As you may or may not know, Animal Crossing as a series is my second favorite game of all time.  It’s only beaten out by Pac-Man, so you know how much I must like it.  One of my favorite parts of Animal Crossing is the museum which you can donate fossils, paintings, bugs, and fish to.  The aquarium part is especially cool, because you can see the fish you’ve caught swimming around and I just like aquariums.  Shortly after Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released, they starting doing real life aquarium tours featuring Animal Crossing characters and decorations.  I really wanted to go to one, but there wasn’t any close in my area.  Until now.  Earlier this year, Animal Crossing partnered with Sea Life, a chain of aquariums you can usually find in touristy areas.  Depending on when you read this and where you live, you might be able to go to one, too, as they are doing this until the end of May.  Check the Sea Life website to see if there’s one near you.  There’s one about 30 minutes away from where I live (Grapevine Mills Mall in Texas), so I hopped on the chance to go as soon as I could.  So let’s take a tour of it!

So there are two things in this tour that I couldn’t take a picture of.  One was that as you are walking through the aquarium, they play Animal Crossing music on the intercom in the background.  The other thing I couldn’t take a picture of is that on certain dates, they had meet and greets with costumed Animal Crossing characters like Isabelle, Tom Nook, and K.K. Slider.  But those were on weekends I had to work, so I couldn’t do them then.  Anyway, here’s a bigger picture of the sign outside the aquarium.  Probably where they did the meet and greets.

As you walked through the aquarium, they had standups for a lot of the main characters.  Here’s Isabelle.

And Tom Nook.

Pascal

Kapp’n

Glad to see Blathers here, too.  He should be here, seeing as though he’s in charge of the museum aquarium!

Looks like Gulliver even washed up at the aquarium!

Timmy and Tommy were also hocking their wares at the gift shop.

Speaking of which, at the souvenir shop after you go through the aquarium, they had Animal Crossing merchandise you can get.  Here’s another picture of that.

They also had a stamp rally, just like the museum does.  At certain points in the aquarium, you could get employees to stamp a card.  Here’s my completed stamp card.

If you got all the stamps, you could bring it to the gift shop for a little prize.  They were adhesive patches featuring Animal Crossing characters.  Here they are in a treasure chest.  Which ones to pick?

I brought my mom with me, since she likes Animal Crossing just as much as me, if not more so.  Since we had two stamp cards, we got two patches.  I got Tom Nook and Blathers, since he’s my favorite character in the game.

Speaking of Blathers, all around the aquarium were little signs with descriptions of the fish by Blathers.  If the fish was found in the game, they’d usually have a sign about it.  They had both regular signs posted to the walls, as well as ones on light up touch screens.  Here’s a couple of examples.

You could also scan a QR code to get some My Nintendo points, too.

And that’s pretty much it.  Thanks for coming along on the tour, and let me know what you think in the comments section!  Later!  –Cary

Tags: Misc