Anyway, Jeff is really cool! Definitely check him out if you aren’t aware of him already, though, honestly, I’ll be surprised if you’re not.
With that all said, let’s get to the main part of the post– Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This was… At least for me, in some ways, my second least favorite AC by the end, only beaten out by City Folk. That isn’t to say it didn’t have good features, but a lot of it really grated down on me. You know when you play a game and there’s a few annoyances at times, but those annoyances just… keep poking up over and over again until it overlaps everything else? That’s kind of how it felt.
And it honestly kills me. I know some of these will definitely be an unpopular opinion, but Animal Crossing is a very special game series for me. I have really fond memories from the original onward and playing with friends. Sending gifts with long codes, playing alongside family members, and even learning more about Japanese culture as I looked up items I didn’t recognize (which is one of the things that really bummed me out with Wild World when they literally removed some).
So, with that said, let’s get on to the list. As always, this is my opinion, and it’s okay if you disagree, just remember to be respectful about it. I’ll be going in the order features got brought up (to the best of my ability anyway). In this same sense, I will be grouping some features as well, but all features will be in bold as will if I’d like for them to return or not. Anything I don’t mention, such as Stretching, is a take it or leave it kind of thing– would be nice, but I don’t have any strong feelings about them.
- Customizing at the start and whenever you’d like
– This is something I definitely want to see return— I don’t mind the quiz, I think it’s still pretty cute to maybe even define your character a bit, and I mean, I got the face I usually wanted without even trying, but I really liked being able to just… get the appearance I wanted right away including the hair color and if I ever did want to change (or needed to), it’d be easy to do so.
I just, seriously I’m begging here, please give us more ponytails/up-dos. There’s so many different long hairstyles or half up/down that they do and just, make ponytail versions of some of them?? This isn’t unique to Animal Crossing– I can think of so many Japanese games that have one ponytail option and it’s usually this straight one or maybe with a slight flip and like, lots of wavy/curly haired ones exist and they are frequently only acknowledged for pigtails or side tails and it drives me nuts. While Fashion Dreamer also lacks ponytails, I will give it credit for at least recognizing you can have a ponytail still exist and not completely disappear just because you’re wearing a hat. That is something else I’d really like to see Animal Crossing improve on.
Either way, just having the customization upfront and being changeable whenever is a great step. As is letting every outfit be unisex so everyone can just dress and style how they want to. Hopefully all these things will return in the next AC.
- Southern Hemisphere option
– Honestly, there’s not really any downsides to this and I think it’s nice giving people more options to play closer to their own seasons or the opposite if they feel like something different. I hope this will be a mainstay in the future.
- Deserted Island Setting and Terraforming
– I wasn’t completely against it from the start, but in the long run, I just did not enjoy starting from scratch. I liked coming into an existing town and improving it. There’s a reason I really enjoyed a lot of features with Happy Home Designer where you really just got to add in and customize buildings. I felt being Mayor in New Leaf was much more enjoyable and a good balance of new and old features than being the Representative in New Horizons.
While I know some people enjoyed really flattening out their island going all in on terraforming, I honestly did not really care for terraforming in the long run and wouldn’t mind seeing it go as well as the Deserted Island, even with my love of waterfalls. If it did show back up, I think I’d prefer it to be more specific over completely open (IE: A cliff face and you can choose to add flowers or a waterfall but not completely reshape the cliff).
What I’d prefer is, well, we’ll talk about that in the next bullet point.
- Placing people’s houses and buildings/utilities (such as bridges/stairs)
– Easily one of my favorite features in New Horizons. This seems like such a no brainer to stick around and feels like being Mayor can still work that in. That said, even though I’d like this feature to stay, I would like to see improvements to it.
For example, if you want to move something over slightly, you need to not only wait a day which is very annoying, but also place it somewhere else first. This isn’t fun. I’d much rather see a kind of overhead thing similar to the Sims/MySims where you could see an overhead view and move as you’d like once you unlock something. In a similar sense, if terraforming did come back in some way, I would much rather see it as a kind of compromised version where you can move/adjust parts of your existing map (IE: You could move your river slightly to the left) over being able to just completely destroy and re-do everything. For what terraforming was, I think I’d rather see it as its own separate area/option where anyone could make whatever custom area, they want over destroying the original island, similar to how New Leaf had museum rooms you could customize on the second floor.
