You know, even the people who play ACNL enjoy different aspects of the game. Creating your perfect town. Making your own tilesets. Designing clothes. Exploring other towns. Meeting and making friends with new villagers. Writing letters to them. Filling up your museum. Playing with people from around the world. Just watching your town grow. Relaxing with the slice-of-life gameplay. Dressing up your character in outfits you can't wear in real life. Dressing up your character in outfits you actually wear in real life. Festivals.
If you like creating things and watching them grow (
Zoo Tycoon,
Harvest Moon/
Rune Factory, games made by Maxis, the sim titles by Bullfrog Productions,
de Blob), then I recommend picking this game up. If you want something to compete in or destroy, choose another game.
"You're the artist and the game is your canvas."
Sounds like so much work I see now why the game is so popular though. Is it possible to make your own clothes, shoes, do makeup hair, what else haaaaaaa oh furniture, flowers...? What are the limitations for creativity in the game?
You can't create your own shoes, hair, or flowers. You can have your done at Shampoodles,
here's a guide. (Keep in mind there are a variety of wigs to buy too... So yes, you can have an afro in this game.) You can change your character's face to that of your Mii's at Shampoodles, so that covers make-up. Most of the shoes are sold at Kicks, though some you can only get from the island or from a certain NPC for helping them. You can't create your own flowers, though there are
many types and varieties of them. When your town's Main Street is developed enough, you'll be able to purchase bushes, too. Certain furniture can be customised at Re-Tail,
this site has pictures of all the combinations. To the extent that you can make your own furniture, you can create patterns and apply them to the fabric of furniture (custom bed covers, tablecloth, etc.). You can use custom patterns on cushions to make them look like
food, bags of blood, sleeping cats, etc. You can save many patterns, but each character can only have six active patterns at a time. So many people who use a lot of tilesets for their town create mule characters to hold these patterns. It's not really a hassle, since people who like designing towns also furnish those characters' houses to be like hospitals, arcades, bowling alleys, schools, bakeries, or just awesome houses, etc. Oh, and Isabelle (your secretary) is a bit crazy about the spacing between public works projects (fountains, streetlights, wells, benches, etc.). So that's another limitation.