Animal Crossing: New Leaf didn’t need Amiibo to be one of the best games on the 3DS, but Nintendo’s Welcome amiibo update gave the little cards a surprisingly important role in the town-building experience.
If you have played New Horizons, you probably remember Animal Crossing amiibo cards as a convenient way to get specific villagers onto your island. But is that anything more than simply putting a character and off-brand furniture as eye candy? Let’s find out!
Getting The Villagers You Actually Want
The biggest problem with Animal Crossing New Leaf is also part of its charm, you don’t have much of a say over who moves into your town.
That’s fun until the game decides to give you three villagers you don’t particularly care about. Then, when you finally get the option to kick someone out, it decides your oldest villager should go rather than the one you’ve been desperately trying to get rid of.
For around $6, an Animal Crossing amiibo card could bring a specific villager to the campground, giving me a much more reliable way to get them into my town instead of leaving everything to the whims of the game’s RNG.
What I liked most, though, was that these characters weren’t all cookie-cutter nice guys either. Some would barely tolerate you and others were downright weird.
The Campground Was More Than An Amiibo Menu
The Welcome amiibo update added the campground as a proper location, and Amiibo visitors could show up in their own RVs. You could walk over, see who was there, talk to them, and check out the furniture they had available.
That sounds fairly basic now, but it worked because it was integrated into the town.
I wasn’t opening some separate Amiibo interface, scanning a card, collecting my reward and forgetting about it. I was walking into the campground because there might actually be something worth seeing.
The RVs also gave me another reason to care about specific characters. Their furniture collections were tied to the characters themselves, so finding a particular visitor could mean finding something I actually wanted for my house.
The Furniture Was Half The Fun
New Leaf already has an enormous amount of furniture, but the Amiibo-related items gave me another collection to work toward. The RVs could contain furniture that wasn’t simply sitting in the normal shops waiting for me to stumble across it.
I could scan a character, visit their RV, and browse what they had available. That made collecting Animal Crossing amiibo cards feel much more connected to the actual game.
I wasn’t collecting cards for the sake of having cards. I was collecting characters because they could unlock things I wanted in my town.
And if you’re the sort of person who spends an unreasonable amount of time decorating your house in Animal Crossing, that is a dangerous rabbit hole to go down, trust you me.
New Leaf Made Amiibo Feel Like Part Of The Town
I think this is where the difference between Animal Crossing: New Leaf and New Horizons becomes most obvious. The original 3DS game made Amiibo feel like another part of the town, while New Horizons mostly turned them into a useful tool for managing your villager roster.
The Animal Crossing New Horizons Amiibo cards are incredibly useful for particular villagers, especially when I’m sick of island hopping and nuking my Dodo Miles.
In Animal Crossing New Leaf, though, I had more reason to care about what happened after the scan because the character actually had somewhere to go and something for me to do when they arrived.
The campground and RVs are a big part of that. I could walk over, see who was visiting, check out their RV and browse the furniture they had brought with them. Suddenly, Animal Crossing amiibo cards weren’t just a way of getting a specific villager but another excuse to wander around my town.
That’s one of the things I appreciate most about the Animal Crossing New Leaf 3DS experience looking back. The Amiibo content doesn’t feel like it was bolted onto the game from the outside. It fits into the same slow routine of checking shops, visiting villagers, wandering around town, and dictating terms to residents as their “elected” Mayor!
So, Did Animal Crossing: New Leaf Really Do Amiibo Better?
Honestly, I couldn’t tell you, because I don’t like Animal Crossing villagers enough to care. That’s probably one of the many reasons I never felt particularly tempted to collect Animal Crossing amiibo cards in the first place.
To me, most of these characters are basically action figures for my wall that occasionally come to life, run around for a bit, sing a song, and then fail miserably at catching a butterfly directly in front of me.
Then there’s the whole business of actually collecting the cards. Buying sealed packs means I don’t even know whether I’m going to get the one I want. At that point, if I wanted to gamble, I’d either hit RainBet or start ripping open New Leaf Amiibo packs because at least those villagers interact with each other.
And just when I was getting desperate, I coughed up $70 for Pokemon Pokopia on the Switch 2 and basically never looked back.
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