Animal Crossing: New Horizons Two Years On
Hai there lovely readers, time for some more nostalgia! Except
is it really nostalgia if it’s from 2020? Eh either way I think it counts! Well
anyways, let’s get into today’s blog, 2020 was obviously an interesting year
but gaming wise I think it was pretty fun! Animal Crossing New Horizons came
out and although I didn’t get it at the very original release date (unlike half
the people I followed on Instagram – so I got to watch a lot of gameplay before
playing it) I did eventually get it, and having played it for the best part of
the last two years, and recently revisited, it felt like a good topic to
discuss! Plus today is a more relaxed blog day than a research blog, so sit
back, press play on the Animal Crossing theme tune, and get ready to hear my
thoughts on the 2020 new version of Animal Crossing.
Okie so first, for anyone who has genuinely been living
under a rock as to what Animal Crossing is, it’s a game from Nintendo (first on
DS) where the player is a villager turned mayor, outright mayor or eventual
island representative depending on the game version being played. There are a
ton of versions of the game, from the earliest version in 2005 of Animal
Crossing Wild World to the 2020 version of Animal Crossing New Horizons
(available only on Switches). Admittedly I haven’t played all the various
versions of the game – I skipped out on Happy Home Designer when people said
they finished the game after a few consecutive days of gaming, but I have
played Wild World, New Leaf, Pocket Camp (before my phone storage disappeared
along with the game into the great beyond of being deleted by me) and now New
Horizons – I am yet to purchase the 2021 New Horizons Home Paradise (as I have
no internal storage basically left to download the game onto my Switch).
So with this in mind, let’s get into talking everything
Animal Crossing, a huge part of what originally made this game so attractive to
me was the fact I could play it alone and that it had more of a
lofi/indie/chill vibe to it – a huge bonus when travelling that it also didn’t
require wifi and could operate on flight mode. For real though, I think the
lofi chill vibe of the whole game is a huge attraction, and many of my friends
agreed with this sentiment, saying it was a great game to distract from the
sometimes depressing reality of real life – I honestly agree with this, especially
when a ‘busy day’ is sitting by the river eating a sandwich as opposed to attempting
to de-code the notes the professor is rambling through. What’s not to love? The
slow, play at your own pace, dip in and out nature of the game makes it a huge
comfort game that is perfect for escaping reality for a while – especially as
there is no requirement to play for a certain length of time, you could log on
for all five seconds and no one would care and that’s just awesome to be
honest.
The game is so wholesome with cute graphics, plenty of
characters to interact with and a relaxing no stress design, it’s the perfect
escape from a stressful day – with the additional bonus of the lack of internet
meaning it is possible to forget what is online. Especially when the internet
isn’t being such a fun place to be – several servers I’ve been in come to mind.
The characters all have cute personalities and aesthetics – and cool home
interiors that you often cannot purchase T.T they’re also a tiny tinyyyyy bit
passive aggressive when you haven’t played the game in a while but it’s so cute
and simplistic in a low stress environment kind of way that I think it’s a
super good game. There’s a lot that can be said about the various spin offs and
new versions but I think the most noticeable and noteworthy thing is that the
game has improved with each version, I (accidentally) played Wild World and New
Leaf the wrong way around so didn’t realise quite how much had changed, how the
graphics had improved etc, but they really have which is crazy cool and of
course a huge credit to the developers.
Now onto the main focus of today’s blog – New Horizons. The
2020 version of the game probably couldn’t have come at a much better time if
it had begged for it, the world locking down and online work/school definitely
made New Horizons attractive, especially as I had all but given up attempting
to unlock main street on New Leaf. There were of course large differences from
New Leaf, the previous iteration of the game was a town where the player is the
incoming and then incumbent mayor of the town. There are no elections within
the town so you are mayor forever, and you can travel to other friends’ towns
through wifi as well as view their homes in your Happy Home Academy spot on
main street. There is also the boat on the dock which takes you to an island
where you can play games to win a currency which enables you to buy limited
edition island items e.g. specific wetsuits as well as limited edition
furniture/interior sets such as the mermaid set.
