New Horizons, New Issues
It’s a quiet Wednesday morning and the only sound to be heard in my room is the gentle babble of Isabelle telling me what’s happening on my island today. When she tips her head to the side as she signs off, I can hear the bell she wears jingle slightly. My character steps out of their house and a new day begins on my not-so-deserted island.
Animal Crossing is a game series that has spanned several years and several new editions. The original game, titled Doubutsu no Mori, released only in Japan for the Nintendo 64 in 2001. The first edition to hit the States was Animal Crossing, released for the GameCube in 2002. Since then, there have been seven new titles for four different consoles with the latest release being Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Happy Home Paradise released on November 5th of this year. They have been played by millions worldwide but have seen a huge influx of players recently with the COVID 19 pandemic and the search for escape.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released globally for the Nintendo Switch on March 20, 2020. There couldn’t possibly have been a more serendipitous time for this game, based on escaping to a deserted island and turning it into an island paradise, to be released to the public. It was immediately the best-selling Animal Crossing game, with 34.85 million copies sold as of September 2021. The instant success of this game possibly had to do with the need and want to escape, but the love that people have for this series is something that must be recognized.
I personally have been playing since I was in elementary school. I was gifted Animal Crossing: Wild World for Christmas, along with the NintendoDS I needed to play it. I fell in love instantly. I wasn’t quite playing the game correctly, but that didn’t seem to matter. I loved being a happy little villager with my house and loans and trying to expand and be friends with the people that lived in my town. I connected immediately with the game even when I was running around like a crazy person. These games have a sense of community and belonging that is difficult to find in others.
New Horizons is much different than any of the other games in the series because it gives the player the most amount of autonomy over the villagers on their island. For the first time ever, players could choose where their villagers placed their houses, where the shops went, and later in the game the actual landscape of the island. These new abilities seemingly expand the gameplay for users beyond anything they ever expected, but even with all these new options, there are still some limits to the game.
Despite it being the best-selling Animal Crossing game ever, there are still player critiques and limits to the game. The terraforming aspect has been critiqued multiple times by players for being clunky and difficult to control, the music is objectively not as good as past editions, and there have been multiple minigames that were popular in the past edition that were cut. There are two limits to the game though that are probably the most quoted though: villager dialogue and user interface.
In past editions the villagers that you run into always have something unique to their personality and to them specifically. Their dialogue would change as you got to know them, and they would even give you errands to run, like delivering a package or asking you to catch a certain fish for them or a bug. In New Horizons, however, these are all gone. In my gameplay, I’ve only had the joy of returning a lost item to a villager every once in a while, but nothing on the same scale as previous games. While this limitation isn’t world ending, it doesn’t feel the same without those tasks and special conversations. The tasks were something to do when you started feeling bored with just gathering resources. Now all there is to do is gather resources and attempt to craft something without getting a thumb cramp.
Crafting itself has been one of the biggest sources for user complaints, and possibly the most limiting factor of all. Crafting is a new function to New Horizons, but there are a lot of issues with it. The way to craft is that the user must craft things one at a time with the limited resources they can carry in their pockets. As an example, I’ll give you the worst item to craft in the entire game: fish bait. It’s the easiest item in the game to craft, all you need is one Manila Clam and then you’ll have one bag of fish bait. However, one bag is simply not enough to catch the fish you need. “So just craft more!” It is a painstaking process. You must smash the A button repeatedly to move through the multiple acceptance screens to then watch your character physically craft it, and then mash the button some more to speed up the crafting process that your character does, and then a few more times to move through the celebration text and the question of whether or not to craft more. Overall, it’s a colossal waste of several minutes and would be much easier if the game included a stacking function.
Stacking would come in handy in another place, the tailor’s shop. Buying clothes is fun and customizing outfits for your character to wear is one of my personal favorite things to do in the game. When your character enters the tailor’s shop, you can use the fitting room to buy an outfit that you choose to put together out of all the options they have, but sometimes there’s that special item that catches your eye and you must have it in every single color. (Cowboy shirt, I love you.) That’s not possible in the fitting room. You can only wear one shirt, so in order to buy all of the colors of the cowboy shirt you have to go back into the fitting room every single time to get the next color. Stacking would absolutely change the game there. Allowing me to buy all five in one fell swoop? A dream come true.
Despite a clunky user interface and repetitive dialogue, this is still my favorite game I’ve ever bought. Animal Crossing has a huge fanbase, and a dedicated one at that, with several wiki pages compiled for each game. I personally have over 300 hours logged into New Horizons since its release in March of 2020. This game series has captivated a generation and will continue to do so for years to come. I hope one day I am able to show my kids a new Animal Crossing, perhaps one with some more fun villagers and a less annoying interface to use.