Japanese convenience stores continue to make wishes come true.
Nintendo’s Animal Crossing is all about living a whimsical, slow-paced life, and one of the happiest little parts of it is how you can spot shooting stars in the night sky and make wishes on them. Even better, the next morning you can find pieces of those fallen stars, called star fragments, if you know where to look.
▼ An Animal Crossing star fragment
And now, in a welcome case of life imitating art, you can find Animal Crossing star fragments in the real world, too! There’s no need to scour the beaches of remote islands for them, either, as you can find them at Japanese 7-Eleven branches.
As soon as we heard about them, we rushed out with the speed of a comet zipping through the cosmos to buy a pack.
Within the world of Animal Crossing, you can use star fragments to craft furnishings and accessories for your avatar or home. While the real-world star fragments won’t fill your actual home with sofas and tables, they will do something just as nice by filling your stomach with delicious sweetness, since they’re konpeito, a kind of traditional Japanese sugar candy based on the Portuguese confeito.
Each 149-yen (US$1.30) pack comes with three varieties inside. The standard yellow star fragment is an obvious inclusion, and it’s joined by the large star fragment, which also keeps its white color from the games. Finally, since Animal Crossing also has seasonal Zodiac star fragments, because we’re getting into late December/early January, you also get red/pink Capricorn star fragments.
▼ And yes, the large star fragments really are bigger than the other two types.
Each category of star fragment also has a different flavor. The large star fragments stick to the orthodox konpeito taste, with a sugary, but not cloying, sweetness. The Capricorn fragments, on the other hand, have a grape flavor, and so much that our taste buds thought we’d popped a piece of fruit into our mouth instead of a piece of candy.
That same fruity force is featured in the basic star fragments, which taste like little chunks of apple.
With holiday vacation season coming up, Animal Crossing Konpeito is just the sort of thing to munch on leisurely while you spend a cozy afternoon relaxing at home and sprucing up your island. We’d recommend buying two bags, though, so that you don’t have to break the sense of immersion by venturing out into the real-world cold to get more after you inevitably finish eating bag number one.
Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]