Moving into New Horizons, the player is effectively founding
an island, you become an islander living out of a tent and then become island
ambassador/representative. It’s a clever way to expand on the previous
mayoral-ship offered in Wild World and New Leaf, and keeps the game different
to previous versions and fresh – which is of course a good thing. The
introduction/beginner simulator (if you can call it that) takes a short while
as is usual with the Animal Crossing games, but it is informative especially
for those with no idea how to work a Switch. A big change with New Horizons is
the ability to play around with the island’s aesthetic e.g. terraforming, which
allows you to quite literally change the landscape of any part of the island,
you can remove or put in cliffs, create waterfalls, create paths across water
without the need to build bridges. That last one is a big one as building
bridges is literally never cheap in either version of New Leaf or New Horizons.
Terraforming is a great idea and definitely spices up the
game to allow players to do much more than previously able to, but I do
honestly miss the main shopping street. Nook’s Cranny and the Able Sisters’
Boutique does return to the game – where would we be without these staples? But
there is something about the main shopping street – especially upgrading Nook’s
Cranny up to the emporium that I miss a lot. It’s worth noting Nook’s Cranny
does upgrade but not to the same extent as the emporium – which honestly
reminded me a lot of Hamleys’ flagship store in London. The interactive nature
of the game and everything within it, is of course brilliant, it keeps many of
the core elements that have always made Animal Crossing what it is e.g. staple
characters such as Nook, Isabelle, the Able Sisters, K.K Slider and Gulliver –
a pelican who is never where he is supposed to be and always washed up on the
beach, quite literally.
There is a huge fondness to the game for always bringing
back these characters, especially Isabelle – who several of my friends hate but
I adore. She’s so damn cute. As I said earlier, I revisited the game recently,
having not played for a while, and while my island was a bit of a mess, I was
sad to find that the boat tours aren’t available without taking a flight (there
is the new airport feature on the island) to someone else’s island. I don’t
particularly care to visit other islands as all my friends who play are in
different time zones and we all lead busy lives, so flying isn’t really an
option and taking away the ability to take boat tours without flying first is
quite disappointing. But I do wonder what is on the other side of the boat
tour? The same island as before?
So I had a quick google search/YouTube watch and aside from
establishing (via song as always) that Kapp’n is happily married (no need to
remind all of us singletons), the tours are effectively a mystery and you are
taken to a mystery island (how romantic) where there are various flowers/fruit
trees. But this can only be done once per day and you can only visit each
island once or maybe twice – but not frequently enough for players to recommend
leaving anything on those islands. According to some of the videos I watched,
there is a messenger bottle on the beach (as are common in the game) where you
can get a DIY craft recipe or potentially a cooking recipe as well as go
digging if there are dig spots. You can of course take home the fruit trees,
crops, flowers, etc. pretty similar to New Leaf, and the same price except it’s
now one thousand nook miles as opposed to one thousand bells.
Something I noticed when playing – and please don’t entirely
take my word for it, I had a break from the game for a while so I may have
missed this – was the lack of appearance of GraiceGrace, apparently she was
added in a recent update but I really miss her furniture. Now don’t get me
wrong, if you’re familiar with her from New Leaf her furniture was HELLA
expensive for what it was, we’re talking hundreds of thousands of bells for one
of her specially designed theme beds. But it is something I hope the developers
plan to add in in some way, from a quick search she does return to the game but
I’d love to see a way to build her designs in the same way you are able to DIY
a lot of designs on the island – a great way for teaching sustainability.
Though I am admittedly useless at DIY in real life. A character/building I was super happy to find
out would be returning with New Horizons was The Roost, the local café to
Animal Crossing makes a return with Brewster behind the counter as always. I
like the continuity created by bringing back these huge pieces of the game time
and time again, now if only Build A Bear would include Brewster’s uniform in
their collection…
Okie, so that’s some of the main nostalgia covered, perhaps
I'm a little too young (something I rarely say) but when I first began playing
New Leaf specifically, I wasn’t on social media so I didn’t see everyone else’s
towns, only my friends’ – whose towns were also a little bit of a mess and
looked like a flower had vomited over every stretch of empty grass. But
something I noticed with New Horizons, and I saw people on Instagram discuss,
was a pressure to make your island aesthetic and perfect (which of course takes
time, effort and energy) – I can openly admit my island is NOT in any way
aesthetically pleasing, unless you like chaos, in which case book your plane
and come visit me, but I do agree there was a pressure to some extent.
