YMMV / Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The concept of Nook being a money-grubber was taken up to eleven when it was revealed that this game would feature microtransactions, and that Nook was the one in charge of them in-game. Jokes about Nook being greedy enough to come out of the game and take players' real money sprung up near-instantaneously. It only got worse with how there's an in-game picture of Tom Nook bathing in money.
  • This video of Isabelle dancing after having consumed "Vacation Juice" has led to people seeing her as a Hard-Drinking Party Girl.
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • When engaging in normal conversations with the animals, they will remind the player to check Isabelle's Beginner's Guide routinely, even if the player does not need it. Similarly, they will share other beginner's advice such as "make sure you craft lots of furniture", "go to OK Motors to expand your camper", or "remember to check the Market Box for items". Amusingly though, Sisterly animals will lampshade this after advising use of Leaf Tickets in crafting like a sales pitch, claiming they are paid in flower starts every time they mention Leaf Tickets. ("And now back to your regularly scheduled (animal name).")
  • Lloid at the garden is very, very chatty. If you leave your character idle there, Lloid will spout an obvious instruction related to your garden's current condition like "Water your plants!" every few seconds, even if the garden has no problem at all (Lloid will either tell you to look at the blooms or check out a friend's garden in this case). Tapping a plot that cannot be interacted with will also result in Lloid telling the player to tap another, interactable plot. So, no matter what, unless you're actively doing something to the garden, Lloid is always there to annoy you.
  • During garden events, the game will occasionally flash a "recommendation" on how to use Flower Food or Lloid's Guaranteed Catch before going on to shill "Leaf Ticket packs with Flower Food are on sale!" and "Use Leaf Tickets to guarantee a catch!" respectively. Similarly, fishing tournaments flash a hint on the Large Tourney throw nets (which also cost Leaf Tickets to use) if you fail to reach a size goal with the haul of fish you give to the host and are still missing at least one of the event's prizes.
  • If a new (or reissued) cookie is added, one of the Nooklings will walk up and announce that they're currently stocking the aforementioned cookie. This is in spite of the game flashing you a notification whenever a new cookie is added and you being able to directly access the fortune cookie shop from the map screen.
• Archive Panic: When the game was first released, there were only four amenity themes and a modest amount of campers. Within six months, there were more than twice as many themes (with all the furniture and amenity upgrades to go along with them) and nearly 100 campers, and with updates being implemented much more frequently, it's much more difficult for newer players to near "completion" (by maxing out friendships and amenity upgrades and filling the catalogue) than it was for those playing regularly since the release. Even long-time players can struggle to unlock new villagers to meet as the mechanics for introducing new animals added via content updates was changed to force them to level up once to unlock a random animal at each level to shipping off Gulliver to find maps for new animals.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In October 2018, Jack seized control of a Fishing Tournament in place of Chip. No explanation was given for how he was able to do so, and when Chip returned the following month, his static, scripted dialogue was never changed to address what had happened. The same thing happened when he lost two of his Fishing Tourneys in early 2020, first to Tom Nook and the Nooklings in March 2020 and then to Zipper T. Bunny the following month.
• Broken Base:
  • The frequency of monthly events. Some players like it to justify being active in game (and more options for dressing up/decorating), some don't for making them burn out easily, especially if the events feel prolonged due to mere bad luck. While those that are pro-event also justify their preference of more events because they keep the game fresh, the anti-event players, especially regarding the garden events, feel like the game basically misses the whole point of Animal Crossing, a casual game that players are free to check whenever, not being heavily pressured by the overabundance of time-limited events that start just two days to immediately after the end of a previous one- giving players barely to no break between each event.
  • Thematic crafting events costing Leaf Tickets, first introduced in the Super Mario Crossover Event. While the mechanic is already applied to the limited-time "special character" furniture (K.K. Slider's chair, Tom Nook's chair, Celeste's telescope), its presence in this type of event manages to bug some players. However, some others defend it as the event also gives out Leaf Tickets via easily-doable Timed Goals and the obvious fact that, well, Nintendo still needs to make money from this game.
