Animal Crossing: New Leaf

It's been a while! If I wanted to, I could gladly review the anime I've been watching in the fall, but some of it is from summer, some of it fall, and some of it from the eighties. So instead, I thought I would do a quick post on Dobutsu Mori Tobidase! or Animal Crossing New Leaf.
When I saw that a special edition 3DS XL was coming out for it, I got pumped and decided that that was the Japanese 3DS I wanted to play my games on. Especially since I was waiting for three years...

It was a bit expensive to get, as I missed out on preorders, but was really worth it. It came with the game installed on the SD card, and it's really just nice to play it on such a big screen. The resolution is amazing. There are so many unboxing pictures out and about that I would feel silly posting my own (especially since it sprouts a Christmas Elmo and Gundam Front charm on it).

I have a wig on in this, but just know my hair is ridiculous.

Right, so, I started playing back in November a little before finals week, and quickly realized that it was going to be slow playing for me if I played my usual way and talked to everyone, ever. Just getting through the intro was a little difficult for me, but I made it through. After which, through some miracle, I managed to determine (with the help of a kanji dictionary [oh by the way, it has furigana built in, which is super nice]) that I was now the mayor of NERV. I suddenly felt like I should have been a male named Gendo, but alas, I ended up as the super standard Animal Crossing character that they don't even show in demos.

One of the features I like in the new game is that you have the ability to stack fruits up to nine times, which means that you save so much time running into town and then up into the shopping area across the train tracks. The island you can go to for 1000 yen is also guaranteed to turn you a profit if you focus just on fishing up big fish or diving (yes, that's right, diving) for something like urchin or Nautilus. If you do this you can make a profit of about 100,000 bells at a time. Which is good because...

Aw man, what a shame...my axe broke...

The debt increases so astoundingly fast. It might have to do with the town I picked (you choose a town law at the beginning of the game that you can then change for 20,000 bells later on), but I'm onto paying off a third room which costs a whopping 498,000 bells. Again, with fishing and island fruit, its not that bad, but there are a great deal of places your bells could go. They can go to community projects like building a new bridge or a camp site, or to one of the many stores. If you really want to get things going, you can spend 10,000 bells and give 4 gold ore to the new refurbishing alpaca to make you a random piece of gold furniture. Ore? What is this black magic I speak of? Well, just like there was a money rock, there is now an additional random rock. Hit it with your shovel and you'll suddenly find yourself in possession of an ore (I've seen emerald, gold, and sapphire so far). As far as I know, no one has managed to figure out how to make a golden shovel in this game, and you don't really need one because your shovel is indestructible (but your axe, sadly, is not).

There are so many new characters too, that you never know who your neighbors will be. I ended up with two familiar faces and two residents that I want to leave, but they aren't getting the pitfall hints, as they've made it so that you can just walk around it to get into their house. Oh well...

Events are still around, and if anything you can always have a party somewhere in ACNL. Will I be buying it again when I return to America (hey, that's quarter two so it should be out, right?)? Yes. Absolutely.

Congratulations on the new year! Here's hoping this year is another great one!

For now, I hope you all have a brilliant and lucky year!
~AAO