Tuesday, November 5, 2013

The Animal Crossing (New Leaf) Blues

As any Animal Crossing player can tell you, there are a vast number of reasons why someone could choose to restart their Animal Crossing: New Leaf game save and begin anew. As a new AC player who's made a lot of newbish mistakes, I can pretty much tell you all of them:

1) You went and sold you're only piece of perfect fruit.
2) You choose a bad map and have no room for ANYTHING.
3) You hate your villagers because you're shallow and, yes, you really care that much about what other people think about the imaginary, humanoid animals that live in your video game -- hey, at least I admit it.
4) Just because.

Those are all valid reasons to restart your ACNL game, in my opinion, and of course there are other reasons. Like maybe you find it unsettling that all it takes is one rainy day before you find yourself digging up what seem to be shallow graves (for more info Google "Animal Crossing + Gyroids + Haniwa"). Or maybe you received bad information from a LPer, who shall remain nameless, and were under the impression that all your perfect fruit had rotted when it was actually perfectly fine. Or maybe, just maybe, you found yourself living in constant fear every time you logged into the game due to horrifyingly fast, deadly spiders and decided just to bow out for a month til spider season died down and keep it to yourself because, let's face it, it's hard enough being afraid of bugs in real -- who the f*ck is gonna admit to being afraid of virtual ones?
It's like I said, there are a lot of reasons a player could choose to restart and they're all good, valid reasons. But ACNL can be a pretty unpredictable game sometimes and sometimes things can happen that can leave a player royally screwed over.
That's pretty much what happened to me in my new save.
See, I decided to start a new game for personal reasons (see reason number three on the above list) and for once, things were actually looking up. I had an avatar with a face I could actually stand to look at, decent villagers that didn't make me want to punch a Nintendo game developer in the face for coming up with a such a stupid design, and what I consider a pretty awesome map. Yep, everything was all sunshine and rainbows for me.


My character, Hikari, became the mayor of the sleepy town of Starwood and everything was looking good. I planted some perfect fruit in her would-be back yard as per tradition in my other saves, and paid off the 10,000 Bells down payment on her house in a matter of hours.
Life was good.
Then I logged on to the game today, and my mouth literally dropped in horror of what had taken place in my town.

I know what you're thinking: Someone's moving in. What's the big deal?
Well, let me explain. You see, every town has a native fruit and when a new ACNL save is created, you usually get one piece of perfect fruit. One. Not one tree full of perfect fruit. You get one piece and one piece only to do with as you please, but the smart player knows you're supposed to farm it, so you don't end up riddled with debt. Now, the native fruit itself is valuable, but only if you have access to another players' town where that particular fruit is considered foreign. The perfect fruit, however, is worth double what the foreign fruit is worth, so I imagine you could understand why people would like to have it around.
So, now that that's been explained, let's turn our attention to the tiny, wilting tree in the picture. Uh-huh. Yep. Guess what that is?
If you guessed it's my perfect fruit tree -- my ONLY perfect fruit tree because it's the only I planted because I just started playing yesterday -- then you guessed right. Guess who is instantly out of, potentially, millions of Bells?
Yep, this gamer.
The really messed up part about this situation is that I didn't make any mistakes this time or anything like that. The only thing I did wrong was think it was an okay idea to plant a f*cking tree in my virtual back yard because who the f*ck does that, right -- it's completely out of the f*cking ordinary to have a tree in your Arceus-for-saken backyard!!!!
Guess it's back to beetle farming for me until I can convince one of the six people on my 3DS friends list who are all too busy playing Pokemon X/Y to care to let me into their town, so I can pawn my worthless native fruit on the shop owners there -- but wait a minute! Didn't Nintendo just disable the Spotpass function on Swapnote because some pre-teen boys thought it would be fun to send out drawings and probably actual pictures of their junk to all their online friends? Yep, I think they did!
Well, at least, I've got oranges to sell!!!!

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