Megatown: an Animal Crossing Blog

I decided today to quit playing Pocket Camp.

It went offline last year, but I kept playing every day. I played the online version every day since it launched, eight years ago, and then the offline version every day since it launched, one year ago.

They added four new monthly events this year. The other eight were repeats. Now it's nothing but repeats. More opportunities to finish filling out my catalog. To get the things I didn't get the last time around. The things I managed to live without then, and could live without now.

It was the first thing I did when I woke up in the morning. I would sit up in bed and use the glow of my phone starting up Pocket Camp to force myself to get out of bed. I did that this morning.

I got good at multi-tasking. I could clean my cat's litterbox one-handed while I played Pocket Camp in the other hand. I would play while driving. I would play while walking outside. Holding my phone close to myself so it wouldn't get rained on. Poking one finger out of my glove so I could keep playing when it was below freezing outside, switching from hand to hand as one finger at a time became so cold it would grow numb.

I played at airports when I traveled to Japan in 2019. On subway trains. At dinner with friends. I played during work meetings, stealthily, under the table, where everyone could see I was doing something on my phone but didn't know what.

I would play it while doing my workouts in the morning. While doing my final leg and knee stretches at night, part of my daily physical therapy for my chronic knee pain.

I would check the clock constantly. 5 AM. 8 AM. 11 AM. 2 PM. 5 PM. 8 PM. The times when I should check my flowers and gather fruit. Give items to the campers. Once a day, empty out my inventory of snacks to the campers with the lowest friendship values with the corresponding themes. Swap out the campers in my cabin for the ones who now had the lowest values.

It was a ritual. A series of them. And I showed up, day after day, watching my numbers get higher and higher. My campsite and warehouse filling with earned items.

I stopped posting about it a long time ago. I have no friends who play. I don't talk about it with anybody. I did it just for me for a long time. I let it slip more and more in the last few months, because the offline version didn't require as much. Days I was visiting family, I'd only check in three or four times instead of all six that I would during normal days. But I never missed a day. Never missed a morning.

And the math doesn't work anymore. I'm trying as hard as I can to fix my sleep debt. To write novels. I'm a few months from having the one I've spent the last five years writing ready to send out to publishers. I've already started on my second. Will they ever see physical releases? Probably not. Will they ever make me money? Probably not. But would Pocket Camp? No. It never did.

I don't regret the time I spent on it. But it's done. The thing I showed up for for eight years needs to be put down. A daily habit, multiple times a day, for eight years. It was predictable. Gave me continuity.

I won't miss it. I don't miss the other Animal Crossing games I quit playing. I don't miss the other mobile games I quit playing, either. The obligation to maintain it continued long after the joy faded.

But I was there every day, and I won't be anymore.

Here is the Friend Card for Soybean, who rose to level 643 this year. I just took this today. It is very likely the last I'll ever see of her. It would mean something to me to know that she might show up in someone else's game, even once.

I keep this blog up because it means something to me when I see a post get a like or a reblog on my activity feed. Makes me feel like it was worthwhile to populate this tiny corner of the fandom, in this tiny corner of Tumblr, in this tiny corner of the internet.

Look closely enough, and you'll find me. I was here. I had to move on to something else, but that won't change the fact that I was here.

I've seen a few people post their cards, but a lot of the ones I saw were from people who were way lower level than I am. I figure, you know, noblesse oblige, right? I owe it to the people to share my level 623 Soybean with the world. Maybe I'll update it in the future as I gain even more levels.

I wish very much that I'd ever been able to learn more about ひろぴ. But I probably never will. Still, a day before service ended, I decided it was time again to pay them one final visit at their campsite. I hadn't been in years. I was dying to know what they'd done with their place.

Hiropi was a few levels higher than me, despite the fact that I played literally every day and had a helper and everything, so they either found some day to spend money to increase their level, or they used up all those request tickets to be able to earn more XP by completing tasks, or they just plain played during more three-hour periods than I did. I believe the number of request tickets I used across the seven years could be counted on one hand. I didn't worry too much about my level. It sort of took care of itself.

