Party Game Sundays: Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival (Part 1)

When I first saw the announcement of Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival I thought that it could be cool. Mario Party is fun to play with a group of friends, and I really like Animal Crossing. To make things even better the game was supposed to be a free download, and you'd just need Animal Crossing Amiibo to play. Well, that's not what ended up happening. Nintendo decided it would be better to have consumers pay $60 for the game, and two Amiibo. I inexplicably bought Mario Party 10 for $60 so, why not this game where I get two Amiibo as well? I regret everything.

Man, this game is not good. It's not bad either. It might be the most mediocre video game I've ever experienced in my life. I hear you asking "Is it like Mario Party?" My answer to you is yes, it's exactly like Mario Party, except with all the parts where you interact with the game stripped out. It's essentially a digital board game. You roll dice, and that's really it.

CAN YOU FEEL THE EXCITEMENT!?

The quintessential mode in the game is called Board Game. In order to play you need at least two Animal Crossing Amiibo. If you only have two Amiibo you can still have up to four players, but the other two will have to be villagers. On top of that they'll also be at a distinct disadvantage. See, the entire point of Amiibo Festival is to have the most happiness points at the end of a month. You pick a month, and each time every player goes that counts as a day. Every single turn you have to tap your Amiibo to the game pad in order to roll the dice. Whoever thought that was a good idea needs a swift kick in the head, because it means you have to either pass the game pad around the room, or sit right on top of the other players.

Once you roll you get to choose where you want to move. Each time someone who is using an Amiibo rolls they get a single point of happiness, people using villagers don't, because they didn't bring an Amiibo to the Amiibo Festival. If you land on a pink space you'll see an event and get some happiness. If a money bag is on the same space you'll also earn money. Alternatively if the space is purple you'll lose happiness and money instead. There are also special event spaces that change every turn, which have you button through a lot of text for little to no payoff. So, yes you roll a die, and then read an event. Something happens and you arbitrarily gain or lose happiness and money. Sounds fun right!? It's not.

Digby's hype meter if off the charts!

To try and add more depth to the game it layers on a few other mechanics. There is a gyroid at each corner of the map, and if you reach them they'll put a stamp on your stamp card. This nets you a large amount of happiness, especially if you collect all four stamps. My personal favorite part of the game happens on Sundays. Joan the Boar comes and sells turnips, which allows you to play the stalk market. You are allowed to purchase turnips in groups of ten, and then sell them for a profit. Every space has a price that turnips sell for. Sometimes it's high and sometimes it's low. It's like the stock market...

This is all there is to the game. No excitement, just reading. I often just use all of my money to buy turnips and hope they sell high just so I can feel alive while playing. At the end of a game every 1,000 bells you have (Animal Crossing's currency) you get one happiness point. The happiness points tally up and then the game is over. If you have an Amiibo the happiness points are saved to it unlocking new outfits you can wear during the board game...*sigh*

Each Amiibo has six outfits to unlock.

There actually are mini-games, but they're totally separate from the board game mode. After playing through a board mini-games unlocked. In order to play them you need to use Amiibo cards. Thankfully the game comes with three so you can try them out. Each game is relatively similar and has you swiping the card on the game pad for a terrible random thing to occur. There are about 7 games and none of them are fun or take skill.

What's insane is that I played the board game mode three times. Each session takes over an hour, and nothing really even happens. On top of that the events started repeating IN MY FIRST SESSION! They didn't even write a wide variety of reasons for your character to get happy or sad! How is that possible!? What's even more insane is that after the third session I unlocked the ability to edit the game board. So now I can add buildings to the board to make different events happen. They didn't think that would be a good thing to have from the start? I have yet to see what the game is like with that new addition, but sadly I will find out. I have agreed to play the game once a month with the Sunday crew, so that's great.

This image looks so fun. Why isn't the game?

I will be back for a second part to let you know if the game gets any better with the addition of new event spaces. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it doesn't.