Animal Crossing: A Long Awaited Update

Good evening everyone and welcome to The Magical Mystery Blog.

After two days playing with Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s free update, I’ve fallen in love all over again with the game. That being said, Animal Crossing New Leaf is now called Animal Crossing New Leaf: Welcome Amiibo (ACNL: WA) – quite a mouthful, right? Yet still the title holds true wherein you can utilize your amiibos from the Animal Crossing franchise and even other characters (ex.: Splatoon, Mario, Pikachu) to unlock new items within the game. 

You can even use Animal Crossing amiibo cards; speaking of which, for this update Nintendo will be rolling out 50 more of those cards to provide you with even more friends to meet (and possibly have in your town) and items to purchase at Harvey’s Campground. The amiibos can be activated by summoning Wisp, the in-game amiibo reading spirit and using the Amiibo Reader (if your device is compatible with it). Wisp can be found in a genie’s lamp while walking around town and requests you bring him back to your house. Those who come via amiibo figure will not live in your town, but rather they will grant you items at Harvey’s Campground.

Harvey’s Campground is a new development in your town wherein you can use MEOW tickets to obtain new and rare items you can’t find in Nook’s stores. To retrieve MEOW tickets, you simply carry out Town Initiatives which appear on your new identification card. These initiatives include bringing items back from the island, catching a certain bug, updating your home, and other tasks. Some requests will offer more tickets than others and change on a daily basis. Once you’ve completed said initiative, go to the CAT machine (a little orange kiosk) outside your town hall to retrieve the tickets. Your new identification card will also require a new Dream Address.

If you happen to have Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer (HHD), then you receive even more items. Once you turn on the game, it’ll prompt you to transfer your HHD data to ACNL: WA. You can either use your downloaded version of the game or the retail cartridge, like I have. The cartridge method baffled me honestly. Remember how when we used to play video games and you removed the cartridge you would get a malfunction of some sort? For this update, I had to remove the ACNL: WA cartridge and input the HHD cartridge. The transfer went well and there were no problems, but I couldn’t believe that Isabelle (the one who prompted you through this from the ACNL: WA cartridge) still stayed on screen as you went through the process.

From the HHD transfer, you can order the following items from Nook’s Catalog at any Nook Store:

-Submarine (it’s the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine)
-Carriage (it’s Cinderella’s carriage)
-A mountain
-A mountain of money
-A large egg (now to wait forever for your pet dinosaur to hatch)
-An inflatable Mr. Resetti
-A large ant (perfect for Ant-Man)
-A cake house (the ideal item to lure Hansel and Gretel)
-A massive, towering cake
-A tea cup ride
-A UFO
-The actual Sun
-A Transformer look alike
-The luxury car from Monopoly (only black)
-A propeller plane
-A large stew pot (the perfect thing to cook your enemies – I mean, dinner in)
-Iceberg (RIGHT AHEAD!)
-A monitor tower
-A gigantic teddy bear (snuggles for days)

Another part of this update, we can now sit on rocks and cushions in our home! Players can also hang clothing on their walls, upload their photos to select social media sites using the image share function, receive items that aren’t just a balloon set in shooting down presents, and place items on specific pieces of furniture.  Albeit they’re minimal features, but it’s the little details that make the gameplay fun and unique.

Overall, I’m in love with this update. It’s so wonderful to see Nintendo breathing life into an old game and the items are excellent so far. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for a game I greatly admire and enjoy playing.

Thank you for reading tonight’s entry. If you enjoyed it, feel free to subscribe, share, comment, and critique.

So tell me, what do you think of ACNL:WA’s new update?