A downgrade from New Leaf in every way. The game gives you so much control over every minute detail that it becomes less about living a virtual life with your animal neighbors and more about customizing your virtual dollhouse island down to the smallest grain of sand. It was missing many features from New Leaf at launch, and it still is even after all the updates. Villagers lack so much dialogue compared to New Leaf, and the amount of ways you can interact with them on a day to day basis is incredibly lacking as well. Making money feels like a chore because it's always gatekeeping from making changes to your island, and the only real way to make it is to monotonously catch bugs for hours and hours and every change to your island is prohibitively expensive even though the game encourages you to go as wild as you'd like. And the day to day systems of the AC series feel more annoying than novel when you want to move a house and you have to wait the entire day just for that. Just feels like an overall downgrade from the games that came before, thought the house and character customization is absolutely the best it's ever been and it completely blows every other AC game out of the water.