Am I mad, or did it feel like all the villagers had more individualistic personalities in earlier games? The limited patter from them transforms them from neighbours into particularly fleshy furniture, lifeless behind the eyes, but maybe they have an errand for you, or dropped their purse or whatever. Maybe I’m only noticing it now because of the sheer number of villagers. Who knows.

The game itself is fun. The need to build and expand gives you a nice, structured way to grow and change the island, introducing new elements a good bit after you’ve got the hang of what’s come before. Eventually you buy everything you want, expand everything you wanna, and you end up with a sort of endgame of carving the island up into whatever design you’d want most.

And then I got bored and moved on. And that’ll do. Despite the design of these sorts of games, no game should last forever. I wanna be able to say I’m done with more games and play new experiences. I’ll remember this one fondly.