Animal Crossing: New Leaf spoilercast
Chris Donlan and Tom Phillips on Nintendo's new marvel.
I don't think I'm the only one who's got a problem, but when that problem's staying up until the small hours writing love letters to a bespectacled monkey who I'm pretty sure just wants to be friends it's difficult to do anything about it. Animal Crossing: New Leaf's sucked us all in with a force the series has been unable to muster since the GameCube debut in the West (although I'll admit that Wild World came close), and it's a real rare delight.
There's something subversive about Animal Crossing, whether that's in the melancholy bubbling away under the surface (I bumped into that monkey wandering the trees on her own last night, her snootiness crumbling for a second as she seemed to contemplate her own mortality) or in its wilful slowness. Here's a game where you're punished for running by trampling flowers and sending wildlife scattering, and it's this that sets Animal Crossing apart from the instant gratification of so many of its peers.
So yeah, it's pretty good. Tom Phillips and Chris Donlan got together to discuss exactly how good recently, as well as how it all ends (spoiler: Blathers shoots Nook down in cold blood and whisks you away in his grey feathers to a life free of financial tyranny.)
There's a video below, and even further down is the chat framed in more traditional podcast format. We'll be back with more of these whenever anyone bothers to release another video game, which could well be a while off.
And here's the audio link!