Their campsite and the first floor of their cabin was set up to lock campers in place, to make it easier to speak to all of them and collect XP. This is good, and proper, and worthy of respect.

Their camper's first floor was a wonderful display of gluttony and of a love of food that put me in mind of Guy Fieri, whose likeness I saw in ひろぴ all those years ago that made me start giving them gifts every single day. The second was nothing special, nor were the second and third floors of their cabin. The second was also set up to make it easy to talk to campers, I suppose, but their third floor was a joke I didn't understand. Presumably, it was for ひろぴ to sleep up there, but instead I saw Olaf.

And that's all. That's who ひろぴ was. I'm glad I knew them in my limited way, and while part of me will always wish I knew their social media handle or their blog or ANYTHING about them at all, I suspect I'm probably happier not knowing. The truth might be incredible, and it might be tremendously disappointing for a huge number of reasons. ひろぴ could have been a very young child when they started playing, though I suspect they wouldn't have stuck with the game for seven years and made it to such a high level if that were the case. They might have been and old retiree, who went from age 70 to age 77. Or unemployed in their thirties and then forties the entire time, spending all their time playing video games on their phone.

I'm not saying any of those possibilities are good, or bad, but I am saying that they're probably none of my business. You can google "ひろぴ," and I have, a few times, but I've never found screenshots of this character from someone claiming to be their player, and I can't help but think that's intentional. I've posted Soybean a bunch of places. I don't know how hard or easy it is to find Ratralsis or Megatownac by looking for Soybean, though, and I was tempted to change my name to "At Ratralsis" or something like that in the final days to clue people in to how they could find me. I suspect nobody will. I suspect very few cared to.

Some more memories of my final day playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. I received the 2,928th gift shared between myself and ひろぴ, and send the 2,929th. Assuming that the number went up by 2 every day, and it probably didn't, it means we shared gifts on 1,464 days, or just a few days more than every day for four years.

I can't find ひろぴ in the list of suggested friends on my Nintendo Switch. Whomever they are, they either never linked their Nintendo Account, or they never linked it to their Switch. I hope I can find them in Pocket Camp Complete.

Isabelle and the other campers all treated it exactly as they would any other day, of course, which was its own special kind of heartbreaking. But it would have been worse if they hadn't. If the peach tree hadn't had its "3 hr." timer when I knew there were fewer than three hours left for things like peach trees to matter.

I made sure to spend all my Leaf Tickets, at least, as many as I could. You can see I still had 4 left, at the end. But I managed to give away every last gift that I had.

I still play Pocket Camp. I have a full friend list of over 90 people who still play, too. I was surprised yesterday morning when I started up the game and got the message that it was shutting down in a few months.

I've been a Happy Helper member for, apparently, 1,738 days, getting Leaf Tickets every month as part of that plan, so I'm sitting on a stash of over 4,500 tickets still that I can't possibly spend before the game ends and they become worthless.

I also stockpiled snacks. I had over 4,400 gold treats yesterday, 4,000 bronze treats, and 1,980 silver treats. I just found it tedious to give them away, and really only bothered when new characters showed up so that I could level them up to be on par with everyone else. That's also when I would give away all of the themed snacks, so I only have, at most, about 200 of any of those. I last gave them away about two months ago, I think, when the last batch of new animals dropped.

I play the game a lot, actually. I have a special voice trigger for Alexa where I say "Alexa, do the thing," and it starts a 178-minute timer for me. If I say "Alexa, do the other thing," it lists all of my active timers so that I can see how much time is left. I harvest my flowers, tell Alexa to do the thing, and when the timer goes off again, I open the game up. I just hit level 599 today when I gave away another 120 gold treats, 5 at a time to 24 animals, to see if I can give them all away before the game ends.

I've never been good at moderation.

