YMMV / Animal Crossing: New Leaf

• Accidental Nightmare Fuel: Villagers will sometimes unexpectedly knock on your door and visit, calling from the outside. Not so bad if you're in the living room, but it can definitely make a player jump if they're in another room and then suddenly, BAM! The front door knocks and a villager's town tune plays. It's even worse if you're trying to eliminate pesky cockroaches, because they'll immediately be grossed out and leave.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Isabelle's Workaholic nature compared to her peppy attitude caused a lot of interpretations:
  • Players can interpret them as overworked and really good at hiding the stress of working a Soul-Crushing Desk Job. How much she's hiding ranges from taking the burden on herself to being just as outwardly bitter and cynical as Phyllis.
  • In later installments, she is seen dancing rather dizzily after drinking "Vacation Juice" in Pocket Camp, she has what looks a lot like a glass of scotch on her desk in New Horizons, and there was a Japanese advertisement in which she talked about how much she loves whiskey. This all led people to theorize she is a Lady Drunk who drinks to cope with her condition, or at the very least an alcoholic.
• Awesome Music:
  • The 7 PM music is a beautiful track with melancholy piano undertones. But it also falls under Nightmare Fuel.
  • The 1 AM music is incredibly calm and soothing, inviting the player to relax after a day of hard work.
• Badass Decay: Bees were Paranoia Fuel incarnate before the Welcome amiibo update. Now the ability to hold a Bug Net while shaking a tree is possible, catching bees is only a problem if you miss or the beehive spawns in an awkward place.
• Broken Base: Villager trading. New Leaf has a mechanic where, the day before a villager moves out, a friend can visit your town and convince the villager to move in, with people trading bells, other villagers or rare items in exchange. Proponents for the practice consider it essentially the same as trading items online, while proponents against the practice think that villager trading defeats the purpose of the game, and could also be abused (like using multiple 3DS systems to make money quicker), while others are creeped out by the idea of buying and selling villagers to begin with. This isn't helped by the fact that many villager traders use time traveling, another controversial mechanic, in order to make deals and transactions more quickly and easily.
• Even Better Sequel: New Leaf was considered quite refreshing in comparison to City Folk, complimenting features like the town customization and online aspects with the new mayoral duties, while improving hated mechanics like grass deterioration (which was changed to not happen so often). In fact, it's the only mainline Animal Crossing game to not be considered a Contested Sequel in any sense:
  • Wild World removed real-life-based holidays in favor of fictional events, and its now defunct online capabilities.
  • City Folk is widely considered a console port of Wild World that hardly changes anything from prior entries, removes additions from Wild World, such as villagers celebrating their birthdays and giving their pictures to the player if they liked them well enough, and introduced Animal Tracks — meaning a square patch of grass would wear as soon as the player walked on it.
  • The later-released New Horizons entry suffers from being a live service with missing events, mainstay NPC's, items, clothing, and other such content that has to be gradually added, which has irked players to no end, as well as changing aspects of the game to fit the deserted island motif, such as the breakable golden tools. And now that the final major update for New Horizons has been released and is still missing some stuff, this will probably only be exacerbated.
  • Other than dialogue not matching certain personality templates, such as Snooty and Cranky villagers (them being "too nice"), New Leaf doesn't suffer as much criticism as the other post-GameCube games.
• Fans Prefer the New Her: Tom Nook gained a sweater vest and pants as his default outfit. Fan reception was very positive, greatly helping a lot of players to warm up to him.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Between 8P.M. and 8A.M., Tortimer Island house loads of beetles, which sell for 6-12k bells on palm trees at a nice rate, assuming you destroy the other kinds of trees as well as the flowers. There's also plenty of exotic fish that sell for 8-15k each. Since it's only a thousand bells per trip, and there's an item box which can hold 40 of these things, you'll be swimming in bells in no time. And you can get there as early as 'Day 4. Additionally, you can save and continue to reset the ocean's fish to farm sharks on the mainland, assuming you get your hands on a rod (this doesn't work on the island, as saving isn't allowed there). You can also get nearly unlimited amounts of exotic fruit, which can be carried in bushels so that you can fit nine in a single pocket slot from the tours which have absolutely no penalty for not actually doing the intended mission.
  • The Bell Boom ordinance increases buying and selling prices by 20%. On paper, this sounds perfectly balanced. In practice, two things make this incredibly useful. First and most importantly, prices for items increase by 20% but not prices for mortgages or public works projects, which will probably take up the bulk of your cash. Second, is the fact that there is a limited amount you can actually buy each day, but you can sell as much as you please. Combine this with the above-listed island, which gives you even more money than before, and you can pay off any of your mortgages or town projects in a single day and likely have enough cash to buy out the entire shopping street while you're at it, all with less than three hours of bug catching.
