While Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp (Free) hasn’t really caught on the way Nintendo probably was hoping for, it doesn’t seem to be lacking in active players for the moment. The developers seem to be counting on wall-to-wall events to keep the players engaged, but you can tell that they’re trying to get the hang of what those events should be and how they should play out. The winter event that just ended was easy to finish in a day or two, while even regular players had trouble completing the event prior to that, Rover’s Garden Safari. Well, prepare your gardening tools, because the latest event has players heading back to the planting grind.
Titled Lottie’s Gothic Rose Festival, this one plays out more or less just like the last gardening event. Help out villagers to earn special flower seeds, plant those seeds in your garden to grow special flowers, then use your net to catch the creatures the flowers attract. In this case, it’s bats. Yikes. After hitting certain milestones for each type of bat, Lottie will reward you with special clothes, furniture, and other goodies. You can also share the bats you’ve collected with other players to help them out and get some seeds and other rewards in exchange. The harvested flowers can also be traded for useful materials.
In the notes for this event, Nintendo states that they have heard the feedback from the Rover gardening event, so you can probably expect this one to be a bit less ridiculous in terms of difficulty. From the little I’ve played so far, it seems at least like the success rate on catching the creatures has been boosted. Like the Rover event, this one is coming in two parts. The first runs through February 6th, with the second half going from the 6th until February 10th. A number of limited-time goals and IAP packs have also been added in support of the event.
The gardening events are engaging enough, and I suppose they at least get players to mess around in their gardens more than they probably would otherwise. At the same time, the game is now a few months old and doesn’t seem to be making a lot of progress in solving some of the bigger problems it launched with. Before the game came out, I would have thought it inconceivable that it would go the way of Miitomo, but if cycling through the same couple of types of events is all Nintendo has in mind, I’m not sure I see a good future for Pocket Camp. But hey, at least you can dress up like a gothic lolita now.