But nothing lasts forever. The game has felt unsustainable for the last couple of years. There's a new set of furniture items each month for the latest event, but for years now each month has had a bug-collecting event, a fishing contest, and a gyroidite-collecting event each and every month. It was a pattern, and I was getting tired of it. How many new items could they possibly make before the game simply became too large to keep updating it? Apparently, two more months' worth.

I still played, though. If nothing else, I justified it by saying I was getting weekly Platinum Points. I spend those points. I've gotten calendars, keychains, posters, all kinds of things with those points. I had to pay shipping, of course, but I still got those things. I guess I'll have to do the actual monthly "quests" in Switch Online or something if I want to keep getting Platinum Points. I sure ain't gonna play Fire Emblem on my phone.

I knew this would happen eventually, and the game did last for seven years, which is incredibly long for a mobile game that hasn't had any major changes to it in so long. I do wish I'd been able to add Hiropi to my Switch friend list, though, or find out who they are. We've given each other a combined total of over 2,700 gifts now, since we've managed to keep it going nearly every day.

I have no idea what the offline version of the game will be. Maybe I'll be able to get all those fortune cookie items I never spent Leaf Tickets on. Or landscape items I never bought. Maybe they'll finish releasing all of the animals. I'm sure there are still some they haven't.

Or maybe, just maybe, I'll find myself with a lot of spare time all of a sudden after seven years of playing the same game.

I wanted to see if anything special would happen today, February 29, the only day of the year I'd never played.

Apparently, unless it's a player birthday (in which case the islanders WILL say special things about how your birthday only comes once every four years).... NOPE.

I did see some fun things in the three days of playing again after five months away. So I'll have a few more posts, but I'm not back for good.

I stopped playing on September 22, on Ankha's birthday, because I wanted to celebrate that one last time before I put the game down. Since then, I've regained half an hour each day by not playing, and another twenty minutes by not queueing up posts after I got through my backlog on October 1. So it's been about 23 days of having an extra 50 minutes.

I'd been playing for nearly a year for no reason other than to keep getting fuel for posts. It wasn't fun on its own anymore.

I started this blog in September 2013, 10 years and 1 month ago. Since then, I've written over 22,000 posts in just about 3700 days.

When I started this blog, the Animal Crossing world was a lot more active. I made friends with people like @toysleaf and @vivinzenz. I would visit people's towns, and they would visit mine. As years went on, that faded. The blog got a little bit bigger. Just barely, barely big enough that I had to get cautious about what I wrote. I cut out all swearing and off-color jokes. I stopped asking people for things. I made sure never to reveal my political leanings, or my thoughts on current events. It wasn't my place, I thought, and was grateful that nobody asked me to weigh in. I eventually became isolated in my little world, not reblogging anything from anybody, ever, and hoping that maybe eventually some silly joke I made would get viral enough to…

To what, exactly? It's not like I ever made money doing this, and I'd all but given up on making friends. I was just doing it out of habit, out of a drive to see if I could get my follower count to go up. It didn't. I hit the 1500-follower mark back in 2016 or 2017 and never got higher than 1595. My silly jokes, my constant barrage of snarky comments about my day-to-day life, simply weren't popular with some imaginary mainstream Animal Crossing tumblr fandom that stopped existing well before New Horizons came out.

There's still an Animal Crossing fandom out here, of course. Just not one that follows blogs like mine. Do something impressive: create some art, or crochet something, or even design a cool home. Things I was not doing. Things I did not want to do.

I'd like to get back to enjoying Animal Crossing. To playing the game for fun. To playing it with other people, and making friends. But that won't happen right now. It can't.

Remember, I've been doing this for over 10 years. I was in my late twenties when I STARTED this blog, and I knew very well that I was one of the oldest people on Tumblr posting Animal Crossing content. My forties are not far off. I'm old. I feel out of place and weird posting my silly little jokes here when I know that most of the people reading them, and there aren't many who do, are probably quite a bit younger than I am. It's a kid's game, and that's fine. But I'm not a kid, and I'm not posting anything truly creative. Just blogging. Just starting up my game each morning to run around and gather fossils and hit rocks and talk to any islanders I see and snapping dozens of screenshots so I can post them on Tumblr at a rate of 4 or more posts each day.