    For an added bonus, you can choose to sell the beetles to a Lazy villager camping in your town when they play a game with you for ridiculously high amounts of bells. While playing the campers' games to set the prices of your items is usually a Luck-Based Mission and would make it eventually impractical in the long run to sell your items to them as you could get ripped off most of the time if you fail the game; the games you play with Lazy villager is actually not a Luck-Based Mission and with some critical thinking, one can narrow their answers down to guarantee a 100% chance for a much higher selling price than what Re-Tail would normally offer them for. An hour worth of hunting beetles and sharks at the island would net you around a whopping 2.5 million bells from Lazy campers. The only downsides are that campers only occasionally appear for a given day, and they decide when they want to buy something from you, so you might have to scroll through a ton of text to actually sell anything to them.
  • Meanwhile, the Beautiful Town ordinance makes getting a perfect town practically effortless. It was designed for people who otherwise can't Play Every Day like the game's intended. In theory, this means slowing the decay so that it's more manageable for those who can't deal with taking care of their town every day. In practice, it effectively stops all forms of decay, even if you don't play for around a year or so. Not even weeds and such will hurt your town's rating. You don't even need to plant flowers while you play; your villagers will more frequently do that for you.
  • Desert Island Escape: Some animals have some extremely useful abilities which is very helpful in gaining high scores.
    • Cats. They have a fantastic 4 movement and a respectable 2 hunger, but what really makes them this is their ability. Cats automatically move to a tile that has fish when they're next to them, and have a 50% chance of catching some if you don't have a fishing rod. If you do have a fishing rod, you will always get at least two fish, up to a maximum of seven. No other character can catch fish without a rod, and even then, they have the same chances of catching something as a cat does bare-pawed. For bonus points, cats moving to a fish tile doesn't cost any movement.
    • Similarly, there are bears and cubs. While cats are great at fishing, the bears and cubs are excellent at obtaining honey. They automatically detect any nearby honey and that also counts as a free movement. Without a net, they have a 75% chance of getting honey (the last 25% percent results in getting stung), but with one, all risk is eliminated (effectively turning a hazard into a food source). It also helps that they're also good fighters just in case you wander into a space with an enemy.
    • Dogs and chickens are extremely useful in detecting items, food and even raft parts, which takes the guesswork out of which spaces have what.
    • Animals with the Hearty Traveler ability (mainly horses and ostriches) can move a whooping 6 spaces at a time, and they only cost 1 hunger. The biggest drawback is that they can't clear fog (which means they can blunder into a bad space easily). This can be mitigated by heading to a platform.
    • Animals (mainly birds) with the Flight ability can bypass obstacles like mountains and lakes with ease. While the movement says its only 2, they cover as much ground as a character with 6 movement.
    • The Swimmer ability (possessed by penguins and frogs). While they only move 3 spaces on land, it is doubled to 6 in water and provides great shortcuts to areas that are blocked by hazards or obstacles.
    • The Hunter ability turns defeated enemies into medicine and food. With a few wins, you won't have to worry about dangers like toxic snakes or scorpions. Especially if you have a slingshot.
    • What about bulls? They have the Headlong Charge ability, which is seriously broken because it automatically defeats enemies and obtains five of fruit or honey, which is a lot more than you'd normally get.
  • Wisp in the "Welcome amiibo" update. Sure, the cards and figurines to use him cost money, but with them, Wisp becomes a villager ordering service that can let you retrieve old villagers whenever desired and break the 16 cycle, and you're able to evict undesirable villagers in the chosen one's stead. He can also summon exclusive characters to the campground, who have unique items in their campers and can be invited to move in as well.
  • The ability to resell a town after 50 days. Assuming the town has not been neglected, it is very easy to have a town worth a couple of million Bells by this point, all of which can be transferred to the savings account in a new town. Suddenly, the Island does not look so profitable any more.
• Genius Bonus: Redd's counterfeit art pieces now have something different from the genuine article. Therefore, if you know the actual piece the item is based on, you'll be able to get the real paintings and sculptures with minimal effort, and the challenge will become waiting for him to come to town with the painting(s) you need.
• Goddamned Bats: The jellyfish. Like the bees, they follow you (and temporarily stun you if they make contact) but unlike the bees, they cannot be caught and exist purely to annoy you. Notably, when diving came back in New Horizons, they didn't return.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Occasionally, a villager with the "Uchi" personality who's moving out will mention that she is going to participate in turf wars. Two years later, some of the Animal Crossing team would go and make a game all about them.
