I’m still playing Animal Crossing: City Folk (or Let’s Go To The City, if you prefer) but boy is it testing my patience. Admittedly, my enthusiasm for the game waned some time ago, but my three-year-old son loves it, and so I keep visiting my village more out of duty to entertain him than because I really want to. Yesterday, something happened which nearly made me snap the disc in half.
As those of you who play the game regularly will know, yesterday an event took place named Festivale. This new event brought with it a brand new visitor to my village - Pavé the peacock. Speaking in broken English, he was a feisty little chap, singing and dancing away to a samba-style beat and requesting candy of various different flavours. I’d read in my father-in-law’s strategy guide that it might have been wise to stockpile some from Hallowe’en, but seeing as the game wasn’t released until November and I’ve not been cheating by messing around with the dates, that was impossible. I was therefore heartened to find, when speaking to one of my animal neighbours, that I could win candy from them by playing a game, but that if I lost, I’d have to give them 500 Bells. Thus began a long, expensive and arduous few hours which I will never, ever get back.
My first test was a game of rock, paper, scissors - it’s the best of three rounds, and you have to shout out an answer rather than performing the gesture. I lost 500 bells on this game, and was then tested on my ESP by another villager. Soon after, I was another 500 Bells lighter. The third game had me guessing which hand my animal chum was holding some candy was in - I got this right, but it was the wrong colour candy. The fourth game was an entertaining and well-written exchange involving a penalty-shoot-out where I and my favourite villager Chrissy took it in turns to try to save a shot from the other. After several goals, Chrissy missed and I scored, and I got to choose a piece of candy. Upon returning to Pavé, I was told I’d need three pieces, not just the one.
Undeterred by this setback, I ploughed on with the games until I had three pieces of blue candy to pass on, at which point Pavé greedily munched down the lot and gave me a piece of Pavé furniture. I took it back to my house, and put it in the basement. It looked nice, and so I decided I’d try to get some more items. Big mistake.
My play session finished several hours later. I’d visited Pavé nineteen times for ten pieces of furniture (or eight plus a wallpaper and carpet). That’s nineteen lots of three pieces of candy, which means fifty-seven pieces of candy obtained from my villagers. If I’m being generous, my win percentage was approximately fifty percent, and I’m sure it was actually much lower. Which means I spoke to my villagers well over 114 times. God knows how many repeated lines of dialogue that involved, but it sucked absolutely every single bit of fun out of the Festivale, and made me swear that I’d never try and collect a set of furniture over one day again. Snowman or mushroom furniture, where it’s one piece a day and you’ve got plenty of time to get the lot? Fine. But with this and the Jingle debacle, Animal Crossing has made the simple collecting of items more of a rigmarole than level-grinding in an RPG. Of course, some people will claim that it’s not meant to be easy to get the lot. But there’s a difference between ‘difficult’ and ‘tiresomely random’. Had Pavé given me a different item each time, then that would have been something. The fact I had no idea whether or not he’d claim to give me a ‘new item’ and then pass me the table he’d provided not sixty seconds before was the final straw.
(I’m shy of a bed and a sofa, for the record.)
Tedious collectathons, eh - don’t you just love ‘em? Well, it’s a good job my son still loves Animal Crossing, because it’s firmly off my Christmas card list this year for that particular discretion.
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