Why Bunny Day is So Unpopular
by GeekGirlCon Tumblr Adminstrator Member Emily Hendrickson
I’m more neutral about Animal Crossing’s Bunny Day event than a lot of other people. And from a game perspective, I understand why Nintendo made the eggs so ubiquitous. This is a children’s game, and if you were a kid who actually wanted to find recipes for and make all the egg items, you’d want the materials readily available. Plus, learning some of the recipes is contingent on how many eggs you’ve found; so, it makes sense to make quickly finding a lot of eggs easier.
All that said, the event has some major issues, which have been meme’d nonstop pretty much since the event began. And since the Bunny Day event is overlapping with the Cherry Blossom event, I feel it’s apt to compare the two and to answer why one (Cherry Blossom) is so much more popular than the other (Bunny Day).
While it’s true the cherry blossom items themselves hold a level of secular, year-round appeal that the egg items–steeped in an undeniably Easter aesthetic despite being removed of Christian iconography–don’t, the otherwise charm of understated pink flowers vs. pastel rainbow kitsch is subjective. The real difference affecting the two events’ popularity comes in the game mechanics themselves.
The cherry blossoms are an addition. Catch the pink petals. There are plenty of them, but not so many it makes it hard to focus on other tasks. The biggest issue is just aiming your net correctly. If you don’t care about the event, the most you have to deal with is temporarily pink trees. You don’t have to catch a single petal if you don’t want to.
But the eggs (aside from the leaf egg) are replacements. Think you’re gonna dig up a fossil? Nope! Egg! Think you’re going to get a present? Egg! Trying to get some wood or stone/clay/iron/gold for other crafting? Sorry, your island is now Egg Town. Were you sick of fishing up bass? Tom Nook said, “Can I offer you an egg in this trying time?” and is not taking no for an answer.
The replacement interrupts the player’s gaming experience in one of the most jarring and frustrating places it possibly could: resource collection. The event takes an often tedious task and makes it more time consuming, repetitive, and unrewarding. Yes, I can choose not to shoot down the rainbow balloons, and I can skip over the medium shadows when fishing, but if I need iron or wood, I must suffer the eggy consequences for twelve days.
You know the song the Twelve Days of Christmas? Even the people who claim to like the song are sick of it by “eight maids a milking.” Everyone knows the song peaks at “five golden rings”–not even halfway through! Likewise, even the people who liked the Bunny Day event at first are already getting sick of it. Because twelve days is too long to do anything, especially be pelted with “nondenominational” digital eggs while the haunting visage of Zipper watches you with the grim smile of a rejected Five Nights at Freddy’s character.
