For all the good games that were brought to us in 2015 there were also a good assortment of bad ones, this is particularly truthful for Nintendo. In a year where Nintendo brought us such brilliant games as Super Mario Maker, Splatoon and even Xenoblade Chronicles X they also brought us some average as well as bad games. To be completely truthful 2015 was not a great year for Nintendo and the Wii U reflects this, even with the aforementioned great games the bad outweigh the good particularly with the end of the year. Nintendo brought us two games in November and these were Mario Tennis Ultra Smash and Animal Crossing amiibo Festival, while both were bad Mario Tennis was a disappointing bad (as I have already discussed here), Animal Crossing on the other hand was just plain bad to a point where I wonder what Nintendo was actually thinking.
It’s true we never wanted amiibo Festival but yet we got it and why? Well it was so Nintendo could warrant Amiibo’s and offer a game that made use of them, the problem was even with the game’s first reveal it just looked dull and the amiibo integration was simply annoying. It was a lesson well taught in Mario Party 10 which had been released earlier that year, amiibo’s and the board game set ups simply didn’t work but yet Nintendo still saw the need to provide us with amiibo Festival a game that really is as dull as it looks.
Amiibo Festival is not fun and in fact this is one point that loses everything to the game, often in games there is at least one redeeming feature, there is often that one thing that makes the game worth your time. Admittedly amiibo Festival does try to give this credit with one feature but in the case of fun it does not work, the one potential redeeming feature is more of a thought process meaning the stalk market.
As a further issue, this one feature does nothing to even redeem the game it is on the whole just a single point which is just as tired as the game itself and towards the end game it never adds anything. But this is a point that really demonstrates (at least in my books) why Animal Crossing amiibo Festival is one of 2015’s worst games, at one point it is the shortage of redeeming features, but the entire extent of the game is simply tired.
All features are overdone and work to the most minimal extent barely ever doing more than scrapping the bottom of the barrel, and this even comes down to the way Nintendo tried to make amiibo’s relevant. This game feels forced and on the whole there is no better way to put it, amiibo’s may be popular but to the general consumer unless you are a huge Super Smash Brothers fans they are nothing more than just really cool collectable figures. I even keep a number of these just for this reason myself and in the case of amiibo Festival this is Nintendo trying too hard to make amiibo’s matter in gaming terms.
In fact it the likely the business decision regarding amiibo’s that really makes this game worse, had they not tried to shove these figures down our throats for this game things could have been better. There is a simple reason for this, one such reason is in regards to the whole amiibo format, first these are used pointlessly as part of the game for honestly no real reason that I can gather. Secondly, using these as a peripheral to simply make a move in the game is more annoying than anything else. Another reason in the case of amiibo Festival is that they were trying too hard with this format, had they actually used amiibo’s for proper in game reasons things could have worked out but as I have said they are simply forced.
Had Nintendo simply taken a much different route in Animal Crossiing amiibo Festival things have been better, simply not forcing amiibo could have helped, and then to make this game work fully they could have just did an Animal Crossing spin from Mario Party and things would have worked out. I can’t actually complain about Animal Crossing being used in this way, a board game style set up seems fitting but amiibo’s just don’t work in this manner.
In a year that offered so many wonderful games it is strange that there are so many that just did not work out. Even worse though is the fact that of all the games that did not quite turn out the way they could have it seems strange that it is Nintendo that failed so massively. The company has always seemed to be all about decent quality games and ones that are really fun but yet amiibo Festival fails on so many accounts. It just feels worse to know that amiibo Festival is in all honesty the worst game I had played in 2015, looks may be deceiving but in amiibo Festival what you see is what you get.