This isn't goodbye forever. I'm just going on break for now. When something changes, I'll be back.

In the meantime, my main blog, @ratralsis, was active before this one started and is still active. I'm going to try to write there a little more often now that I'm not posting here each day, but we'll see, I guess.

As for here, I don't know what I might be posting here in the next few months. Maybe nothing. Maybe I'll start reblogging things again for the first time in, what, six years? Seven years? I don't know. A long time.

I'm not saying I will. Just that I maybe will. Maybe I won't!

Either way, take care of yourself, and remember that I'm still around and, one way or another, will continue writing on the internet until I am physically unable. I've been doing so since 2001 or so and have never stopped. I've been Ratralsis since 2002 and I needed a name to write on a friend's website (the website is long gone now). As far as I know, I'm either the only Ratralsis out there or the other people with that name don't show up on Google, so, as of today, at least, if you see a Ratralsis out there complaining about Best Buy on Twitter or leaving comments on YouTube videos or posting in the forums on Flight Rising, that's me.

Just like I did yesterday with Henry's birthday, I decided to make Ankha's birthday a single very large post. Sorry if that's a problem. It won't happen again, I don't think.

While I've given almost nothing but clothes to islanders for their birthdays for, like, over a year now, I decided this time to give Ankha some of her favorite food: cherries. It's kind of obscure knowledge now, but back in the GameCube days, Ankha was allergic to apples and loved cherries, which was relevant when she lived on your island and you used your GBA to feed her whatever fruit you wanted.

It was kind of a trick for a long time that you could bundle up two foreign fruits into a single gift and hand that over to an islander and it was considered a good enough gift to eventually earn you their photo, that is, if you did it many days in a row. So I figured it was good enough to do that for Ankha's birthday, handing over two cherries in a package to have it count as a great gift.

Anyway. She was fine with it, and I'm fine with that.

I do wonder if any famous celebrities with the same birthday as Ankha know about it and feel as blessed as Ankha thinks they should. Like, I don't know, Tom Felton?

(I looked for famous birthdays on September 22, I didn't, just, like, KNOW that one)

I decided to make this one extremely long post instead of splitting it up, because I'm trying to condense some of my days lately.

But anyway, Henry's birthday was September 21, and the guest of honor was Ankha, whose birthday is the very next day. I guess she wanted to celebrate two birthdays in a row, and who can blame her.

Anyway, I decided to get Henry a shirt in his preferred style and color WITHOUT wearing a copy of it myself, because I've gone twinsies with so many islanders at this point that I'm not really curious what they say anymore.

I liked a lot of what Henry had to say, which is why I included it. Like him saying that he's keeping his age "mysterious." Or that sometimes he says things without punchlines, which is, let's face it, an INCREDIBLE reveal.

I put this outfit together, and yes, it did totally pass Label's test and was considered to be very theatrical.

Also, I remember that I was once able to completely fill my list of clothing items so that I had ten different things showing in that "Remove what?" list, but I haven't been able to manage it lately, even with the wet suit on.

This morning, I finally had enough rusted parts to build my fourth Robot Hero. I decided to paint it green, since I still had five colors left that were unaccounted for, and, you know, I'm happy with it.

Does it really do me any good to have four robot heroes on my island? No. Does it hurt anything, though? Yes, probably. They take up a lot of space, after all. But there they are, and I'm not removing them.

Dom has to train hard at tennis so that he can still win while watching Chrissy do break dancing, which is still a thing.

It's kind of sweet, actually, although the one break dancer I was actually pretty good friends with told me very soon after I met made it extremely clear to me that I was to never, ever call it that. It was b-boying, and it would be a deep insult to him if I called it anything else.