Animal Crossing Pocket Camp puts a famous busytime game onto your phone. It's simple, you pass time by gathering resources by helping out camp-goers' friendship levels. These objectives can be completed by either fishing, shaking fruit trees, collecting bugs, shells by the seashore, simple stuff. Not only that, you can simply talk to your campgoers to increase their friendship level. Now why do all of this? Well the whole point of the game is to have your campsite be the main hangout of all of the camp-goers! Now what's the problem? It's the goal.
Animal Crossing has been a series where the whole point of the game is to simply, do whatever you want. If you wanted to be an actual mayor of your town, like in New Leaf, then you could do that. If you wanted to become rich, then go to the tropical island and keep farming for those rare fish or bugs. If you wanted to have the biggest house in the entire town, that can be your goal too. The game was endless and had many events to work towards. I can name several events you can work towards: get all of K.K. Slider's music every Saturday, increase friendship with a villager of your choosing, increase the fish, bug, painting, and fossil catalogue in the museum, collect emotes every week from Dr. Shrunk, get the cutest clothes to become the ultimate goth girl. It's great! Animal Crossing Pocket Camp on the other hand makes things feel limited.
For starters, the places that you can walk towards is limited to about seven areas on the map. It's actually four areas if you exclude the Market Place and the OK Motors shop. Also, the aspects of helping your villagers is less-organic. God, it does not feel satisfying when you complete a villagers' request at all when you know that all just goes towards getting more resources for them to make more furniture. Also, furniture is not fun anymore. Furniture is a must for your campground to have villagers stay as a permanent resident. That's dumb. That kind of defeats the point of having themed rooms or campgrounds. Sure the game automatically moves your furniture for when an camp-goer visits, but it feels just too formulaic.
Did you know that fishing and bug-hunting is not as fun as it used to be? That's because in the previous games, it took actual skill to catch a fish or a bug. In pocket camp, you touch a bug, and your character already readies a net and you simply wait until an exclamation point appears over the bug's head. It feels more grindy now that you know you're just gathering items in preparation for a villager request. Fish always tried their best to ignore your fishing lure in the past, now they are attracted to it for no reason and it was more fair back then than it is now. It would be more fun if villagers didn't ask for like three items at the same time! Wouldn't it be easier if each villager only asked for one thing at a time? Yeah, but the grind though. I remember the games being fun since you always feel a connection the more you decide to talk to a villager. Sometimes they would get sick and you would have to buy some medicine, sometimes they would ask you a stupid question and would react appropriately depending on your answer. They would ask you to change their catch-phrase when they greet you. They would make you bury a time-capsule to truly make you feel like their best friend. Now you just try to appease them with fruit baskets and absurd amounts of fish.
Well for a free and innocent game like Animal Crossing, I have never felt so bored of it. In the coming updates, I hope for something more meaningful than going on fetch-quests forever and ever.
Tune in next time for more complaints I have.
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