Exploring the Enchanting World of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

The previous occasion I contributed to Eurogamer, it was to narrate the tale of how Nintendo declared the end of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp as a freemium live service game and sent me spiraling into a state of despair. The one comforting element during this somber period was that, tucked away at the end of Nintendo’s email, was the announcement that my save files could potentially carry over to a paid application – Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete – which was set to arrive “in the future”.

Well, the future is NOW, and I’ve been enjoying Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete since just a few moments after a pre-order download alert appeared on my lock screen. Not continuously, I must admit. I paused to take a shower at one point, and again later to crochet a nudibranch and watch The Waft, but I played quite intensely. The wealth of information and experiences gathered during this period is what I will now share with you.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete offers a very similar experience to the now-obsolete Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. You, a somewhat capable human with a large head, must interact with a variety of clumsy yet adorable animals and their requests as you collect numerous items to enhance a campsite, a camper van, and a lodge. New players must start from scratch, gradually accumulating furniture and making friends to fulfill their deepest campsite management fantasies. Veteran players can either start fresh or resume their previous progress… Well, they can if they connected their Pocket Camp save files to a Nintendo account.

Regarding the latter, there’s a certain level of frustration, and it’s worth mentioning here if you’re a returning player contemplating reviving your camp in the new app. You see, the save file transfer is something you need to consider if you linked a Nintendo account to your save before the live service game was discontinued.

There were countless in-game alerts about account linking, along with another notice in the Complete trailer. However, there was no overlap period between the two apps being accessible, hence no grace period for anyone to download the new app, realize there was a linked account requirement for save file transfers, and correct the issue right away. Instead, by the time Complete launched earlier this month, the availability (or lack thereof) of your save files was already determined. This struck me as an unusually harsh approach to managing the transition timeline.

If you’re in the game, the core mechanics are classic Animal Crossing. There’s crafting! Decorating! Dressing up! Fetching a coconut for an extremely sporty hamster! If you’ve imported save files, you’ll also retain your player character level, your friendship levels with each animal character, your bells (the free currency), crafting materials, items, layouts, clothing, and stored outfits.

What you will not find in Pocket Camp Complete are Leaf Tickets (the premium currency) or paid subscription plans. Eliminating Leaf Tickets means no more microtransactions (hooray!), and the best features of the subscription plans have indeed been incorporated into Complete so everyone can access them, including the option to appoint a camp caretaker animal, a sticker book system, and the availability of additional structure and outfit slots.

There’s also a new currency called Leaf Tokens, which is definitely not the same thing as Leaf Tickets under a different name (it is). Leaf Tokens exist where Leaf Tickets used to appear onscreen, yet unlike their premium counterpart, they are now very easy to earn simply by playing the game. They can even be spent on many of the same items that Leaf Tickets used to be for, such as the golden fishing rod, terrain items, fortune cookies, and more. I believe I could easily be slightly intoxicated by Leaf Tokens, to be honest with you. I’ve gathered so many in such a short amount of time!

Indeed, after seven long years of saving and managing Tickets for campsite terrain items, I might have become accustomed to not being able to afford a fully themed space because I needed to obtain the themed foreground, main ground, background and sky separately. Now, with this influx of Leaf Tokens, I must admit that I went on what can only be described as a geological shopping spree – my camp can have oceans! Jungles! Bamboo groves! Cobblestones! Honestly, I never knew such exhilaration until now.

Crafting events were designed to educate, which was somewhat surprising after spending £3/month into the Nintendo void to reduce these events as part of the bygone Happy Helper Learning. I might have been paying that fee for so long that I could have easily forgotten that crafting time limits even existed, although my plentiful Leaf Tokens did assist with this quite a bit, as I can toss the crafting llama a heap of them and he can shave off six hours from the crafting time of all future items. Not that it’s very apparent, mind you, since you need to run the plus sign over the llama’s head to accomplish this instead of the more logical action of interacting directly with the crafting object slots. The user interface can often be quite confusing.

The main significant change is that Whole no longer necessitates a constant internet connection while playing. This is fantastic news for those of us who wish to spend hours on train journeys creating miniature camp scenes. In fact, I spent an hour nestled in a coffee shop with terrible mobile reception just fiddling with my new pre-Christmas cabin design – a task that would have been nearly impossible in the original Pocket Camp.

The only drawback to offline play is the loss of the (admittedly minimal) social aspect of the Pocket Camp experience. I was saddened to see that go, as my small group of friends had found ways to express genuine affection through Pocket Camp’s limited interactions. Friends are now collected using QR codes on customizable Buddy Cards, and you might encounter their avatars in the new Whistle Stop area. Whistle Stop is where the Animal Crossing universe’s greatest musician, KK Slider, spends his time. (I certainly have thoughts about KK Slider, but I suppose I am not here to review him. Not yet.)

In terms of content, new events and items are planned until September 2025, with previous events returning on a four-year cycle. I’ve completed the initial two events, and they were significantly easier to “complete” (meaning “acquire all the furniture items”) than those in the live service game. This is fantastic for totally new players, but experienced players might find the new pace disorienting.

I internalized the three-hour check-in cycle that is crucial for optimizing gameplay in the live service game years ago. Consequently, I have exceeded the fishing target by such a vast margin that I am now overwhelmed with the Toy Day bookshelves provided as one of the event rewards. I just tossed seven of them into one of the game’s overflow storage units so I wouldn’t have to look at them anymore.

This just goes to show that I played Pocket Camp in such a ridiculously obsessive way that it inevitably influences how I engage with and experience Whole. However, trying to position myself in the mindset of a casual and everyday player, I believe Pocket Camp Whole offers a charming, bite-sized gaming experience focused on collecting and crafting. The food items are a definite delight, and I challenge anyone not to melt when they see the coffee and cake item where the latte foam art is designed to resemble Marshal’s adorable little face!

The removal of the Leaf Ticket economy also means you can often obtain many of the items you desire simply by popping in occasionally, and then engage in a longer session where you arrange your new treasures for optimum display.

On the downside, the user interface still feels cluttered. Even I still experience minor moments of confusion despite the countless hours I’ve spent on this game. There are complicated systems that don’t make much sense without the accompanying freemium social antics. For example, due to the way three types of fruit were distributed to encourage market box usage in Pocket Camp, the only way I can produce grapes in Whole is to annoy the avatars of certain friends at Whistle Stop. Plus, I challenge anyone to truly enjoy the cumbersome furniture overflow storage solutions in the late game.

I would also like to point out that although microtransactions are gone, the remnants of the freemium model are still embedded throughout the game. This means that, despite not making constant appeals to your bank account, Whole can still replicate some of the same loops of exploitative gaming, just using Tokens instead of Tickets, so players (and game critics with a penchant for loot boxes) might want to keep that in mind.

For existing Pocket