Today was Thanksgiving in America, which means it’s the day of the harvest festival in Animal Crossing. But before I headed to the plaza to meet Franklin, I did my usual chores first. I watered flowers and found my money rock, which was actually a gem rock again today. But this time, I got five emeralds out of it!
I talked to Molly, and she told me how some of the villagers are indoors cooking for the harvest festival.
Benedict said when he finished his walk, he might do some cooking himself. NO, don’t cook yourself!
Eventually, I got to meet Franklin himself. Unlike in previous Animal Crossing games, he’s not the main course this time. He’s a chef hired by Isabelle to cook for everyone else.
But he’s not prepared at all; he has no food to cook! It’s up to me to find all the ingredients he needs.
His first dish is an oyster salad. He told me I needed vinegar, an oyster, some seaweed, plus a secret ingredient if I wanted to make it spectacular. Of the potential ingredients he will need for his various dishes, some can be caught or found in town–such as fish, fruit, or mushrooms. But others are things you’ll need to get from villagers.
By visiting the indoor animals, you’ll find that they are cooking and they will need certain ingredients (I think it’s always a type of fish) for their own dishes. Catch the fish they need, and they’ll give you a different ingredient in return: Fruit, a mushroom, sugar, vinegar, milk, butter, and so on.
A surprising ingredient they may give you is a beehive. You’ll use it when a recipe calls for honey.
When you make an exchange with them, they’ll also clue you in on what the secret ingredient is for a certain dish.
Along the way, I stopped to shoot down a balloon present.
A lot of item shuffling is involved, because you’ll be doing a lot of fishing for certain fish. And I didn’t want to sell the extras, because even if a fish wasn’t needed at this moment, it could be needed next time. So I was going back and forth to my storage quite a bit.
But Tabby eventually gave me the vinegar I needed, and I went diving for the oyster and seaweed. So I took the ingredients to Franklin, and he was able to make the oyster salad. Let’s get cooking!
Lemon was the secret ingredient, but I didn’t have it in my possession when I took the main three ingredients to Franklin. That was a mistake, because once you give him the three main ingredients, it’s too late. You can’t add the secret ingredient later on, and this ended up costing me. But still, the first dish was complete, and he rewarded me with a harvest clock.
The next dish on the menu was a mushroom bisque. I needed a round mushroom, a flat mushroom, and milk. The mushrooms were easy, since I saved some ahead of time. And Tabby provided me with her milk…
This time, I made sure I had the secret ingredient (butter from Nintendo Tammy) on hand when I went to see Franklin. He whipped up the mushroom bisque and he said it was outstanding. He rewarded me with this fruit basket.
Next on the menu was the main course. He made sure to point out that people don’t need to eat turkey just because it’s the harvest festival.
I gathered the ingredients for the pan-fried red snapper (very tasty) and he cooked it up as well. Yay! My reward this time was a harvest mirror.
And last but not least, it was time for dessert: Coconut tart. I grabbed a coconut from the beach to go with a lemon, sugar, and honey for the secret ingredient. And with that, we were done! The entire meal was finished!
My final reward was a harvest sofa. Apparently, you can get a cornucopia if you include the secret ingredients for all four dishes. I stupidly missed out on that this time, but I’ll get it next year!
So the fruit basket and cornucopia are really the only two exclusive items you can get from the harvest festival (since the harvest furniture set is sold in the Nooklings’ store anyway). That’s a bit disappointing that there isn’t a new furniture set you can get. It’s a lot of work just for two items.
And most of that work is fishing, by the way. As I tweeted during the day, it almost feels like a fishing tournament more than a harvest festival. The animals all want different types of fish, and it can be time-consuming searching for a certain fish. And even when you catch it, they may give you an ingredient you don’t need, and you have to start the search all over again for a different fish.
However, I do appreciate that Nintendo put in the effort to make the harvest festival a new experience. In City Folk, the harvest festival was almost identical to the one from the GameCube game (except for not having to swipe the forks/knives from the table, which may have been the best part). City Folk even used long stretches of identical text from the GameCube game.
So I am glad they finally tried something new, even if the rewards don’t seem worth the effort. And they did include a nice reference to the old harvest festivals, with Franklin mentioning how he used to be deathly afraid of forks and knives.
This festival also made a mess of my town. I was juggling my inventory all over town (that may be a poorly-worded sentence), but I ended up with items all over the place. Here you can see the items I dumped on the ground near the plaza, but there were many others left on river banks all around Forest. Tomorrow will be clean-up day, I suppose.
That’s all for now. I hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving (or at least an enjoyable harvest festival for you non-Americans). See you next time!