Flower Town
While the game's premise is simple, it's supplemented by a wide breadth of complementary mechanics. Each time you open the game with a new set of StreetPass tags, the Miis you bring along will water your current flower one by one. Watering will start by helping a seed to grow into a blooming flower, but will later grant the opportunity for your flower to cross-pollinate with those of your tags. When done correctly, you should be able to grow a seed into a flower and gather a collection of descendant seeds every time you open the game. Planting descendent seeds is the only way to get new plants, so connecting with people via StreetPass is crucial.
Every time you grow a new flower, it creates an entry in your journal detailing the plant and its attributes. Plants of the same species can still differ wildly in appearance and color, so there is value to growing repeats, but I didn't care so much about that when I could be filling my journal with even more entries. Like completing the Pokédex, that journal was my main goal and biggest incentive to keep playing. I often knew with a high degree of certainty what my next seed would grow into, but it was always fun when I wasn't so sure and still got something new. I fiddled around with a few of the other mechanics too, but watching those little numbers grow was what made this one of my favorites.
Once you have a grown flower, there are a few things you can do with it. There's a shop that offers challenges to grow flowers that meet specific criteria, and you can submit your plant to one of those for some nice prizes, but I only did that a few times before growing tired of it. Instead, I preferred to place the plants in my gardens. There are a good amount of garden plots for you to purchase and decorate, and each of them can hold a small number of plants.
I went all-in on my gardens, buying and fully decorating each of them as soon as I had enough money, which I earned by selling extra seeds and duplicate flowers. My only disappointment with that feature was the limited number of spaces for plants. Even with every available garden unlocked, there isn't enough space for one of every flower variety, so I had to make some disappointing sacrifices later on in my playthrough. However, that did encourage me to go back and curate my gardens a little, so it wasn't all that bad.
Flower Town might seem a bit too subdued to some, but it felt perfectly tailored to me and was exactly what I wanted from a StreetPass game. The process of working with others to build up a collection called back to my love of Puzzle Swap while also giving me the freedom to tailor my gardens to my taste. The cozy, laid-back style of gameplay just aligned with my preferences for StreetPass games better than most of the others in the plaza. I'm not thrilled that I moved on from Flower Town with empty pages left in my journal, but I still ended up playing it far longer than most of its peers, and I'm happy with what I did get to do.