  • The Super Mario Crossover Event itself, which lasted a whole month, divided into three parts, unlike other thematic crafting events. Mario fans see it as a treat, non-Mario fans that like filling the catalog don't mind the new items, other non-Mario fans simply don't care about this event and consider it a nice little break (especially after the exhausting Leif's Spring Garden Event), while the rest absolutely loathe this event. Emphasis on the last one, as their reasoning include that it's either causing more stress or deemed unnecessary. It also doesn't help that every part has one craftable item that requires Leaf Tickets to make! (see above)
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The base animals at launch have had a significant boost in popularity while they were just a handful out of hundreds in the mainline games.
  • Tex especially got this, simply by proxy of being one of the best early-game sources of cotton, a critical resource.
• Fandom Rivalry: Is starting to have a subtle but growing one with players of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. See that page for more info.
• Fridge Horror: There was an event where the player could catch the squid and octopus forms of Inklings and Octolings and show them to Chip, who would then talk about them much the same way he would other fish. You heard me right: Chip wants to eat the sentient, civilized Inklings and Octolings.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In Rover's Garden Safari event, sometimes a player can end up obtaining two of the same reward (two Rover's hoods, two Rover's tables, etc.) upon completing tasks. This is caused by completing two active tasks at the same time. Keep in mind that normally a player can only obtain one per task completed. This seems to have been fixed, as this doesn't happen in Lottie's Gothic Rose Festival.
  • Version 1.3.0 update brought one where a player could keep more items than their current inventory's max. Only up to a certain amount, though, so still no infinite inventory for them. Also, this only affected some players. This was later fixed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the things a Villager can tell you is that handcrafted furniture (referring to Cyrus' role in this game) is the trendy thing nowadays. In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you have to build most of the furniture yourself.
  • In New Horizons, one of the main gripes about the 2020 Bunny Day event was that the egg crafting materials took over everything that wasn't insects, particularly when they were fished up in place of seasonal fish. Pocket Camp's own Bunny Day event (started the same day the NH one ended) sees Zipper hosting a fishing tournament where the aim is to catch as many egg-shaped fish as possible, though at least there's a limit every few hours before regular fish start coming back.
  • In 2018, Pocket Camp introduced the Eevee set. This won’t be the only time Pokémon crosses over with Animal Crossing.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • With the game's announcement, jokes about how Tom Nook is now after real money via micro-transactions cropped up almost instantly.
  • Farm Tex for cotton.^note Early-game, the only way to obtain the aforementioned crafting material outside of Timed Goals and the My Nintendo feature is by either completing Tex's requests or having him gift it to you. Note that the basic amenities (required to increase the relationship level Cap) require cotton. Lots of cotton. The Pocket Camp subreddit ended up having a◊ field day with this.◊
  • I was just saying hel^lo.^note Back during the game's early months, the "casual chat" dialogue option (like "Let's talk.") when interacting with animals may occasionally glitch out visually and produce this kind of Good Bad Bug. Normally, clicking the normal "I was just saying hello." is done to cancel an animal interaction. Clicking this glitched option will proceed to the casual chat as usual. Players either find this funny or come up with Creepypasta-esque interpretations of it.
  • Jail Camp ^note People have began to create jail cells in their campgrounds by placing down chairs and surrounding them with white lattice walls, both of which are pretty cheap to make and accessible early in the game. Animals will naturally attempt to interact with any interactable items - thus resulting in them willingly sitting down in the jail cells. Depending on the person, it's either pretty funny, or horrifying.
  • Cyrus' inability to cook.^note Items take varying amounts of time to craft, mostly depending on how late in the game they're unlocked. Certain items, however, take very long to complete, and this includes food. For example, the Whole Pizza item takes a whopping seven hours for Cyrus to prepare. In addition, when Chrissy requests the Pancakes item, this unlocks the Pancakes to be crafted...which takes 16 hours for Cyrus to make.
  • No one's around to help.^note The video displays the error message a player sees when they attempt to get help accessing the quarry, alongside a Blender animation of Bob by Geibuchan that'd been popular within the community for ages and with a vaporwave remix of the Animal Crossing: New Leaf main theme in the background. Curiously, this meme is also shared with two other games; A Hat in Time, as a version based on that game was also made, and later became an Ascended Meme in the latter's "Seal the Deal" DLC, while Paladins released an emote that references the meme for Moji.
  • Vacation Juice^note An item that is clearly meant to be an alcoholic beverage, resulting in the term becoming a new euphemism for alcohol.