  • The game states that T-Bone, a bull villager who resembles a cape buffalo, wants to become a police officer. Four years later (three years outside of Japan), Disney released a movie in which one of the characters is a cape buffalo who's a police officer.
• LGBT Fanbase: The game is popular amongst trans people for allowing you to crossdress. The game also largely follows Gender-Inclusive Writing, and no villager comments on your attire specifically because it's of the opposite gender. The closest you get is Mabel commenting on the item your male character wants to buy that's designed for females in mind ("Oh, are you shopping for a present?"), but she doesn't hold it against you if you try something on ("Well, I guess it's okay to be a bit more adventurous sometimes.").
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Due to New Leaf being released right before E3, many have joked that it was released on that day to distract people from the conference.
  • Fans often post screenshots online with out of context conversations with their villager, which can get pretty out there.
  • Isabelle's lack of sleep and her dedication to her job is also made fun of online.
• Misblamed: There are fans who feel New Leaf is a step down from the GameCube original in terms of writing and characterization. Rover's dialogue at the start of both games are often compared for those arguments. Another comparison is how Cranky and Snooty villagers address you in both games. The GameCube game has them (along with the peppy villagers) outwardly being rude and don't hesitate to insult for the most mundane reasons, while the ones in New Leaf are nowhere close to reaching this level of antagonism towards you, even if you get them mad; this is par for the course as to why many people believe the series' dialogue has dip in quality since at least City Folk's release. The GameCube localization is just less of a direct translation compared to New Leaf's. The latter's Rover dialogue is truer to the Japanese text. Some irony can be found here in the fact that the spiced up localization of the GameCube Animal Crossing is regarded as superior to the more faithful translation of New Leaf during an era where liberal translations and localizations are increasingly scrutinized.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • While Tom Nook still has more than a few haters, his new portrayal come New Leaf has made some fans finally warm up to him. Not to mention, he looks awfully cute in his sweater vest and puffy yellow jacket. And then there's his backstory revealed once you get close enough to him and the Able Sisters, which quickly turn him from The Scrappy into The Woobie.
  • While Resetti is still as cranky as ever if you reset, he'll be understanding if you tell him it was an accident or if you don't know what caused a reset, and the conversations you can hold with him and his brother in the Reset Surveillance Center paint him as much more sympathetic.
  • Katie wasn't very well-liked due to her annoying sidequest requiring the player to revisit a town they had recently visited and her crybaby personality. Her New Leaf incarnation has matured quite a bit, no longer crying (unless you reject her quest, and even then it's very brief) and overall being more polite to the player. Her sidequest is also a lot more lenient, letting you take her to any town rather than only the one you had just visited.
• The Scrappy: Pavé is not well-liked among the fandom for often being obnoxious and berating the player for not dancing even if the player uses the Shrunk Funk Shuffle, as well as his minigame not being very fun.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Redd doesn't show up on a fixed day in this title — irritating enough that you need to wait seven days especially after being spoiled by City Folk making him available daily. Worse, there's a possibility that he won't show up for the week at all.
  • Gracie and Katrina, who were also permanent fixtures of the city in City Folk, are back to being random — made more annoying because both of them have Main Street stores unlocked by visiting them a certain amount of times. One of the prerequisites to fully upgrading the Nookling shop is to complete four fashion checks from Gracie, and the most frustrating part is just waiting for her to show up. It can take months to get four visits from her if you're unlucky.
  • This game makes you pay to dispose of trash and counterfeit art pieces. It's painful enough that your inventory is limited; now, you have to let go of some money to be rid of it. This becomes less of an issue if you get your hands on a trash can, allowing you to get rid of it for free, but it's a Public Works Project... that's has to be requested by a Normal villager... and it's considered a negative towards your town's environment.
  • The fact that signposts were removed in this game is generally strongly disliked, due to the chance of a new villager being able to build their house anywhere in your town. This can mean building their new house on top of your roads or cutting down precious fruit trees or shrubs to make way for their house and generally just ruining your landscape. And if the villager moving in is already unpopular among the fandom... well, expect a few angry mayors to try to run them out of town as best as they can. Welcome amiibo fixes the problem in a different way; villagers can't build over patterns laid on the ground.
