Better late than never to this review, right? Not that we haven’t already been playing it…

If you’re new to the Animal Crossing franchise, it is a vacation simulation series (although the semantics, and specifics, of each vacation site do vary with each game) which puts you at the mercy of a fictional character named Tom Nook who you need to “pay back” for things like building your house and what have you. This is intended to be the primary motivating factor in playing the game, although this also serves to drive the storyline as well since the amount that you owe him is almost prohibitively expensive — at least in my opinion — and is intended to take a long time to pay off. You build a house, manage a town of your own, invite villagers to your town with the goal of making them as happy as you can to keep them there, and fulfill various storyline-driven quests as you ultimately save up enough Bells (in-game currency) to pay Nook back. (That is, unless you play the Stalk Market, the game’s equivalent of the stock market, and manage to “make it rich” selling your turnips — which in New Horizons, you can buy Sunday mornings — back on your island or someone else’s island on a day when Timmy and Tommy are buying them for a really high price, and then you can practically pay Nook back all at once, or over the time span of a few days. That was exactly what Bub and I wound up doing, and it was glorious. Our home loan is now permanently paid off. See ya, Nook!)

Although I’m the sort of person who likes, barring Bub deliberately cuing that he would like to play the game, to take breaks from games to avoid burning out on them and then not wanting to touch them for awhile, I would have to say that I really like this game, and it’s been handled really well for the most part. There are the occasional seasonal storylines (such as Bunny Day for Easter) that pop up that you can participate in — that one I absolutely loved. GIVE ME THE BUNNIES. The fact that you can also play it so easily with your friends if you have a Switch subscription is great as well. I don’t really have anything negative to say about the game so far and would pretty much recommend it to anyone who likes Animal Crossing, is looking for a nice, family-friendly game to play with their friends (online or solo), or is looking for a great game in general.