this was my first animal crossing game so it'll always be special to me for that. when it first came out I did everything, then they started adding updates and I struggled to stay ahead, eventually giving up. but it introduced me to so many characters and mechanics of the series. it's kind of a precursor to new horizons in regards to its crafting (and, y'know, release date). I'm glad nintendo did a new horizons crossover where you could get themed items from this, so the spirit of this game could live on in a better one lol.

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.