It’s so cool seeing what people get up to and I’ve seen some
really beautiful and creative islands, from the Japanese anime school island
where there were classrooms and custom designed bus stop signs (I’ll link some
of these accounts at the end so you can check them out for yourself) to the
Love Island (no I'm not joking) themed island at the beginning of summer. If
you have luckily missed out on the Love Island phenomenon and have no idea what
I'm talking about, please go and Google search. There are also tons of
beautiful islands and islands tutorials on YouTube (again I will link some) but
it does create a pressure to some degree, or at least it does in my opinion and
it’s important to remember the game is meant to be about having fun. But on the
flip side of this, I love how there are limitless possibilities within the game
and you can create your perfect island with any theme you see fit… I wonder if
anyone has made a Valorant or K-pop themed island yet?
Something I’ve always struggled with about Animal Crossing
though is how after a few years, even with updates I get a little bored, this
could be me having a super short attention span but I do find sometimes I find
it a bit predictable and don’t always feel motivated to level up and I suppose
this does sometimes make me slow down in pace of the game as a whole which is
why I find myself putting it on pause for a while. This is in no way bashing
the developers or the game as a whole, it’s a fantastic game that I adore but I
do find going away and coming back to the game makes me wonder what could help make
it a more long term game for players like me who run out of motivation to play
for a little while. Having frequent updates is a great motivator for sure, and
being able to start over at any point is also great, but it is hard to know how
to go back to playing the game daily like many people did when it first came
out.
Although I didn’t start the game when it first came out like
a lot of people it was interesting to watch what other people were doing within
the game and it gave me some expectations/understanding of what I could expect
to play when I eventually got the game. I love that the game is such that
anyone can play it, from a young child to an adult and it covers all bases with
the timeless nature and ability to disconnect (if you wish to) from the real world
and play alone without need to be ranked in a system or leaderboard. It’s
something a lot of games don’t fully hit on the head but Animal Crossing has
always had a magical way of doing. I think that’s what makes it so special in
many ways – the ability to cover all bases, be play-able by anyone and keep
such a huge audience of varying ages, professions, personalities, etc.
interested and playing. It’s pretty special in that way.
Animal Crossing is one of those games that will likely
always be successful but I do wonder what else can be put in or where the game
could go from here. There were a lot of clever additions and changes to New
Horizons in order to keep it clearly a part of the Animal Crossing universe but
distinctive from previous versions. The airport in particular was a clever
addition but as I said earlier, I'm not a fan of the need to use it in order to
unlock other capabilities within the game, maybe in a future version there
could be a way around this? (if there is, please feel free to let me know) When
I think of what they could do, honestly very little comes to mind (good thing
I'm not a developer for this game) but apart from creating an Animal Crossing
city of some sorts – which would admittedly be strange after New Horizons which
founds a literal island, I don’t really know what else could be done. The
expanding nature of the Animal Crossing universe is really something, it has a
strong future evidently and naturally there will always be critics, but the
nature of the game is such that developing it further will be interesting to
see.
Admittedly, I would totally play a version of the game where
you are founding a city, I think it could be a game with constant developments
and a long story line for maximum gameplay which would allow for it to be
played out for a while and it would be really exciting to see a potential way
to travel across or incorporate other Nintendo games/incorporate other
universes e.g. Cooking Mama or Mario Kart game play. The addition of the
hospital to New Horizons makes me wonder for the possibility of something like
a school – if so please teach Animalese!!! I'm definitely excited to see where
the developers will take the game in the future, and something tells me I will
be paying for the next version whenever the updates stop on New Horizons and a
new game is published.
So, there you have it, my thoughts on the game, what I
loved, what I miss, how it could develop – and that I’d pay money regardless XD
I hope you enjoyed this blog and thank you for reading! I'm going to change my
blogging structure to taking weekends off entirely from posting content so that
I can create better blogs with more refining detail and research put into each
one, which will mean less blogs per week but hopefully they’ll be of a higher
quality!
Thank you again so much for reading.
See you on the next blog!
Byeeeee ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ
Notable Sources of Information
Animal Crossing –
Nookipedia –
https://nookipedia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Kapp’n Boat Tours Explained EmSwizzle YouTube –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuYnJirbs9A
Introducing Animal Crossing New Horizons Happy Home Paradise
YouTube –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu76c3HCKg4
Aesthetic Island Designs from Instagram –
Ohayou.crossing Instagram (anime city with classrooms!) –
https://www.instagram.com/ohayou.crossing/
mavocado.crossing Instagram (traditional Japanese) –
https://www.instagram.com/mavocado.crossing/
mayplaystv TikTok Animal Crossing x Love Island –
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