Without question, Animal Crossing Plaza is intended to be the Animal Crossing version of WaraWara Plaza. Acting as a platform to support the newly launched Animal Crossing Miiverse community, the plaza consists of a massive town tree (seen previously in New Leaf), a message board that lets you post to Miiverse, your Mii, and every single animal in the series wandering about. Instead of assorted Miiverse posts from your friends, however, your Mii is the only one that I saw featured.

The animals, meanwhile, say funny things that they would say in an Animal Crossing game and also spout posts on the Animal Crossing community. When you tap on an animal on the GamePad, you can choose them as a favorite animal (which shows up on a profile next to your Mii in the app showing your dream address, town, and name) or post on Miiverse about that animal, which shows up on the Animal Crossing Plaza of other users through their speech bubbles.

More interesting, though, is the extremely mild connectivity with the recently released Animal Crossing: New Leaf on 3DS. Should you decide to insert your 3DS SD card into your Wii U, the app allows you to import your in-game screenshots and QR codes from the game to share on Miiverse. I greatly appreciated the fact that Animal Crossing Plaza automatically sorts your New Leaf pictures from any other 3DS photos, and that a bulk upload of 180 of my screenshots only took two minutes or so. If I have one complaint about this feature, it would be that I had to individually tap each of my 180 photos to include them in the bulk upload and saw no option to do it all at once.  One other nice option is the ability to organize all of your photos into albums, which should prove useful for the most diehard of fans.

Outside of that, there isn’t much to say. It’s a clever way to make the Miiverse community more interesting, but outside of posting screenshots to Miiverse or gawking at how beautiful a Wii U Animal Crossing game is going to look and sound in 2015-2016, there isn’t much to enjoy here for most outside of novelty.

Animal Crossing Plaza is now available as a free download on the eShop through the end of 2014.