Overview:

Welcome to your life…with a mortgage and errands you have to run…for everybody.  Thankfully, you’ll get paid so you can deck out your world but, in the end, it’s just you alone on your island full of robots.  Over the course of the game you get additional tools to help you make your island better.  You can do this by searching for fossils to donate to the museum [as well as flora and fauna].  You can build bridges and roads and litter them with junk everywhere.  You can basically do whatever you want to your island but, as I said, it’s all just for you.  Other players can visit you through a convoluted process and they can’t do anything while on your island.  It’s very depressing.  But cute!

Visuals:

Animal Crossing kind of hit its stride from the very beginning when it was supposed to release on the N64.  Improvements have been made to the world by making the people more round but everything looks the same as it did since then.  That’s not to say it’s ugly because it’s not.  It’s just…an Animal Crossing game.

Audio:

This is where I feel Animal Crossing has changed.  Before you had the characters reading the letters super quickly and at times it seemed like they talked.  Now, maybe it’s just me, they seem to just mumble the words and it still gets the point across.  The rest of the sounds and music are all cheerful and relaxing with no real moments to make you feel stressed.  That’s the point of the game so it does it extremely well.

Completion:

Can you really complete an Animal Crossing game?  I played this iteration for 35+ hours and did I do anything to improve my island?  Only if the game made me.  My main goal was to be a horrible capitalist pig and just hoard money.  That’s all I did!  Make money, pay off my loan, then hoard it.  I never upgraded.  I never added any quality of life for my residents.  I just made money.  I ended with a few million bells once I was done.  Pen Island is complete.  I’m finished!