  • As mentioned above with the trash can, acquiring Public Works Projects is Luck-Based Mission meets Fake Longevity. In order to get it, you have to wait until a villager "pings" and walks up to you, which is completely random, and they will request one for you to build. What's worse is that it's not guaranteed that they will request one when they "ping"; it's usually going to be about their catchphrase, your nickname, or just a random question that doesn't affect anything. On top of that, some Public Works Projects you can only get from villagers of certain personality types, which can be be irritating when you want a certain project for your town, but don't like the villager type that suggests it. While there is a trick to force pinging (wading in the water for about 2-3 minutes with your pockets filled with untradable stuff), you still have the other randomness factors to deal with.
  • Until Welcome amiibo changed it, placing bridge Public Works Projects was very tricky. Like all Projects, bridges require a certain amount of free space around them, however, this space is unnecessarily big. If there's a villager's house, another project, or even a player's house a few feet across the river, you can't build your bridge. The kicker is that houses and Public Works Projects can be built in the same distance from a finished bridge. Not to mention that in order for villagers to even suggest bridge projects, you need to have less than three in town. This means that there's going to be a very long period where you need to make do with only two or even one bridge(s) in town. This was alleviated with the restrictions for how much space you need to build a bridge was made much more reasonable, so houses can be nearby.
  • To some, Weeding Day is worthless if you don't play online and aren't willing to shell out a small fortune for an extra 3DS and copy of the game. The consolation prize for going into Weeding Day with no weeds at all are three topiaries if your town is weed free, and even then, you have to wait until the next day if you want to put them in your town or even see what they look like, since Isabelle won't let you do mayoral work on a holiday. Even Chuggaaconroy complained about it, despite using the online services constantly. It is possible to get Flower Set furniture on the same day if you have extra player characters on your copy of the game, but only 4 of the 12 pieces are available from doing the event in your own town.
  • You find out you have a camper. Turns out the camper is the villager you've been dreaming of having since you started. Already have ten villagers? The game is just mocking you at this point as there is no way around this. Even worse is the fact that it can be possible that a bunch of the villagers you already have are ones you outright despise. This Awkward Zombie lampshades this.
  • Villagers can seemingly threaten to move on a whim. You can't decide on who is moving, as the villager who is moving is randomly generated when the day starts. Similarly, they will only tell you this if they spot you, with their animation looking exactly like how villager would normally want to talk to you. You also have a limited amount to respond to their request before they lose interest and won't talk about it unless they decide to bring it up again when they spot you. This can happen when you're already talking to another villager. If you're already in a conversation with a villager who's feeling particularly rambly at the moment and can't break away in time, then you better hope that they decide to bring it up again, because otherwise, you better say your goodbyes to them in the meantime. This exact thing happened to Chuggaaconroy in his LP of the game, with one of his top favorite villagers, too. This can also pop up the second you enter a house, too. When you talk to a villager and they are talking about moving, sometimes choosing the reply that will make them move away will have them change their mind. This is especially annoying when trying to get rid of a villager you want to move out.
• Spiritual Adaptation: American fans sometimes jokingly compare New Leaf to Parks and Recreation, as it centers around a perky blonde assistant who just wants to improve her town and its beauty.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Pavé furniture series can only be gained on Festivale (unlike most holiday furniture that you can get all month). To get it you must give Pave three of whichever color feather he asks for (caught by the bug net or trading with villagers). This time-consuming activity gets even worse when you realize that what item you get is completely random.
  • Getting Katie's items. First, you need to have Katie show up in your town (as long as you've connected online, there's a small chance that Katie will appear on a given day). The easy part is guiding her to the train station and have a friend who has their town open. Once you've dropped her off, you'll get a letter from her the next day. You can get one of six items (including her picture), but much like Pavé, the item that you'll get in the mail is random. If you let someone drop off Katie in your town, she'll be ready to leave for another town in three days.
  • Good luck getting 1,000 StreetPasses if you don't live in Japan.
  • You now have to pay to dispose of counterfeit paintings through Re-Tail. Better get a trash can so you can do it for free.
  • In New Leaf, you're back to waiting for Redd to show up only once a week (and this time, the day of the week is randomized — he will not show up on the same day every week). OK, that's no big deal, until you find out that you're only allowed to buy one art piece per week. Although the mechanics of that part has been nerfed in that forgeries will have some kind of visual imperfection, it will have you yelling Guide Dang It! and playing compare-the-art with GameFAQs before making your move if fine art is not your thing (or if you weren't informed of the nerfing beforehand, which is quite likely, leave you taking potshots in the dark). You also need to wait a whole day to find out for sure if you've made the right purchase. Make a mistake and you're left waiting until the next week to have another shot (in addition to paying Re-Tail a disposal fee if you don't already have a trash can). On top of that, the fact that his spawn schedule, weekly inventory, and real piece are completely random, it isn't unheard of for players that only have about two thirds of their exhibit filled going several months without encountering any new artwork to buy. And worst off, in a case of But Thou Must!, you must have at least one of each type of exhibit donated (and a total of 20 donations) to the museum to get Celeste and subsequently The Roost back. It's definitely a case of That One Sidequest to fans of Celeste and/or Brewster but who hate art-hunting.
