I despise this game with all my heart. Never have I seen game design this morally corrupt, this worthless in creating fun interactions for the player. The entire game is one huge, joyless grind, designed to make playing it a habit, to make booting it up every three hours an addiction. It features three different subscription models, on top of lootboxes, on top of the metric ton of microtransactions. But I think ‘micro’ is the wrong word here, so let me phrase it another way: 'Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp' hides an excessive amount of content behind paywalls. What isn’t hidden is the daily grind to make you, the player, addicted. What is hidden is the fun cosmetics and furniture – The possibility of customizing your clothing, your campsite in a fun way. But doing that is expensive. Playing Pocket Camp is expensive in general, it feeds on your time and produces emptiness, with the promise of less emptiness if you just buy into it. If you just buy into it, it honors you, tells you you did amazing – ‘Welcome to the Pocket Camp Club’ it says jubilantly – and creates, as a reward, more emptiness for you to enjoy.
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is what happens when rip out the joyous heart of a beloved series and replace it with greed. Instead of giving something to the player, this game just takes. And keeps on taking. It took a lot of money from me. It took a lot of my time. And, in the end, I filled the emptiness it gave me with disgust. For all the abusive gameplay loops. For the morally bankrupt monetization. Please, do not play this game. And if you currently are, I beg of you, step away. Remember the sunk cost fallacy. You are worth way more than what his game considers you to be.
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is what happens when rip out the joyous heart of a beloved series and replace it with greed. Instead of giving something to the player, this game just takes. And keeps on taking. It took a lot of money from me. It took a lot of my time. And, in the end, I filled the emptiness it gave me with disgust. For all the abusive gameplay loops. For the morally bankrupt monetization. Please, do not play this game. And if you currently are, I beg of you, step away. Remember the sunk cost fallacy. You are worth way more than what his game considers you to be.
There's some hoes in this house.
It’s just… evil. So frustrating because it has the framework and potential to be the BEST execution of the Animal Crossing concept, and instead is emblematic of the poison that infected New Horizons. A poison that has now become a part of the lifeblood of what Animal Crossing will Be Now as a franchise forever.
That’s not quite fair. The path this game paved was first hinted at in the 3DS game Happy Home Designer. Remember when amiibo were a thing? Relevant to this discussion: Happy Home Designer, and the cards that were created for New Leaf’s cast of characters, fundamentally changed the nature of the franchise. No longer could the cast of animal villagers be carelessly swapped out, dropped, or replaced between entries. Now each villager had a real, physical presence in the world as a product.
But equally importantly, these characters-as-product now existed outside of their typical life-sim context. What made this franchise was the personality of these characters, their individuality, and the emergent relationships players forged and witnessed between them. Starting in Happy Home Designer, their personalities were necessarily flattened. More important than their personality-as-text was the furniture sets they represented - they became characters-as-aesthetic. A move I found incredibly odd for a franchise where part of the core appeal was growing to love ugly characters by your daily interactions with them.
So now Animal Crossing was locked into a set cast of characters. Those characters were associated with certain aesthetics and specific furniture sets. You can already see how the avenues of creativity possible for the franchise were being capped. Is it any wonder that the Wii U had Animal Crossing Plaza and amiibo Festival? Hollow excuses that only existed to maintain familiarity with this set of characters? Lament how dull and lifeless the HD-ification of a bunch of old content looked compared to the non-canon vibrancy of the Animal Crossing track in Mario Kart 8’s DLC.
So what is Pocket Camp? What could Pocket Camp have ever been?
For one, there was no way that the animals would have the crazy amount of dialog of a mainline Animal Crossing game. That’s just not the kind of human resource that gets allocated for a mobile game, especially by a Nintendo who was still sour about Super Mario Run proving they didn’t understand how the mobile market worked. At the same time, Nintendo still had a stubbornness to how it presented its brands on mobile platforms. Not content to have an Animal Crossing branded mobile experience, Pocket Camp still had to convey some of the essence of what it was like to play Animal Crossing. So even though, functionally, this game was never going to be allowed to be anything beyond another Happy Home Designer, it was still mandated to have non-Happy Home Designer gameplay elements.
