When you wipe out certain supplies, particularly from fruit trees, you are promptly shown a three-hour timer. Instead of free-flowing and emergent gameplay, where you happen to see a rare bug or a fish's shadow and make moves to switch out inventory and capitalize, you're instead just heading to specific locales and farming the crap out of them until their supplies are exhausted. This disrupts the feel and flow of Animal Crossing in surprising ways. If you head to the bug-crazy Sunburst Island, you'll only have access to a net. If you go near a shoreline, you'll have a fishing rod in your hand. Instead, Pocket Camp's map is broken up into smaller, discrete zones, and when you go to these, you can only do one major action. The first huge difference in this game, however, is that players no longer wander around a single, large town. Anything you've done in an older AC game is easy to do by way of taps, and Nintendo designed this to work as well as you could imagine.
Tap to talk to a pink, sweater-wearing dog. Doing all of this is as simple as tapping the screen. You must attract campgoers from nearby, which you do by completing errands, picking up supplies, and crafting your neighbors' favorite furniture and decorations. Instead of moving into a new town like previous games, you're asked this time to run a campground. Like other Animal Crossing games, Pocket Camp starts with you arriving at a new, outdoorsy locale. We're rocking out to a box of bugs? Sure, that makes sense. But before addressing any of that, we have to look closely at how Nintendo converted this game from a fixed-price, retail offering to a free-to-play microtransaction disaster-and how that has rotted Animal Crossing's most rewarding elements from the inside-out. And many of the series' best and weirdest trappings are in this smartphone version. The series' mix of simple, bright graphics, cute animal friends, house decorations, and quick-hit daily tasks seems like perfect tap-and-go gaming fodder.
That's why fans were understandably excited about the series getting its first smartphone entry, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, which is now out on Android and iOS. That formula has since shone for over a decade, with follow-up entries adding online support that essentially expands that "cozy little household" feeling without breaking the game's core loop. You were supposed to hop in, do your daily virtual regimen, leave notes for other players in the same household, and come back in a day or two. There simply wasn't much to do in a given day after fishing, fossil scavenging, and running basic errands. But Nintendo added a very special pinch of time and patience. It resembled popular life- and farm-sim games, where your experience in a small, riverside village revolved around simple tasks and monotony.
Animal Crossing debuted as a weird, unique, and very Nintendo-like video game in 2001.