  • Toy Day has you impersonate Santa Claus and deliver presents to all of your villagers to help ease Jingle's yearly workload. This wouldn't be too difficult, except...
    • In order to find out what a villager wants for Toy Day, they have to bring it up in a conversation on any day from December 1 to December 23. This happens completely at random, and they'll only describe its color and/or category.
    • There's no guaranteeing that they'll describe one or both of their specifications before Toy Day, meaning that you'll probably have at least one villager who never said what they wanted.
    • Multiple villagers can request items within the same kind of color and/or category, so if two villagers request, for instance, white furniture, have fun trying to determine who exactly wanted what.
  • Villagers will give you their picture if your friendship with them is strong enough, but this tends to happen at random. Either they send it to you in a letter (sometimes if they move out), or they give it to you spontaneously, through one of those see-you-and-go-ding events, meaning that you could potentially have a best friend move out without having ever received a picture from them. Special characters are another story, with the requirements varying from character to character. Overall, the hardest one to get would be Jingle's; the player must deliver every single gift on Toy Day to the correct villager. Given all the issues with Toy Day noted above, it'll probably require high levels of patience to get your hands on that picture.
    • There is however, a single day where getting all the pics of your current villagers is a cinch: April Fool's Day. However, it comes with its own set of Guide Dang Its. On April Fool's Day, Blanca will impersonate a villager and it's up to you to spot the impostor. Unfortunately the only clues that are given to you are their birthdays and favorite sayings (which only appear on... their pictures) or random facts that are never ever brought up at any other time of the year (such as what they want to be, special skills, or number of siblings).
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: While most of the changes New Leaf added to the series were well-received, there were some changes that caused criticism.
  • Blathers not going on tangents for each item you donated. This was done to encourage players to just donate everything they had at once, and there are detailed descriptions for each donation at its exhibit. Convenient, but it strips the very meaning of his character, and by extension, his name.
  • The removal of "episodes" (special events that added backstory to some of the game's permanent NPCs like Sable). Admittedly, some of them would just be retreading old ground at this point, and the old characters' backstories are referenced sometimes, but it does make some of the new characters like Reese and Cyrus seem underdeveloped compared to the others.
  • In previous games, balloons would contain a random item. Initially in New Leaf, they only contained Balloon furniture, so they only existed to shoot down, and after someone completed the set, they were largely pointless to shoot down afterwards, besides getting badges from Phineas, better slingshots or selling them for some bells. The Welcome amiibo update reverted this change so random items would drop again, albeit balloon furniture is still the most common outcome.
  • Once a villager suggests adding a police station to the town, the player receives two options: They can get the Classic Police Station, in which Booker works at, or the Modern Police Station, in which Copper works at. Splitting the two up has not been well-received by people, as Copper and Booker have always been a team. You can only hope to see the other by visiting a different town/Dream town. Another thing disliked about this mechanic is that the characters are tied to the respective stations, which some players do not like because they would prefer a station's design, but not the personality of the character that works there. For example, some players may like Booker for his Shrinking Violet Cloudcuckoolander personality, but want the modern police station as it blends into their town's theme. The result is that the player has to make a very difficult decision of either choosing a policeman they do not like, forgoing their plans for the town's theme altogether, or letting an out-of-theme building stick out like a sore thumb in their town and ruining the aesthetics.
  • Unlike previous games, New Leaf has no Bebebese and Silence language options, meaning there is no way to get rid of the Animalese voices.
  • Numerous shopkeepers will now get to the point when speaking to you, but the Nooklings are more talkative than anyone else. It's a chore to buy a tool, as Tommy will always ask you if you know how to use it, something Tom Nook would only do once.
  • A common complaint about New Leaf is that everyone is too nice: while the series' characters gradually Took a Level in Kindness from Wild World-onwards (allegedly due to complaints from parents about the Jerkass characterization of the first game's various overseas localizations being emotionally distressing to the series' target audience of children), NPCs, especially the traditionally acerbic cranky, peppy and snooty villagers, are considerably less rude or grumpy here than in previous games. This criticism would only be amplified when the trend continued in New Horizons.