Animal Crossing: New Horizons Two Years On

August 23, 2022

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So with this in mind, let’s get into talking everything Animal Crossing, a huge part of what originally made this game so attractive to me was the fact I could play it alone and that it had more of a lofi/indie/chill vibe to it – a huge bonus when travelling that it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 –

https://animal-crossing.com/

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