So even though bug-catching and fishing were in, animals-as-aesthetic had to be the way to go. And lo, in Pocket Camp, your relationship with animals is based entirely on creating furniture they like and earning the ability to craft furniture they like. They did not have enough unique dialog to even match the item descriptions of their furniture sets. Befriending animals became a language for friendship meters, which were literal progress bars for furniture acquisition rather than any indication that you had a facsimile of a relationship with them.
Which brings me to my frustration with Pocket Camp. Because the marriage of the gameplay of Animal Crossing as applied to a smartphone is a revelation.
Animal Crossing as a gameplay concept is extreme addition by subtraction. It is all the optional gameplay elements of a JRPG recontextualized as The Point™, with all the carry-over user interface shenanigans reinterpreted as ritual over repetition. A limited inventory can be as cute as it is annoying because it is a part of the role-playing. Deciding to drop an apple to catch a rare bug is the right amount of fastidious menu fiddling to make the player’s decisions rewarding. Inventory menu management was a foundational pillar in connecting every disparate type of gameplay that Animal Crossing offered, forcing the player to plan ahead for what activities they wanted to do while keeping in mind multiple possibilities for how their day could go.
But that part of Animal Crossing is a hold-over from a game design philosophy so far removed from what gaming and Animal Crossing have become. And Pocket Camp’s touch-screen based user interface made me realize how completely unnecessary those old conventions are for creating a similar feeling in the modern day.
Being able to touch a tree to shake down its fruit, touch a river to cast my fishing line, touch a villager to start a conversation, all on the same screen, without menus, creates such a wonderful feeling of harmony between actions that I never want to go back. That harmony was previously acquired by the limited inventory system, where fish, apples, furniture all occupied the same inventory slots as the tools needed to acquire them. But rather than having to equip and unequip different tools for different tasks, the nature of contextual input allows for a gameplay flow that strongly conveys a sense of freedom. I am loathsome to call anything cozy after the Wholesome Games Direct crowd has co-opted a few specific words (and animals (and color schemes)), but whatever. It’s nice, ok. It’s peaceful. I like it a lot.
But again, because of what Pocket Camp was allowed to be, catching fish, collecting bugs, harvesting fruit - they’re not the optional elements of an emergent player experience. They are the mechanisms of a grind for friendship points for crafting materials for furniture. A grind so tedious that the game eventually patched in the ability to hand in villager requests for items for friendship points via a menu, instead of actually talking to them. Talking with villagers to receive and complete their requests was one of the few facades Pocked Camp maintained that it was an Animal Crossing game and not a Happy Home Designer game. To see the pretense dropped is just sad.
Pocket Camp needs the pretense of you liking these animal characters enough to justify a ridiculous grind to create instagram-worthy dollhouse rooms to keep up with the new content roll-outs. (I mean, you could pay real world money to make the grind go away, at prices so exorbitant I would probably implode if I ever got to see their sale rate.) But as it collapses under the sheer volume of content, Pocket Camp walks a razor’s edge: How can it automate as much of its experience as possible, to make the grind palatable, without automating out the pretense of why you would be doing any of this in the first place?
Which all unravels with the ending culmination of this balancing act: the loot boxes.
New to Pocket Camp are loot boxes themed around individual animal villagers, containing outfits and furniture items wilder, more luxurious, and downright cooler than anything else in the series. By theming each loot box furniture set around an individual animal, the aesthetic of that furniture set becomes the personality of that villager. Because where personalization by dialog is impossible, furniture and aesthetics become the language of Pocket Camp.
The only personalized scripts any of these characters receive are locked behind obtaining the rarest of drops from a rotating bevy of loot boxes. Not from any sort of relationship with the player, and not even from the furniture building mechanic, but by spending real-world money. So much money. Enough money that you could buy a Nintendo Switch and New Horizons for everyone in your family before you are likely to get a fraction of all the “Scrapbook Memories” available. (Here's a playlist, because fuck everything about gacha games.) These loot boxes have been pumped out at a steady stream for years, to say nothing of the limited time event items one can acquire by regular daily grind activities.
Did I mention that Pocket Camp has subscription plans, plural? Three, in fact? One for getting more resources on a monthly basis at a discount. One for getting loot boxes for furniture and items at a discount. (Not increased chances of success, mind! Just a slight discount on the gambling!) And one for allowing your favorite villager to follow you around and actually do activities with you, as if this were a game where relationships mattered.
