Update Animal Crossing New Leaf – If you click on a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.
UPDATE 1/9/16 4:10 PM Nintendo has finally announced Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s big update for Europe – it’s coming here with a free patch, probably in early November.
Update Animal Crossing New Leaf
The update will add amiibo functionality to the game – as detailed below – with cards that bring their villagers to your town. A new batch of 50 cards will be launched on November 11th.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Summer Update Wave 2 Adds Fireworks, Backups, & More
It’s not known what the Animal Crossing amiibo figures will do, though Nintendo has confirmed what we previously reported: that some figures from other Nintendo series will also be compatible in some way.
Starting November 25th, all new copies of the game will come with the update pre-installed – and in the new guise of the Animal Crossing: New Leaf Welcome amiibo!.
Finally, a special Animal Crossing Nintendo Direct is planned for sometime this fall, likely with more word on the update as well as details on the long-promised but still mysterious Animal Crossing mobile game that Nintendo has in store.
Four years after its original launch on the 3DS, the quirky life sim is getting new content, with amiibo figures and map support.
Just Bought Animal Crossing New Leaf! Excited To Play It When I Go Home
Animal Crossing amiibo will now be supported in-game. The cards will prompt their specific villagers to arrive in your town, although it’s unknown what the amiibo figures will do.
It also looks like Nintendo’s color-based shooter Splatoon will be featured in the game, via new Callie and Marie Amiibo figures.
“And amiibo from other series?” Nintendo’s Japanese website asks, along with photos of Splatoon furniture and costumes (thanks to our John Lineman for the translation). At the very least, this suggests that amiibo from other franchises will be used to unlock in-game content.
An update will come this fall. Nintendo also said in April that the Animal Crossing mobile game coming this fall is an Animal Crossing mobile game — which will be free. may receive income from affiliate and advertising partnerships for sharing this content and from purchasing links.
10 Best Amiibo For Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Animal Crossing: New Horizons may be the game that revives the franchise, but New Leaf is the best representation of what Animal Crossing is really about.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf celebrates 10 years today, June 9, 2023. Below, we explore New Leaf alongside the explosive popularity of its successor, New Horizons, and find the appeal of its simpler approach.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Animal Crossing: New Horizons changed everything for the once dormant life simulation series. Thanks in large part to the start of the pandemic, New Horizons surpassed the combined sales of all previous entries just six weeks after its release, and has sold more than 42 million copies to date. But while New Horizons got some well-deserved love from critics and fans alike, I personally put many hours into its 3DS predecessor, New Leaf, which just turned 10 years old, and it still stands as the best pure Animal Crossing experience.
New Leaf is the fourth entry in the Animal Crossing series, and it’s fair to say that the game was seen as a somewhat conservative evolution of what made the series so great. Before New Horizons, each new entry was essentially more of the same, with a few little twists to keep things interesting. While this may sound like a criticism, the slow life sim that Animal Crossing offers doesn’t require dramatic changes to attract fans, especially when they wait several years between releases.
Nintendo Launches Free Update For Hit Animal Crossing: New Leaf Game
New Leaf builds on the core aspects of Animal Crossing as a series, while adding a number of key improvements that make it significantly better than its predecessor, City Folk. The biggest change in the game of New Leaf is that you are now the mayor of the city, and not just a new human citizen living among the animal people. It gives you the ability to create new devices in your city for large fees, including lampposts, bridges, banks and cafes. You can even make “laws” that allow businesses in your village to open later or earlier, depending on your personal whims.
When I first started playing New Leaf all those years ago, I found these greater responsibilities (as I interpreted them) problematic at first. They felt inconsistent with the make-your-own-fun approach that made me fall in love with the series on the GameCube, and I mostly ignored them in the early hours of the game.
However, as I got further into New Leaf, I realized that these quests gave me more purpose than the collection of furniture and fossils from previous entries in the series. When I played the original Animal Crossing games, I was a kid with seemingly endless time—I could spend hours enjoying the measured charm of the series without worrying about bills or responsibilities. The various mayor perks in New Leaf may cost an absolute ton of Bells, but they gave me something to work on besides house payments – something I’m reluctant to admit I want in a modern Animal Crossing game. What’s more, I realized that New Leaf simply had a depth of content that no other entry in the series at the time could match: more shops, more villagers, more events, more items.
However, that all changed with New Horizons. True to its name, it introduced a number of new mechanics to the formula, especially those popularized by the survival genre, albeit with the sharp edges honed. These changes make it probably the most innovative game in the series, for better or worse. Players are encouraged to make their own furniture instead of waiting for Tom Nook’s shop to stock their desired items. The game strongly encourages hoarding recipes and key ingredients like wood to craft the items you want. A few hours into the game, players unlock the ability to terraform their islands, essentially giving them the freedom to completely change the face of their city as they see fit. Keep your eyes open as you cut down other wood to collect enough of the right kind of wood to build your favorite fence, and you might imagine one of Minecraft’s creepers strolling through your idyllic island.
Nintendo Animal Crossing: New Leaf
At first, I embraced New Horizons with open arms. I have a deep, abiding love for the series, and when I jumped in, I hadn’t spent much time in an Animal Crossing game in over five years. I wanted to like it, maybe a little too much. As someone who doesn’t generally enjoy survival games, I was aware that many of the changes Nintendo made probably weren’t made with me in mind, even though I tried to buy into them.
There’s no doubt that I enjoyed my time with New Horizons, but my complaints began to mount from the start of the working hours. While previous Animal Crossing games mostly give you the freedom to explore and do your own thing after just an hour or two of playing, New Horizons slowly puts its content behind days and days of tutorials that I found tedious, to say the least. I also felt that it took a long time to find furniture or recipes that I liked – I found myself sticking to standard equipment that I could easily build for much longer than I wanted, simply because I didn’t want to go out and cut more trees.
It was New Horizon’s first major event, Bunny Day, that really dampened my desire to continue playing the game. Party Eggs have replaced every other item in the game to an absurd degree – underground eggs, tree eggs, eggs hanging from balloons. (Nintendo even later apologized for this occurrence.) It felt like a parody of itself. I forced myself to pull enough weeds and plant enough flowers for a five-star island, but when I reached that, my desire to play hit a wall. Sure, I could use the Island Designer app to turn my island into my perfect paradise, but I just didn’t feel like doing that — I barely had enough furniture to fill my house. Frustrated, I left New Horizons and reset my city on New List. And to my surprise, I found myself enjoying the predecessor much more than the acclaimed sequel.
What’s ironic about all of this is that you can see the seeds of many of New Horizon’s ideas in New Leaf. The Island Designer app in the Switch game is basically just a big version of New Leaf’s public works projects. For me, the problem is that New Leaf’s PVPs felt like a series of objectives that I worked towards through the core of Animal Crossing – a daily handful of quests, fishing, hanging out with my villagers – while the island designer is the entirety of what New Horizons goes, buried under an endless hamster wheel of quests from Minecraft and other survival games. Previous Animal Crossing games had daily quests that weren’t necessary but gave the game its own rhythm; New Horizon’s larger board feels like a pain in the ass. That doesn’t help either