• Misblamed: Many fans hoist the anger at Nintendo for the heavy amount of microtransactions in the game, when the fault is actually DeNA's as they are the ones who actually develop the game.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Cross-pollinating and capturing rare creatures at the garden have a chance of failure. While it's mildly irritating in the former as the game is more lenient on how the players care for their garden and what to do with the flowers, the latter is more devastating for completionists due to the fact that it, being tied to events, is a ten-day Timed Mission, and bad luck may cause them to not be able to complete all the event objectives on time despite all that hard work. Players think that the rare creatures' catch rate seems to be rigged against them, especially since you can use 10 Leaf Tickets to guarantee a catch. Furthermore, It's not even guaranteed that all blooming flowers will produce creatures, which had players annoyed at the prospect of RNG on RNG — especially in the second part of the event (the last six days), which lasted only a few days, had flowers that took the longest to bloom and produced the fewest creatures that were the hardest to catch yet demanded the same amount of creatures as the longer and easier first part of the event.
  • During Gyrodite events, Shovelstrike Quarry will most commonly offer Gyrodites as a reward, and, on most days, will make Gyrodites the only reward available for that day for each 12-hour period. However, with no warning, the game can replace the Gyrodites with a different random crafting material in the afternoon, and if you're unable to gather up enough invites in the morning to enter before the rewards shift (or forget to enter in the first place), the invites are effectively wasted and you have to wait till the next day to attempt to gather more invites and enter again. Unfortunately, the inverse scenario (a non-Gyrodite crafting material in the morning and Gyrodites in the afternoon) is much rarer.
  • Buying from the market boxes of friends. Not only are players unable to view their friend's entire Market Box from the Friends menu (only the first four items are shown), there's no way to just search for the needed item, leading to an endless scroll-and-click to see if anyone has the one thing you need. Players also cannot simply purchase the item from the Friends menu, and have to endure another loading screen to travel to their friend's campsite just to access the box. This has been revised a bit, as later updates let the player view and buy from their friends' Market Box inventory in their entirety, but there's still the lack of a search function.
  • The 40-furniture limit for a campsite, which can be reached rather quickly. Players hate this limit for limiting their creativity and its tendency of leaving big, open spaces that can't be decorated with anything. Considering that the players' own campers have no such restriction (only limited by camper space and open tables for putting smaller items), players think that the limit is basically a bad game design, and begin wanting an update that removes it.
  • Starting with version 1.2.0, animals can now request flowers for their Fetch Quest. The garden is already polarizing to players to begin with. While thankfully they only request basic flowers whose seeds can be easily bought from Lloid, keep in mind that without flower food they take at least a cycle (3 hours) to grow and the only other way of obtaining them without gardening relies on complete randomness from the occasional item balloons. Also, flowers cannot be sold in Market Boxes unlike other request items, so players are left on their own when it comes to this type of request. It also cannot be skipped, as whenever an animal requests one, it is always the third request, so if you want to use Request Tickets on them, no such usage for you until you fulfill that particular request!
  • Farming caps, a unique currency exclusive to the OK Motors. The only way of farming them is by playing the Brake Tapper machine (requires friend powder). Most of the time you will only obtain 5 caps per win, unless a Big Bonus is happening, giving you either 30 or, rarely, 50 caps upon winning. These caps can then be traded for items like crafting items, clothing, and furniture, but here's the problem: The insanely high cap requirement for the better items, including essences. See the amount you can obtain per win? One bottle of essence alone costs 250 caps (same for the clothing)! Want the OK Motors furniture? Prepare for massive grinding, because the cap requirement is in the thousands. Even if you manage to consistently trigger the Big Bonus each play (and win them all), the ridiculous prices make the whole thing way too tedious for many players to bother, often being ignored except by the "true and honest" completionists.
  • Some furniture occupy space much bigger than what it appears to be. So, you have players complain that a tea-party balloon that appears to be able to occupy one tile turning out to occupy 2x2 worth of space, calling it a terrible decision from Nintendo's part.
  • The gacha / fortune cookie system is Pocket Camp's lootbox mechanic, with all the annoyances that come with it. Want a specific piece of furniture? You might never get it, even after opening numerous cookies!