It is so freaking heartbreaking. Because even if you saved all that loot box money to buy that Nintendo Switch, you still can’t obtain the imaginary perfect version of Animal Crossing. One with all the extravagant furniture, the depth of villager personality, the flowing touch controls. At the time of this writing, New Horizons has less than half the content of Pocket Camp. Its theming and item variety are laughably worse. It stopped receiving fresh content updates a year or so ago. It never even received everything that was taken out of New Leaf on the 3DS! But worse than all of that, it inherited all the worst possible DNA from Pocket Camp.
Instead of implementing touch controls, refining the play experience and prioritizing a feeling of flow, it doubled down on time spent in menus. It inherited a crafting system that tipped the scale away from “ritual” to “repetition”. It tried to balance its economy instead of prioritizing player freedom. It has daily check-in bonuses and mobile game attention-hacking notifications and menus. New Horizons does not play like a console game, but a mobile game where the timers, resources, and events have been made less inconvenient by in-app purchases. (Not gone, mind! Just, lessened enough to be tolerable!)
But worst of all, New Horizons inherited the “villagers as aesthetic” mentality. Because after years of these characters existing as interchangeable values from the real world loot boxes of blind trading card booster packs, their watered down archetypes were and are the new canon. I was so indescribably numb when a villager in New Horizons told me to stop talking to them because I had tried interacting with them too many times that day. I wanted a friend - they wanted to be observed from an instagram-post distance.
That’s not quite fair. The path this game paved was first hinted at in the 3DS game Happy Home Designer. Remember when amiibo were a thing? Relevant to this discussion: Happy Home Designer, and the cards that were created for New Leaf’s cast of characters, fundamentally changed the nature of the franchise. No longer could the cast of animal villagers be carelessly swapped out, dropped, or replaced between entries. Now each villager had a real, physical presence in the world as a product.
But equally importantly, these characters-as-product now existed outside of their typical life-sim context. What made this franchise was the personality of these characters, their individuality, and the emergent relationships players forged and witnessed between them. Starting in Happy Home Designer, their personalities were necessarily flattened. More important than their personality-as-text was the furniture sets they represented - they became characters-as-aesthetic. A move I found incredibly odd for a franchise where part of the core appeal was growing to love ugly characters by your daily interactions with them.
So now Animal Crossing was locked into a set cast of characters. Those characters were associated with certain aesthetics and specific furniture sets. You can already see how the avenues of creativity possible for the franchise were being capped. Is it any wonder that the Wii U had Animal Crossing Plaza and amiibo Festival? Hollow excuses that only existed to maintain familiarity with this set of characters? Lament how dull and lifeless the HD-ification of a bunch of old content looked compared to the non-canon vibrancy of the Animal Crossing track in Mario Kart 8’s DLC.
So what is Pocket Camp? What could Pocket Camp have ever been?
For one, there was no way that the animals would have the crazy amount of dialog of a mainline Animal Crossing game. That’s just not the kind of human resource that gets allocated for a mobile game, especially by a Nintendo who was still sour about Super Mario Run proving they didn’t understand how the mobile market worked. At the same time, Nintendo still had a stubbornness to how it presented its brands on mobile platforms. Not content to have an Animal Crossing branded mobile experience, Pocket Camp still had to convey some of the essence of what it was like to play Animal Crossing. So even though, functionally, this game was never going to be allowed to be anything beyond another Happy Home Designer, it was still mandated to have non-Happy Home Designer gameplay elements.
So even though bug-catching and fishing were in, animals-as-aesthetic had to be the way to go. And lo, in Pocket Camp, your relationship with animals is based entirely on creating furniture they like and earning the ability to craft furniture they like. They did not have enough unique dialog to even match the item descriptions of their furniture sets. Befriending animals became a language for friendship meters, which were literal progress bars for furniture acquisition rather than any indication that you had a facsimile of a relationship with them.
Which brings me to my frustration with Pocket Camp. Because the marriage of the gameplay of Animal Crossing as applied to a smartphone is a revelation.
