Animal Crossing-New Leaf: Day 20

New Leaf has pretty much become part of my gaming regimen now and I'm certainly not thinking of quitting anytime soon. I've perfected and refined my in-game routine, tackling new tasks and relinquishing others. For instance, I all but stopped trips to the Tropical Island; although these visits could be quite productive, they felt too much like farming bouts for my taste. I prefer to stay in my lovely old village, even though the enrichment rate there is considerably lower. My early trips to the Tropical Island were not for naught, though; you could say that they literally bear fruit, since they allowed me to collect a large range of tropical fruits that I could then replant in my own village. These foreign specimens acclimatized pretty well, and my local cherry trees now cohabit with lemon trees, lychee trees and more—not to mention that my shorelines are now adorned with countless coconut trees.

And talking about local cherry trees, I've decided a couple of days ago that the peach should hereafter become the local fruit in lieu of the cherry—first because peach is my favourite fruit of all the ones offered by the game, second because peaches look so ripe and full, and third because I'm the mayor and this place is my oyster. I thus started cutting down cherry trees with great enthusiam and replacing them with peach trees, and I already have a nice and productive peach orchard next to my home. That's not to say that I will totally give up on other fruits, mind you: I want peaches to be the prevailing fruit in my village, but I'm still planning to maintain smaller orchards featuring all the other fruits—including cherries.

Apart from wreaking havoc on the local flora, I maintain pretty much the same daily routine as any other New Leaf player: I chat with the neighbours and fulfil their demands, I hunt bugs, pick up shells and harvest fruits before selling them, I put some crappy items for sale in the Recycle store and, last but not least, I savour the littles surprises that pop up each day. (For instance, yesterday was the so-called "Bunny Day" and involved a giant hunt for chocolate eggs. That was lovely, although I gave up after a couple of minutes because the last three sorts of eggs were too tedious to find.) In a nutshell, I'm enjoying myself. A lot.

My only real gripe with New Leaf lies in the fact that it takes so, so very long to accomplish anything in that game. Mind you, I'm not referring to the overall slow pace of the game, i.e. the fact that only one public work project can be tackled at a time, the fact that fruits take a couple of real time-days to regrow or the fact that house improvements can only be witnessed the next day; this is all part of New Leaf's unique style and it's what makes the game so relaxing. What I'm referring to is the fact that even the meanest in-game task takes much longer than it should. I often find myself playing New Leaf for 45 minutes or one hour at a time; and yet, when I close my 3ds, I've hardly accomplished anything more than harvesting some fruits, capturing a couple of insects, excavating a handful of fossils and repaying a meagre fraction of my loans. The return on investment when it comes to gaming satisfaction is clearly not meaty enough for my taste: one hour of gaming should provide me with more tasks to accomplish and a deeper satisfaction than the one I derive from my daily session of New Leaf. As a result, I decided to keep things in check and to play no more than 30 minutes a day; I will accomplish things slower, but that's fine by me. It's not like the game is rushing me forward anyway, now is it?

Retaliatory measures aside, I identified a couple of factors that play a huge part in making mundane tasks so unbearably slow. Those are pretty much gameplay tweaks that seem to have been implemented for the sole purpose of lengthening play time, which make New Leaf one of these (too) numerous games rife with fake longevity:

• The default walking speed is way too slow. I'm constantly pressing B to run, which can become hard on my fingers after a while. The running speed should have been the default speed, period.
• The talking speed is also unbearably slow, even when using the B or L button to speed it up, and it cannot be altered in the options. Worse, text cannot be skipped at all, which forces the player to endure the villagers introductory speeches every single time they address them. Not to mention that constantly pressing the L or B button when talking to people can be tiring.
• The inventory's capacity is painfully limited, which forces the player to take a lot of extra trips during the harvesting and selling processes. 
• The overall speed of everything is painfully indolent. My character moves around slowly, picks up items from the ground slowly, digs slowly, fishes slowly and so on, as though they have all the time in the world. Well, maybe they do, but I do not. 
• Villagers who want to invite you to their places or visit yours always want to do so at least one hour later. Why not just five minutes later, damnit? I have more important things to do than mill about for one hour or reopen my 3ds just to rendezvous with digital animals.

I cannot help but think that New Leaf would be so much more fulfiling if only it played three times faster. Why this languor, anyway? Did Nintendo think players would be all stressed out if their mayoral self moved faster or if text could be skipped? Or is it a classic case of a conscious design to make play sessions drag on unduly and inflate the overall gameplay time, giving birth to impossibly long playthroughs? Whatever the reason, this display of fake longevity spoils my experience ever-so-slightly and could well be one of my main reasons to give up on the game in a distant future. But we're not there yet; for now, I'm still enjoying the game and I want to indulge in it for a little while longer. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!