even not charging interest).
This means you got to get a job to pay off that loan. I expected to actually work longer for him (or working for someone else). But actually, you must literally grind that money by doing things like fishing, and digging for fossils. Both the fishing pole and the shovel are sold by Tom Nook.
And even after you do that (from what I’ve been told), he can give you upgrades for your house to further put you in debt… ouch.
And that’s pretty much what the game is; to simulate what debt is at a young age (and why it sucks). Plus, you can actually go to this unnamed City of where you can buy expensive stuff… for your house. But you can also buy clothes.
And I also heard rumors that you can even help to make the town you live in, look better. And you also have to pull weeds in the town. I guess the turtle Mayor was too tired to hire a landscaper? Why are you suddenly doing it?
It also raises other questions of the ‘Villager’ (the player character’s actual name);
1. Why is a 12 year old (going by his height ingame) living on his own, instead of with his parents?
2. Why did this kid move to a town of animal-like people (each with their own personalities)?
3. Where in the hell are this kid’s parents, and why did they allow this?
4. Why is Tom Nook good at playing Monopoly with the player (throwing you into debt and stuff that a typical 12 year old shouldn’t need to concern themselves about)?
If you want my opinion, this kid is pretending. Probably has a shitty life. No friends. And this is his way of coping with life’s hardships. Notice how these animals are usually so happy to see the player character? He’s designed them to. Yet he’s also gave them free will, able to walk around and even move out of the town if they feel they don’t like it here anymore.
Yet the kid is also mentally disturbed of actually wanting to pay a debt to a rodent who owns four houses that are the same size and shape, and price tag. Or maybe this kid is smart and wants to train his brain to prepare for his real life of when he grows up (which he still doesn’t really need to worry about for quite some time, and just focus on being a kid).
This is all I can think of. Then again, maybe I’m once again thinking way too hard on this and fail to realize “it’s just a game”.
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It’s now time for my review of this game. I’ll be leaving the issues with my controller out, as they aren’t related to the game itself (nor is it the correct way to play the game);
Good:
-Game time is based on your computer’s clock(or on the Wii, its clock). It even sets the day and month, and even the moon phase.
-Holiday dates are also based off your computer’s clock(same goes to the Wii).
-Plants and trees grow in realtime. Just note you don’t have to wait 10 or so RL years for a sapling to grow into a tree.
-If you have a USB Keyboard hooked up to your Wii, you can use it to write letters and stuff like that. In my case, my computer’s keyboard (being USB), works perfectly.
-(Unknown if you can do this on the Wii), you can cheat the game’s time by adjusting your computer clock. Make the store open again instead of waiting ’till the next RL day.
-If you log into the game on your birthday, you’ll be given a cake.
Bad:
-Save ‘and quit’ feature. How about a Save ‘and keep playing’ one? Are all Wii games like this?
-In the first house size you own, you can’t put furniture down in the attic (where your bed and phone are). I’m unsure if you can in future upgrades.
-(Unsure if this is the same as all Animal Crossing games) Horrible navigational options. All you got is your map. Not even a waypoint system.
-The game’s thing of using your time and date, doesn’t factor in your current time zone (similar to the way a server in WoW does it). It shows at 7pm, it’s dark (when in RL, it’s early sunset currently).
-0/10.. no dragon-like people walking around. -IGN 😛
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Final Verdict: “This is a game for furries” keeps going through my head. Yet for some reason, I really like this game.
Though I wish there was just a bit more to do, and more animals who have odd jobs for me. Feels like the only way I’m making money is by… well, grinding it. Collecting things and selling them to Tom Nook, or shaking trees in hopes to get a 100 Bell drop from them.