Animal Crossing as a gameplay concept is extreme addition by subtraction. It is all the optional gameplay elements of a JRPG recontextualized as The Point™, with all the carry-over user interface shenanigans reinterpreted as ritual over repetition. A limited inventory can be as cute as it is annoying because it is a part of the role-playing. Deciding to drop an apple to catch a rare bug is the right amount of fastidious menu fiddling to make the player’s decisions rewarding. Inventory menu management was a foundational pillar in connecting every disparate type of gameplay that Animal Crossing offered, forcing the player to plan ahead for what activities they wanted to do while keeping in mind multiple possibilities for how their day could go.
But that part of Animal Crossing is a hold-over from a game design philosophy so far removed from what gaming and Animal Crossing have become. And Pocket Camp’s touch-screen based user interface made me realize how completely unnecessary those old conventions are for creating a similar feeling in the modern day.
Being able to touch a tree to shake down its fruit, touch a river to cast my fishing line, touch a villager to start a conversation, all on the same screen, without menus, creates such a wonderful feeling of harmony between actions that I never want to go back. That harmony was previously acquired by the limited inventory system, where fish, apples, furniture all occupied the same inventory slots as the tools needed to acquire them. But rather than having to equip and unequip different tools for different tasks, the nature of contextual input allows for a gameplay flow that strongly conveys a sense of freedom. I am loathsome to call anything cozy after the Wholesome Games Direct crowd has co-opted a few specific words (and animals (and color schemes)), but whatever. It’s nice, ok. It’s peaceful. I like it a lot.
But again, because of what Pocket Camp was allowed to be, catching fish, collecting bugs, harvesting fruit - they’re not the optional elements of an emergent player experience. They are the mechanisms of a grind for friendship points for crafting materials for furniture. A grind so tedious that the game eventually patched in the ability to hand in villager requests for items for friendship points via a menu, instead of actually talking to them. Talking with villagers to receive and complete their requests was one of the few facades Pocked Camp maintained that it was an Animal Crossing game and not a Happy Home Designer game. To see the pretense dropped is just sad.
Pocket Camp needs the pretense of you liking these animal characters enough to justify a ridiculous grind to create instagram-worthy dollhouse rooms to keep up with the new content roll-outs. (I mean, you could pay real world money to make the grind go away, at prices so exorbitant I would probably implode if I ever got to see their sale rate.) But as it collapses under the sheer volume of content, Pocket Camp walks a razor’s edge: How can it automate as much of its experience as possible, to make the grind palatable, without automating out the pretense of why you would be doing any of this in the first place?
Which all unravels with the ending culmination of this balancing act: the loot boxes.
New to Pocket Camp are loot boxes themed around individual animal villagers, containing outfits and furniture items wilder, more luxurious, and downright cooler than anything else in the series. By theming each loot box furniture set around an individual animal, the aesthetic of that furniture set becomes the personality of that villager. Because where personalization by dialog is impossible, furniture and aesthetics become the language of Pocket Camp.
The only personalized scripts any of these characters receive are locked behind obtaining the rarest of drops from a rotating bevy of loot boxes. Not from any sort of relationship with the player, and not even from the furniture building mechanic, but by spending real-world money. So much money. Enough money that you could buy a Nintendo Switch and New Horizons for everyone in your family before you are likely to get a fraction of all the “Scrapbook Memories” available. (Here's a playlist, because fuck everything about gacha games.) These loot boxes have been pumped out at a steady stream for years, to say nothing of the limited time event items one can acquire by regular daily grind activities.
Did I mention that Pocket Camp has subscription plans, plural? Three, in fact? One for getting more resources on a monthly basis at a discount. One for getting loot boxes for furniture and items at a discount. (Not increased chances of success, mind! Just a slight discount on the gambling!) And one for allowing your favorite villager to follow you around and actually do activities with you, as if this were a game where relationships mattered.
It is so freaking heartbreaking. Because even if you saved all that loot box money to buy that Nintendo Switch, you still can’t obtain the imaginary perfect version of Animal Crossing. One with all the extravagant furniture, the depth of villager personality, the flowing touch controls. At the time of this writing, New Horizons has less than half the content of Pocket Camp. Its theming and item variety are laughably worse. It stopped receiving fresh content updates a year or so ago. It never even received everything that was taken out of New Leaf on the 3DS! But worse than all of that, it inherited all the worst possible DNA from Pocket Camp.
