...I find it weirdly heartwarming that a game that isn´t about shooting people in the face and running them over with your car, basically a game without any actual conflict, antagonists or end goal still can be so popular.
I mean, this game just warms my heart. Running around with somebody you barely know, chilling on the couch, banging drums, catching fish, running in circles, writing cheesy letters to nonexistent talking animals, watching the sun set, enjoying the sound of running barefeet in the rain, listening to funky little VGM tunes, lovingly crafting new clothes for your childlike alter ego... As much as I enjoy finding something like a big bullet bill cannon, I enjoy giving it away to somebody else without expecting anything in return even more rewarding.
It´s a game not about running towards some big reward, not about being better as somebody else. It´s about enjoying life, plain and simple. It´s very zen (and I say that as somebody who usually hates when people throw that term around, like "this new MacBook Pro has a very zen look to it").
This is already sound cheesy as hell, but I´ll make it sound even cheesier: It reminds me what it feels like to be carefree and childlike again. Doing dumb shit just for the sake of it. Being silly, being outgoing.
You could say that it all happens "virtually", that it is just a fantasy world and that it is just a waste of time - I mean, nothing really happens in this game, isn´t that kind of boring? But in the end, the kind of feelings it makes me (and us, I assume!) feel are very much real. It´s basically a gigantic playset that fits in our backpacks. It reminds us how important it is to be silly once in a while, to be unreasonable, to throw our worries in the wind for half an hour.