  • For the duration of all three major events in a month, the Happy Homeroom Academy will open up an event room with three difficulty tiers that must be completed from easiest to hardest. In the Garden and Fishing Tourney rooms, they all can be completed fully by acquiring every event item/furniture at least once. Moreso, the items needed for all the HHA rooms of an event can be earned for free with very minimal, if any, Leaf Tickets, provided the player has friends to assist during the Garden Event and fishes often during the Fishing Tourney. This is not the case for Gyrodite event rooms, in which the third and final room, ontop of needing everything available with the respective Gyrodite will require purchasing one, or sometimes even more than one of, the premium Leaf Ticket items to get the highest score. The premium items are not cheap either, running at least above 100 Leaf Tickets. You can still pass this room with a three-star rating, however, if you happen to own high-scoring items that trigger "Good Eye!" when placed.
  • Some Happy Homeroom Academy rooms require items bought at the Market Place, which is completely random on what is stocked and available for purchase from the appeal vendors and Tommy and Timmy Nook. Other event HHA rooms, disregarding the rooms themed around a specific premium cookie, require items won from generic Fortune Cookies to pass with perfect scores, which are also completely random. Even worse, you could end up with a room that requires an item that in turn needs a high enough friendship level with a villager. If not already unlocked by the time the event room comes around, and if you cannot find a suitable replacement that generates a "Good Eye!" reaction, it'll be impossible to get the full three medals from that room without shelling out Leaf Tickets before the event ends and the room closes.
• Sweetness Aversion: Despite not being any different from other Animal Crossing games aesthetic-wise, some players still complain about having too much "cutesy" content (emphasis on "cute"-based or "hip"-based content, especially events) in this game. The "hip" theme, represented by the color orange and a mushroom, gets this the most due to its overly whimsical, sugary (yet trippy) J-Pop-esque theme.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Many players aren't happy with the change to the guest animal interaction mechanic where they can only chat to a certain number of animals and do only one request in their campsite every three hours (introduced in version 1.1.0), compared to the older mechanic where players could chat with all guest animals every hour and do up to three requests every few hours.
  • They also aren't happy with the previously mentioned lootbox-like gacha / fortune cookie system.
  • Want to meet some new animals? In previous versions, any animals that were introduced through updates could be instantly met (either through discovering them at one of the four main areas or using a Calling Card) provided you're at the proper level. In more recent updates since late 2019, you have to give items to Gulliver and hope he returns from one of his cruises around the world with a random map containing an animal, then spend essence to have Blathers explore the map. Keep in mind this is the only way animal maps can be received outside of rare themed goals, and luck can be against you and result in Gulliver not returning with a villager map. Of course once you get the maps, you have to complete them. How much does it cost for one roll of the dice? Between 6 and 12 essence of the animal's theme, which are rare and hard to come by. You're better off just cheesing the map and paying five Leaf Tickets to instantly get your reward.
  • The change from collecting special crafting materials from villagers to instead finding them in the overworld during monthly Gyrodite events. The latter is easily more time consuming unless you regularly visit the Shovelstrike Quarry.
  • In February 2019, with the introduction of Blathers' Treasure Maps, Limited Goals' Material, Essence, and Bell rewards were changed from giving the rewards outright to giving maps containing the rewards instead, requiring you to spend Bells or Friend Powder just to get the rewards. Later events toned down the presence of Maps, instead offering them alongside regular full items.
  • As if Gulliver couldn't get any worse, September 11th, 2019 brought an overhaul to Gulliver. The good news is he can now go out on three different voyages at once on three different islands, some normal and some golden. The bad news is he now demands specific items of any quality instead of any ten furniture/clothing based on the island's description, meaning you can't simply give him duplicates and unwanted items unless they're required, which not only leaves your only option being to sell said items for pitiful amounts of Bells, it defeats the whole purpose of Gulliver to begin with. Additionally, Villager maps can only be found on golden islands which require large quantities of specific items (including the elusive Golden Furniture, which cost a million bells just to craft) or special Gulliver-exclusive packages and crates crafted with highly rare and expensive materials (essences, Sparkle Stones, etc.). And even then you still may be left with an Undesirable Prize as a reward if you don't pick the correct souvenir, unless you use Leaf Tickets to grab multiple items in one trip. As such, it was criticized as being heavily unbalanced, only favorable to Whales who spend lots of money on the game. The devs quickly acknowledged that the revamp fell short, and modified it in November 2019 so that you can use any item in a shipment, reduced the shipment point requirements, and shortened trip times.

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