Marking the first time Tom Nook will physically take money out of your wallet.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/preview/40545/animal-crossing-amiibo-festival-wii-u-preview-a-day-in-the-life-of-kk-slider
Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival is probably going to be the only retail Animal Crossing game on Wii U. The off-hand comments of NX at the E3 Digital Event make it sound like Nintendo is trying to wind down the Wii U and move focus elsewhere, and Nintendo’s EAD Software Development Group No. 2, the group responsible for Animal Crossing development, is now juggling two Animal Crossing spin-off titles and Splatoon support as we speak. It just doesn’t seem likely that there’s another, bigger Animal Crossing console game on the way.
Now that that’s out of the way, what game are we actually left with?
DĹŤbutsu no Mori-o Party
Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival is a board game played by up to four players that takes cues from Mario Party and Fortune Street. As one of a number of popular characters from the Animal Crossing series – namely Isabelle, K.K. Slider, Tom Nook, Mabel, Reese, Cyrus, Lottie (a new character from Happy Home Designer), and Digby – you play by moving across the board (styled after a town in Animal Crossing) via dice rolls, racking up Happy Points (think Stars in Mario Party but much easier to get), and making bells AKA money (which eventually translate to Happy Points). At the end of the game, the player with the most Happy Points wins.
In order to get Happy Points, you roll the die and land on spaces that each have an event of some kind tied to them. When you land on a space, a micro-episode of Animal Crossing happens and your character is affected positively or negatively. For instance, Tom Nook could land on a space where it shows him smiling and sitting down, and it says “I decided to visit another town today. There’s something relaxing about waiting for the train.” In another scene, K.K. Slider gets some happy points because he’s shooting the cover for his album. The events you land on are often specific to the character you choose and what they would be doing in the world of Animal Crossing, which is nice, and allows us to see what K.K. Slider is doing when it’s not Saturday evening. For what it’s worth, the Animal Crossing charm appears to be fully intact.
Animal Crossing further bleeds into the game through other situations. For instance, what determines the board you use is what month you decide to play in. Each game takes place over the course of a month (with each set of turns being one day), and events that would happen on a certain day in a traditional Animal Crossing game happen on those dates. In other words, if it’s summer, you might expect the bug catching tournament or a Holiday to happen on a specific date, and that is represented here. Other Animal Crossing mainstays are represented like villager interactions, the turnip stalk market (which has daily price fluctuations as well), and visitors like Gracie and Redd.
There are also bonuses, events, little Animal Crossing dialogue trees, and other such things that make this come across as a surprisingly robust Animal Crossing board game experience. And as Nintendo Treehouse Live points out, there is still “more” to Amiibo Festival that Nintendo hasn’t revealed yet. Neither the trailer nor the Treehouse Live segment featured actual mini-games, but the fact sheet in Nintendo’s press kit said that Amiibo cards could be used to play mini-games of some kind. My guess is that this is going to be a three-pronged game, featuring this board game mode, a series of Mario Party-esque mini-games in their own unique mode, and some return of Animal Crossing Plaza, the now-dead Miiverse and photo-sharing application that was conveniently shut down at the end of 2014.
IRL Bells May Be Required
In order to play Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival, it looks like you will need to have one of the non-card Animal Crossing Amiibo. Using one of several Amiibo figures (each representing one of the playable characters – go K.K.!), the figures are how you roll the die every turn (by tapping the figure to the GamePad), and the figures are used to store Happy Points earned during each round to “expand your own game even more,” whatever this means. Moreover, you can optionally use Amiibo cards otherwise used with Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer to bring villagers into the game in some way – as well as any house of theirs you design in HHD.
The Amiibo are such an important part of the game that there’s word of the game being a free download on the eShop (similar to the way Wii Fit U was initially distributed perhaps). I still have my doubts as to whether this is true, but we do know for a fact that the game will be sold as a physical retail bundle with the game, two Amiibo (Isabelle and her twin Digby), and three cards. Retail price on this has not been 100% confirmed as of this writing (it’s listed for $60 at a few stores in the U.S. but official suggested price is still TBD), though if the game is offered on the eShop gratis, this could very well be a $30-$40 dollar bundle.
Ultimately, this is a board game that, while not Animal Crossing proper, contains its essence. It looks like Animal Crossing, sounds like Animal Crossing, has the writing and humor of Animal Crossing, and seems like it feels a little like Animal Crossing too. When it releases this holiday season, Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival will not be the next full installment of this beloved franchise, but if there’s any consolation to be had, it looks like this entry will follow the series tradition of having a whole lot of heart.
Topic: Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival (Wii U) Preview: A Day in the Life of K.K. Slider (Read 2024 times)
