Ranting about my love for Animal Crossing and what that has to do with my excitement about next Monday (2-12)

         One of my favorite games I used to play all the time is Animal Crossing, specifically New Leaf. That game has a nostalgic feeling every time I went back to play it. I fall out of it a couple times because really, it's just a game to reminisce on. 2020-2021 hit and New Horizons is released, and I find myself finding a video in my recommended, a compilation of a bunch of funny New Horizons clips. It was funny, it was a compilation, and it was a bunch of New Horizons clips. At this time, I don't have New Horizons yet, but I did get it for my birthday. Until then, I had to do with New Leaf.

        It was at this point in time when Nintendo introduced the "Welcome Amiibo" expansion / update / free DLC / thing. What came with this new update? A new spot on the map, the campgrounds. This was where every day, a different "Special Event" (Holiday, misc, etc.) villager would arrive at the campgrounds. It would be your usual, the Christmas / Toy Day deer whose name I can't remember rn, there's Harvey, a misc. special character, there's the ever-groovy KK, etc., but there was one character that stood out to me because of a shared appreciation of good vibes.

        And now is to the point where the second part of the title of this blog can be explained. One of the characters that popped up was a light blue Peacock named Pavé. He was wearing what looked like workout clothes in his little camper van, but when he's not camping, it's a totally different story. I go to read the little info thingie I can't remember at the moment, and, take a second and read this and tell me that you don't want to hang out with this guy

"While he's camping, Pavé can finally drop the act and relax completely. Just kidding - he's even more Pavé than ever. Viva Festivale!"

DOES THAT NOT MAKE YOU WANT TO VIBE UNCONTROLLABLY WITH THIS MAN?

        I read a little more into it and find out that yes, this character is associated with the special event Festivale, which is basically like Animal Crossing's equivalent of Carnival, a day famously where people just, vibe, and as excessively as humanly possible. I know there's like some religious reason behind it because like, supposedly it's the day before Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, where people fast in honor of Jesus doing the same thing in this time period, which is why also during Carnival, large amounts of food is eaten, giving the Holiday the alternate name of "Fat Tuesday." However, there's people like me, who don't really align themselves with stuff like that. So as religious people see it as "It's the day before Lent we gotta get our crazies out," there's me who just sees it as "International Vibe All Day day," which for me is just everyday, really. (Also in this research I found a Tweet which is an ACNH screenshot of Festivale with the caption "It's 10:30 am on a Monday. Why does everyone smell like alcohol?" That Tweet lives rent free in my mind and I love it)

        So what exactly do you do during Festivale? Basically you try to collect enough feathers for Pavé to give you all of the Festivale themed items. There's red, purple, green, blue, and the elusive rainbow feather. Also, you gotta wear the clothes, or else Pavé will look down on you and tell you to "Put these clothes in a safe, boring drawer where they can cry quietly to sleep" and I quote. Every time you give him a feather, he does a lil dance, but if you give him a Rainbow Feather, that dance is significantly less lil. If you give him enough feathers, he'll eventually ask you for three rainbow feathers, to which he does the Super Rainbow dance, and gives you the final and most extravagant item, the Festivale float. And now for something that I forever think of ever since it happened. During Festivale, I was playing Animal Crossing (it was my first one since I don't know how long ago during the New Leaf days), and I was listening to the Insomniac Rewind stream, and right as I gave that first rainbow feather to Pavé, right as he did his lil Rainbow dance, the music dropped. It was like, this emotional progressive house song and it fit perfectly. A memory that still lives on. Forgot to mention, if you try dancing next to him, he'll just stare at you, which is hilarious.

        With this information, every year I get vaguely excited for Festivale. Even though I don't really play Animal Crossing anymore, and the fact that I later were to become obsessed with another Carnival related thing (more on that possibly later), the vibes are still strong. I still listen to music and vibe uncontrollably during this day, not to mention my AI Dungeon scenarios where I try to shoehorn Festivale into it for some reason (I do that a lot, shoehorn my favorite games into AI Dungeon) and I still look in the Animal Crossing Discord Server to see all of their shenanigans. Unfortunately, I have school that Monday, but still, the vibes are still strong.

        One more thing, a few posts ago I talk about Gitaroo Man. I want to take a second to mention an irrelevant but relevant thing at the same time. There's a song on the PSP port of the game called Toda Pasiòn, and to me that song really captures this feeling well. It's the song where you fight Ming-Ming, the final boss Zowie's cat, and instead of going the obvious route of making the song as goofy as possible, but they just decided "Let's just make a Samba de Amigo track and use it here." So they did basically that, and every time I listen to it, I picture myself in that moment; endlessly vibing in the streets as the music plays and everyone celebrates.

So yeah. Happy weekend everyone. Happy Super Bowl if you're interested in that thing. and to the ACNH fans who just so happen to read this, Viva Festivale!