Instead of implementing touch controls, refining the play experience and prioritizing a feeling of flow, it doubled down on time spent in menus. It inherited a crafting system that tipped the scale away from “ritual” to “repetition”. It tried to balance its economy instead of prioritizing player freedom. It has daily check-in bonuses and mobile game attention-hacking notifications and menus. New Horizons does not play like a console game, but a mobile game where the timers, resources, and events have been made less inconvenient by in-app purchases. (Not gone, mind! Just, lessened enough to be tolerable!)
But worst of all, New Horizons inherited the “villagers as aesthetic” mentality. Because after years of these characters existing as interchangeable values from the real world loot boxes of blind trading card booster packs, their watered down archetypes were and are the new canon. I was so indescribably numb when a villager in New Horizons told me to stop talking to them because I had tried interacting with them too many times that day. I wanted a friend - they wanted to be observed from an instagram-post distance.
once again, Nintendo chooses to support the mobile game over the main console one
fun for what it is! i was really staving for a new animal crossing game in 2017 and this was the next best thing x3
i hate it here i hate microtransactions
Exactly what you would expect from a mobile game.
Do you like doing the same 5 things to get the same 10 items being requested by several random (but the same) villagers who say the same 20-ish lines as all the other different (but the same) villagers in their "category" at several different (but mostly the same) areas every day? Do you like partaking in events that are always the same but with a new skin on them? Do you like endlessly collecting barely-useable furniture and decorations while having a comparatively small area to actually display said items? Then this game is perfect for you.
The Animal Crossing series offers some nice, relaxing gameplay, and it could have been great for a mobile experience. But Pocket Camp just ends up being an item collection game with very little personality and no motivation to continue collecting the items.
The Animal Crossing series offers some nice, relaxing gameplay, and it could have been great for a mobile experience. But Pocket Camp just ends up being an item collection game with very little personality and no motivation to continue collecting the items.
I was so excited for this game and downloaded it the day it came out. I had always wanted to try out animal crossing and customize/visit my friends "villages" so I gave it a shot. However, the time limits and microtransactions that drowned this game killed that enthusiam really quickly I'm sad to say. I had fun dressing up my villager and posing but it became repetitive really quickly. Collect as much fruit as you can, fulfill as many quests as you can, do the challenges for the day, pray that the stock in rotation is stuff you want, wait 2 hours for everything to recharge, rinse and repeat.
Barely an animal crossing game. Soul sucking mobile game wearing the skin of something I love.
been playing since launch; hate the turn it’s taken in recent years, but i stay. esp for leonardo ):
1.5 stars for being very cute, as Animal Crossing should be. Everything else about it is bad
the actual gameplay gets old pretty quick but the need to get more cookies stays
Personally, I did not find much enjoyment here. Its a well put together experience, with a seemingly good amount of content; its just a poor Animal Crossing experience, even for a mobile game. Even when Pocket Camp first released I would barely open that app because I just could not vibe with its structure.
Nintendo stop making these shite mobile games man
I remember leading up to this game how insanely hyped I was at the concept of "Animal Crossing on your phone".
Man what a disappointment.
Man what a disappointment.
It's playable. After the first few hours progression slows down to a crawl and you kind of need to pay to do anything.
ontologically evil and stupid
Pocket Camp é o primeiro (e último?) título exclusivo para celulares da série Animal Crossing, lançado na mesma época em que a Nintendo finalmente percebeu que o mercado mobile era rentável. Assim como Mario Kart Tour e Super Mario Run, Pocket Camp é uma versão "reduzida" de sua série original, e por isso muitos fãs da série principal o odeiam.
Apesar das limitações não deixa de ser uma experiência muito divertida. Muitas features no jogo foram alteradas fazendo com que o jogador utilize de grind para alcançar os objetivos. Basicamente você precisa completar encomendas para os villagers que visitam seu acampamento a cada 3 horas, aumentando seus respectivos níveis e assim ganhando móveis para decorar seu acampamento.
Como a maioria dos jogos gratuitos de celular, Pocket Camp conta com um sistema de moedas normais e Leaf Tickets (moedas premium), que são usadas em trocas diretas por itens de decoração e/ou biscoitos da sorte para ganhar itens aleatórios no sistema gacha. Por incrível que pareça, é relativamente fácil juntar as LFs de forma gratuita (e sem ver ads!)
