In August, Nintendo announced it would shutter Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. Its final moments came this week. Don’t feel sad. It had a good, long life. Well, a long life at any rate, because the game might have been better dubbed Animal Crossing: Hideous IAP Edition. It was infested with currencies and payments. And unlike chill efforts on Nintendo’s other platforms, it constantly bugged you with notifications and unsubtle hints that you could progress faster if you spent piles of cash. And now it’s dead. Except it isn’t, because it’s been reborn as Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete. Yay?
Surprisingly, this is a good thing, even if this new release might have been more accurately named Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Mostly Complete. The entire original game has not made it across intact, for better and worse. You still get to stomp about a campsite, remaking it in your own image like a furry Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. But it’s now a distinctly solo pursuit, lacking interaction with other players. On the other hand, there’s no IAP. And although grind mechanics remain, the exploitation has gone – for example, you now earn Complete Tickets during events and trade them for limited edition items.
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So: no more FOMO. Play when you want. Pay once. This feels more like the game Pocket Camp should have been in the first place. More importantly, it now feels like an actual Nintendo game. But Nintendo has always been a bit weird on mobile, never quite figuring out what it wanted to be.
The first Nintendo game I recall playing on iPhone was GW Parachute, back in 2008. Only this wasn’t actually by Nintendo. A developer had cunningly ‘converted’ a bunch of Nintendo’s Game & Watch titles to the touchscreen. And they were perfect. At which point, Nintendo ruined everything by throwing lawyers at a tiny indie until they changed the graphics to cartoon rubbish and then disappeared entirely. I always wondered if that soured Nintendo to mobile. But I also wondered why Nintendo didn’t then bring across those titles itself.
In the end, Nintendo didn’t rock up on mobile for another eight years, with the baffling Miitomo – a kind of deranged social networking featuring Nintendo Miis. Next up was Super Mario Run, which dumped Nintendo’s mascot into an auto-runner that was fairly good but, to my mind, lagged behind faster and more entertaining Rayman games. Also, it reportedly didn’t sell well. Hence Nintendo then diving feet first into full-on IAP hell with Fire Emblem Heroes, Animal Crossing: Now Very Dead Edition, and Mario Kart Tour.
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Given that history, Pocket Camp Complete is an oddity. I’ve seen games transition from paid entities to freemium horror shows before, but the reverse is vanishingly rare. Yet here we are with a game that will initially cost a tenner, and that Nintendo will even support with new items until next September. Wisely, the company is also making it easy for existing players to move across saves from the IAP-infested original, assuming they do so by June 2025. (A deadline even the most chill Animal Crossing fan should be able to make.) And you can now import custom designs from New Horizons too. Blimey.
It’d be interesting to know what the motivation is here. Perhaps the Delta emulator jolted Nintendo and made it shift from badness to goodness on mobile. Maybe this is the start of something new. I’d certainly love to see more of this kind of thing from Nintendo on Android and iPhone. I fear, though, this is more likely a last hurrah – a thank-you of sorts to this mobile game’s biggest fans. Albeit a thank you that’ll cost them one final payment and let Nintendo pocket a few bucks while this particular camp winds down for a final time.
Buy Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete on Android ($9.99/£8.99) or iOS ($9.99/£8.99). The price doubles on 30 January 2025.
