Or maybe not rant, per se.
I am building a second floor on my palatial three-room estate up in the cliffs of our island, overlooking the water. I have begun an experimental flower bed for cross-breeding; I have a little hill where I plant all the extras of everything and see what happens (what happens is a lot of damn flowers); I have another, larger plateau for all the exotic fruit trees I bring back from Mystery Tours. I have a haunted statue and a scientific drawing with a mysterious key taped to its back. I have a mad science lab with freaky moving wallpaper and skull flooring. My kitchen has glow in the dark skull wallpaper and black wood flooring. My living room is a lovely green with molded paneling. My bed has a cute planets pattern bedspread. I have a pet hamster whose cage fell out of a tree.
The issue is quickly becoming that I’m not the primary player on the island. That would be my kid, who asked for the game originally and still likes it, but not as much as he likes playing Minecraft with his friends or Overwatch.
Okay, so for every Switch console, you can only have one island. You can have (I think?) eight player characters on the island, but only one of them is the primary player. That player gets to set up the little animal people moving in, gets to decide where buildings go, and eventually gets to terraform the island if they like. Everyone else can jaunt about building their houses and taking Mystery Tours and such, which is actually pretty fun all by itself.
But.
I kind of want to get more animal people on the island. We also got to see one of Z’s friends’ islands, and it was super cute, and got me thinking about expanding my dollhouse to the entire island, and …
I could completely re-start the game, but frankly … I’ve spent over 1 million bells on my house (game money–and not in-game purchases, either, this is from crafting walls out of oranges and catching fish to sell to the two small tanuki children who run the general store–I haven’t spent any real money past the $60 to buy the game). I love it. I don’t want to lose my lab or my haunted-ass kitchen wallpaper. I have a crossbreeding program for roses going on, I can’t stop now!
So I entered into negotiations with the kid to occasionally play as him in order to lure invite animal people to my island for my weird genetic experiments to hang out and catch butterflies and gather firewood. I discovered that we’re supposed to be trying to get K.K. Slider to come give a concert, but I kinda doubt I have the wherewithal (or artistic eye) to make that happen, ever. More likely I’m going to keep buying haunted art to leave in the woods amongst the weeds that I actually kind of like and don’t want to pull.
Laura E. Price 