Every college student and their older siblings who had a true childhood lost their pants two weeks ago after the release of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing Pocket Game, and then after actually playing the game, quickly put them back on.
Unfortunately, despite what many 90s babies hoped, the release of the app version of one of the most beloved Game Cube original games of all time did not bring back the magical era that was 2001. The Pocket Game is an incredibly stripped down version of the original game, complete with animal requests and furnishing a residence for no reason, but lacks the mystery and enamor that the original Gamecube disk included. The premise of OG game was already incredibly simplistic, but the new app rid players of even more flexibility.
Instead of moseying around shaking trees for gold coins and making sure that weeds did not take over the city, app users are limited to jump cut scenes where their character is supposedly riding their personalized RV between incredibly small islands where only one animal can fit. Gyroids and digging for fossils have been completely cut out the equation, and the only goals of the game are to complete repetitive tasks for animals so that they will give you weird juices that enable you to make furniture for your campsite that you want everyone to come to.
That is right, Tom Nook does not sell your furniture out of his weird supermarket/Home Depot/Burlington Coat Factory in this game and no, there is no dump to rifle through, either. You have to give two llamas juices and building materials so that they will build your furniture, and this can sometimes take hours, which, by the way, Nintendo, how dare you?
Including the llamas, there are a few more questions I have for the creators of this game who decided to not just bless us with a full version of the game for us adults who refuse to invest in the new Nintendo DS because we still own our old one:
Who is this Tommy Nook fellow and why is he trying to sell me such trash furniture? Is he supposed to be some sort of adolescent version of Tom Nook, or is this Tom Nook’s son? If this is Tom Nook’s son, who is Tommy Nook’s mother? Are they still married? If so, I am personally offended that I did not have a front row seat for this wedding. Tom Nook basically raised me, and I find this unacceptable.
If there are no snowballs during the winter months for me to push around and make into a snowman I am going to lose my sh*t. This is not really a question, it is more of warning.
Is the point of letting people visit their friend’s campsites other than making them feel self-conscious about their interior design skills? Because I’m feeling especially bad right now that I have not leveled up my tent to a level 3 cool tent so that I can get a skateboard ramp, and it’s all because of you, Nintendo. I do not need this added stress.
While Nintendo did not measure up to many expectations called upon them by adults who desperately craved reliving their childhood (relatively) for free during times of deafening amounts of student loans and eating Taco Bell for breakfast, I have to thank them for at least trying to provide a smidgen of nostalgia to a generation who really needs it right now.
While I am still feeling abandonment issues from the absence of the cat on the train with a customizable face, this is one of the only apps besides social media I have downloaded in the past couple months and it has given me an outlet to pretend the world is not on fire. So for that, I thank Nintendo, but I also politely demand a pocket game version of Nintendogs. Mine ran away.
Available on: IOS/Android
Miranda Moses can be reached at entertainment@collegian.com or on Twitter @mirandasrad.
