Amiibo Festival is adorable, but it’s often boring.
I almost fell asleep while playing Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival. I started to snooze on my sofa, so I told myself that the GamePad was dying anyway and literally went to my room to take a nap instead of playing. To its credit, amiibo Festival can be very relaxing in a uniquely Animal Crossing way… But it often feels like there’s nothing happening. Amiibo Festival’s charm and wit make up for it somewhat, but both its main board game and its minigames are simplistic and its amiibo integration clunky. It’s at its best when played with friends — otherwise, it’s slow and sleepy.
Amiibo Festival’s core attraction is a simple board game set in a typical Animal Crossing town. You have to get the most “Happy Points” to win, a sweet, adorable incentive to move around the board. However, it’s slow-paced, and there’s nothing terribly competitive about it. Simple isn’t bad, necessarily, but there’s not enough to make me want to come back to it over and over again.
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Watch 10 minutes of amiibo Festival’s board game above.
Although there’s not much going on gameplay-wise, amiibo Festival’s main attraction is filled with cute little details. My favorites are the scenarios that pop up whenever you land on a non-event space, like watching shooting stars or talking to a friend, that result in you either losing or gaining Happy Points or Bells. Nearly every single one of the scenarios is charming, and I even paid attention to the NPCs’ turns to see what would show up.
There’s not enough to the board game to make me want to come back to it.
The board game does integrate Animal Crossing’s turnip trade, the Stalk Market, very well. Buying low and trying, mostly through luck, to sell high made me feel like I was affecting my chances instead of being at the mercy of a die roll. It’s a gamble, and I sold all my turnips more than once for a modest profit only to land, to my dismay, on a space with a way better price on it the very next turn. Even with the Stalk Market, however, I still felt like I was barely doing anything besides tapping my amiibo on the GamePad and pressing A.
Two or three of Amiibo Festival’s eight minigames are strong, and even though they’re not terribly complex, I still enjoyed their endearing nature. My favorites — the Quiz Show, Mystery Campers, and Island Escape — are all games my much younger self would have absolutely loved. Unfortunately, there’s not enough depth to them to keep my interest for too long. Once I played a few rounds of each minigame, I’d mastered it — every playthrough after that felt like more of the same.
We want to hear it.
How well can you do at amiibo Festival’s Quiz Show? Get a peek at the questions above!
The Quiz Show is the biggest standout. I’ve played well over a thousand hours of Animal Crossing over all the games, and I still found some of the quiz questions difficult. A lot of them require specific knowledge, like who in real life made a painting that’s featured in the games, and my roommate beat me once with a combination of art history knowledge and lucky guesses.
Sadly, most of amiibo Festival’s minigames use amiibo cards, three of which are included, in frustrating ways. One hybrid of rock-paper-scissors and whack-a-mole required a lot of switching between amiibo cards and tapping them to the GamePad’s NFC reader at the right times, but it’s horribly clunky and not very fun. I ended up fumbling with the cards a lot and getting irritated.
Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival is undoubtedly charming, using the world and little details of Animal Crossing to their fullest. However, there’s not enough to it to keep me coming back. The amiibo integration is cumbersome and hard to play with, and interesting ideas like the use of the stalk market are limited by a slow pace. It’s delightful enough to make me smile, but it’s still a bit boring.
