Animal Crossing x Sea Life @ Berlin

Nintendo has currently a cooperation with SEA LIFE going, where they are doing a crossover with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. One of the locations is Berlin, from July 18th to September 8th, and since there is rarely anything Nintendo-related happening where I live, we decided to go there for a weekend trip

This crossover is generally a nice idea, since you have such aquariums in the game's museum. And there is of course some overlap of the fish that you have in the game and at SEA LIFE, so that's interesting to experience. But it was overall quite underwhelming, both the aquarium attraction and the Animal Crossing: New Horizons event, which may be due to the location.

The SEA LIFE in Berlin doesn't have all to much going for it. At the end there is a tunnel that leads through a tank with stingrays and other fish inside, which is very impressive, but otherwise it couldn't really compete with the aquariums that I saw in certain zoos, especially since everything was quite small.

And as for the Animal Crossing crossover, it wasn't bad, but it was lacking effort. You have a stamp rally as part of the event, which is also something that you do in the game's museum, so that was clever. During the tour you'll find these stamp stations in the form of posters on the wall with certain villagers. These were usually clustered with two at once, so you didn't really have to look for them. As a nitpick I have to mention that some of the stamps weren't properly aligned with what was shown on top, which was annoying if you wanted them to be correctly rotated.

Each station also had a poster with Blathers, who gives some information about one of the fishes or sea creatures that you can find both in the game and in SEA LIFE, where they give you a quiz sheet for that. You had to fill out a seven letter word and each poster came with a letter, but we knew the solution after the first one already. (It started with "S", can you guess it?)

And then there were some questions about the stuff that Blathers tells you, which were easy to answer... except for the first one. There they wanted to know how heavy carps can get, but we had to google this information to find out, because it wasn't stated anywhere. Other than that, it was clearly made for the entertainment of small children, but that's okay. It also wasn't required to answer any of the questions, that was just for your own education.

Then you could find Gulliver in one location, floating on a boat, while some guy or gal had to pose in an Isabelle costume, where it was hilarious how much the people loved this. See the first photo.

If you got all stamps and the easy-to-guess secret word, you could score some small merchandise at the end. You get a post card of the event and then you could pick from four different items. They had a sticker sheet, a cleaning cloth, some cheap luggage bag, or a SEA LIFE wristband for those who don't care about Animal Crossing. Well, you can see what we've picked above.

The biggest disappointment then was the shop. We saw that the same event in Paris had this big booth at the end with all sorts of Animal Crossing merchandise, where I was prepared to bleed some money here. But all they had in Berlin were some plush toys and LEGO sets... Eh.

So, overall I wouldn't recommend this event, at least not for Berlin. And this is ignoring all the controversy around SEA LIFE and most zoos, where you might want to boycott them in general and for good reasons. And to be honest, I don't think I would have ever gone there without the Animal Crossing: New Horizons stuff, so this little event was a big incentive for us. Can't say it was worth the trip, but we were also meeting with an old friend of mine afterwards, so we had a great day nevertheless.