Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival

Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival

If amiibos weren't such a selling point, New Horizons would have been on the Wii U!

Genre(s):	Party
Platform(s):	Wii U
Release date:	NA: November 13, 2015 EU: November 20, 2015 WW: November 21, 2015
Developer(s):	Nintendo EPD NDcube
Publisher(s):	Nintendo
Made in:	Japan
Franchise:	Animal Crossing
Predecessor:	Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer
Successor:	Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival is a party video game developed by Nintendo EPD in partnership with NDcube and published by Nintendo for the Wii U in 2015.

Why It's Not A Festival

As the title suggests, this game is focused on amiibos, meaning you had to buy more amiibos in order to play the game. This is just nothing, but a complete waste of money, and you could even not have enough money to buy amiibos, or other stuff you would like to buy if you would actually buy amiibos for this game.
There's not enough content in the game to justify the retail price of $60. This proves that the game is overpriced, and it's also the same price as Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash.
The game is nothing but pure luck. You have to be really lucky if you want to beat the game, otherwise, you can lose the game easily, forcing you to restart the game. This can be a waste of time if you would replay the same stage from the beginning after failing the stage you played, much like Mario Party 9.
- The Turnips, which are basically the game's stock exchange currency, are also guilty of this. Nathaniel Bandy, while making his TRIGGERED! video on the game, managed to obtain 142250 Bells just by exchanging all 570 of his turnips and landing on a helpful space in a single turn.
Terrible, annoying and clunky controls. To throw a dice, you can't press any buttons, not even if you would hold it for too long. You have to scan an amiibo to do it. This is similar to Mario Party 10's amiibo Party mode. The player can get annoyed by the controls very easily.
Whenever it's the player's turn, you have to re-scan the amiibo. There's nothing you can do to make the game tell you to just play the game without re-scanning the amiibo. This is another annoying thing made just to annoy you.
Although it's a party game, like the Mario Party series which contain boards, this game has no minigames at all. Even in a party game. All you do in this game is just roll the dice, read text, repeat. That's pretty disappointing to those people who loved party video games that contain boards and minigames.
Really boring dialogue. If there are people talking a few times, the game will just want to bore you and waste your time. Even Mario Party 9's dialogue is not that boring.

Redeeming Qualities

It runs very well, just like other Animal Crossing games, meaning the game doesn't have huge chances of crashing. This means you can play the game without any run problems.
The graphics are awesome, making the game beautiful, just like the rest of the games from the series, especially for Wii U and 2015 standards.
The soundtrack is incredible and really good to listen. Pretty sure you would just want to listen to it for so long just to prove how incredibly the soundtrack is. And as what would you expect from a Animal Crossing game.
Desert Island Escape is very fun and easily addictive. So much to the point that it was ported to the Nintendo 3DS as part of the Welcome Amiibo update to Animal Crossing: New Leaf, as a playable minigame accessed through the Wii U item.

Reception

Due to the game's serious flaws, the game was criticized by both critics and fans of Animal Crossing for focused on amiibos and boring gameplay, it wasn't only just considered as the worst Animal Crossing game ever made, but also one of the worst Wii U games ever made.

Upon release, despite Famistu gave 32/40, the game received mixed to negative reviews from critics, with a Metacritic score of 46/100, it also has a 4.1 by user score, Nintendo World Report it a 4.5 out of 10 and said citing "Boring, repetitive gameplay" and "Tak[ing] an hour to get anything good.", Nintendo Life gave a 5/10 and said "Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival does not seem to have learned from them, and brings questionable to downright annoying integration. Were all of amiibo Festival as clever and engrossing as the Desert Island Escape minigame then this package would be the real deal. However, that simply isn't the case. The central board game is slow and plodding, and is tough to recommend to anyone that isn't already a die-hard Animal Crossing fan willing to put up with it. That leaves the minigames, of which seven out of eight aren't compelling enough to continue playing for more than a week."

However, the game also sold poorly, it sold 20,303 copies within its first week of release in Japan, the game proved to be a commercial failure in the entire Animal Crossing franchise.

It was one of only two Animal Crossing games (alongside with Animal Crossing Plaza) released for Wii U.