Eu diria que Pocket Camp foi o rascunho do título posterior New Horizons pois foi onde os desenvolvedores implementaram o sistema de crafting, inexistente nos títulos anteriores e também foi onde a série focou mais na decoração e criação de quartos do que no relacionamento com os villagers.
O jogo ainda conta com sua essência principal que é o fator social. Porém diferente da série, aqui se conta mais com jogadores reais do que os próprios animais, que por sua vez não tem diálogos tão variados e "vivos" como na série principal. O sistema de amigos te incentiva a trocar presentes com outros jogadores para ter acesso a biscoitos da sorte sem gastar LFs.
A comunidade ainda é bastante ativa mesmo 5 anos depois. E os desenvolvedores ainda lançam conteúdo semanal para o jogo como eventos, novos villagers e coleções de móveis dos mais variados temas. Ironicamente, viveu mais que o tão amado New Horizons.
Recomendo para todos os fãs da série que gostam de design de interiores, mas não para os que gostam da parte que simula vida.
Apesar das limitações não deixa de ser uma experiência muito divertida. Muitas features no jogo foram alteradas fazendo com que o jogador utilize de grind para alcançar os objetivos. Basicamente você precisa completar encomendas para os villagers que visitam seu acampamento a cada 3 horas, aumentando seus respectivos níveis e assim ganhando móveis para decorar seu acampamento.
Como a maioria dos jogos gratuitos de celular, Pocket Camp conta com um sistema de moedas normais e Leaf Tickets (moedas premium), que são usadas em trocas diretas por itens de decoração e/ou biscoitos da sorte para ganhar itens aleatórios no sistema gacha. Por incrível que pareça, é relativamente fácil juntar as LFs de forma gratuita (e sem ver ads!)
Eu diria que Pocket Camp foi o rascunho do título posterior New Horizons pois foi onde os desenvolvedores implementaram o sistema de crafting, inexistente nos títulos anteriores e também foi onde a série focou mais na decoração e criação de quartos do que no relacionamento com os villagers.
O jogo ainda conta com sua essência principal que é o fator social. Porém diferente da série, aqui se conta mais com jogadores reais do que os próprios animais, que por sua vez não tem diálogos tão variados e "vivos" como na série principal. O sistema de amigos te incentiva a trocar presentes com outros jogadores para ter acesso a biscoitos da sorte sem gastar LFs.
A comunidade ainda é bastante ativa mesmo 5 anos depois. E os desenvolvedores ainda lançam conteúdo semanal para o jogo como eventos, novos villagers e coleções de móveis dos mais variados temas. Ironicamente, viveu mais que o tão amado New Horizons.
Recomendo para todos os fãs da série que gostam de design de interiores, mas não para os que gostam da parte que simula vida.
Okay lowkey this game was actually kinda fire not even gonna lie.
I liked it when Nintendo released an update for this game that suddenly made it incompatible with my current phone, meaning I would have to buy a new phone in order to continue playing this already microtransactions-heavy game. Thanks but no thanks, I'm good.
Fuck nintendo for delaying and abandoning new horizons updates but constantly adding new stuff to this shitty mobile game
Really good fun game! It’s really cool being able to design your campsite and interacting with villagers is fun and there’s always new cool updates and stuff to collect
♡
I only play this for the my nintendo platinum points
Holy shit Better Call Saul is so goddamn good. I can't believe how fucking amazing that last episode was.
And here we have yet another in the long line of games I personally blame for my gender crisis.
It's full of microtransactions and the gameplay loop is beyond exhausting at this point but I did get to build a shrine to Isabelle, so that's sick.
It's full of microtransactions and the gameplay loop is beyond exhausting at this point but I did get to build a shrine to Isabelle, so that's sick.
no lmao
it's fine
My first entry in the franchise. Playing a little bit i understand this has little to do with the console entries. But it was fun during a short period o f time. You manage a camp and need to convince many animals to visit the establishment by doing favors for them. It's all simple tasks, but if you want to decorate the place there is microtrasactions involved. The game will grab you by the cute aesthetics. Recommended for kids by the simplicty and childish design.