The game is better now.

Not entirely sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but for me, it's no contest.

The game, prior to the release of Complete, was bad. Very, very bad. I say this as someone who used to be borderline addicted to it.

I played this game in around 2018-2019. Definitely not the first year, but I remember the very first title screen. It was my introduction to an Animal Crossing game, and I had a lot of fun with it at first. At first.

Initially, I hardly partook in events. Somehow, I don't even remember knowing they existed. This was the point in time where I had the most amount of fun with it.

I took a break from the game for a year or so, came back in 2020-2021, and finally got around to doing events. I completed quite a few of them, logging in multiple times a day, every single day, doing inane tasks and growing miserable from it. I felt immense FOMO from this game, and no amount of minimal serotonin boost was enough to make up for the misery it caused me. Being overdramatic here, but I really did stop having any fun with this. I left again shortly(?) after the introduction of a subscription service, and I didn't miss it one bit. I since moved on to New Leaf and New Horizons, which are ACTUAL games that I enjoyed playing.

Despite my memories mostly being tainted by the issues I have with this game, I still felt a lot of nostalgia for it. There were good memories in all that muck, and when I noticed it was released as a 'Complete' version for ten bucks, I decided to bite. I don't regret coming back to it this time.

Things feel manageable now. For once, this feels like a legitimate video game. It's, well, complete. You're not being hounded by absurd prices and microtransactions. For a one-time price, you get the benefits of a subscription. I enjoy the Camp Caretaker fine, but now that I have it, I can certainly say it wasn't worth paying a monthly rate.

There's an extent to which I don't regret my time playing before, either, which is easy to say now that I'm in a better place and don't feel chained to a mobile app about cute animals. Nowadays, it's nice to come back and listen to music tracks that I used to hear when I'd spend minutes on end waiting for bugs to spawn in, and see old villagers that I have high levels with. Hell, for this year I'm wearing the same outfit from my last year on the app, an entire Christmas getup that I splurged tons of leaf tickets on, which are now worth pennies in tokens.

But even if I have some decent memories with the previous iteration of this game, I can say, with 100% confidence, that the complete version is infinitely superior. It's a perfect blend of the nostalgia this game makes me feel, without stressing so hard over missing out on things, or feeling like the prices are exorbitantly high. For once, I feel happy playing this game, and it isn't bogged down by strong negatives.

I don't mean to make anyone feel bad if they enjoyed the initial Pocket Camp, or bought the subscription, or any microtransaction, or actually enjoyed doing the same things over and over. I definitely don't blame anyone for grieving it. But I will say that I cannot relate.