As an aside, we literally got an overhead view option with decorating— letting us choose between doing that or doing things manually with everything would be amazing.
- Crafting, Cooking, and Farming
– I’m grouping them all together because I feel like they’re all part of the same problem and as everyone may be very well aware I hate crafting so it’s no surprise I want to see all three of these go. I don’t necessarily mind cooking, but it just felt like an extension for crafting and we could… just have food items like usual. I get that they gave a reason to eat, but that’s what the fruit trees are for. It just felt silly.
In the same sense, Animal Crossing doesn’t need crafting or farming and it just felt like they were added because nearly every simulation game has been doing it. In a way, rather than make it seem like AC is “keeping up”, it made the game feel more generic. Farming, like cooking, just doesn’t really add much of anything. Sure, it’s an additional way to earn bells, but I feel like there are already more than enough ways and the time/space it required just wasn’t worth it for that purpose. It just added more of an appearance-type of thing to those who wanted a farm and again, just make it a static item then.
The game feeling this need to force crafting in also ended up being the core reason we got one of the worst features in New Horizons…
- Tool Durability
– If there’s one thing I feel almost everyone agrees one, it’s that nobody likes this. The axe was annoying enough where it would break until you got gold, but they took away the specialness of golden tools by making them break too. Honestly though, there’s just no good reason to have this— the golden tools were fine as an achievement that you finished certain tasks and adding the durability served no purpose beyond making you dependent on crafting which not everyone liked. I never want to see tools breaking again after this game. It’s ruined a lot of fun for people.
- Tool Ring and the Vaulting Pole
– Of course, not everything with the tools was bad. The tool ring was really handy for switching between tools and I would like to see that back at least. Now if we can just also have a dedicated inventory for tools as well…
Similarly, at least some tools didn’t break and the Vaulting Pole was pretty fun, plus it gave you a way to access parts of your Island that maybe you didn’t want a bridge to or before you could afford to build one. I would like to see both of these return, though, I still want a town with bridges already.
- All New Furniture Sets
– This was dumb. Some of the new sets were nice or even upgrades of previous sets, but decades of items were essentially thrown to the curb which… really sucked. While I wouldn’t mind seeing sets return, I do not want it at the expense of so many existing items and want to see the old sets back as well.
The fact that Pocket Camp has a bigger item library of both new and old sets alongside better interaction (with the only downside being that the Villager can’t interact much with stuff too) completely blows my mind. Don’t toss out everything good just to replace it. I’m still upset about the Princess Top being changed to blue for a new set as well.
That said, while I dislike the replacement of sets (even if I genuinely do like some new items and would still like to see new items return, just old items as well), I did like being able to place any item outside and hope that feature will continue to come. It was a great expansion of the Public Works system and let you have a lot more freedom with decorating, especially with so many items that just work better outside in the first place.
- Drip Feed Updates
– Another frustrating decision that I do not want to see back. I don’t even time travel and this was still disappointing to see. In general, I’m not a fan of drip feed updates and while MMOs are expected and the trend of Early Access releases (likely to help continue to fund the game through release) as more and more Indie Games release, there’s just no excuse for a mainstream produced game to have it. I’m very much in the department of I’d rather see the game take more time than be released lacking content just to slowly add it in overtime.
I know some people enjoy that kind of thing as it gives them a reason to check back, but ignoring that Animal Crossing is a real-time game which kind of encourages you to check in anyway, I much prefer the feeling of being done with a game than having to constantly check in especially when the addition is just something that has long since been a feature in the game series now and is just being added back in instead of being there at the start (like Brewster’s).
That said, I don’t necessarily mind the expansions such as Welcome Amiibo for New Leaf and Happy Home Paradise for New Horizons, I still would prefer to wait for the game to have everything, but an expansion years later is a lot more fun than the drip feed update where half of it is stuff we already had in previous games.
- Nook Miles Stamps
– This was the hollow replacement to Badges in New Leaf and I genuinely feel like it missed the mark of why the badges worked and felt fun. I’m not saying all the badges were great, but where the badges felt like an achievement just for slowly making your island better, Nook Miles Stamps were largely about grinding as much as possible— they didn’t feel rewarding about being acknowledged doing something you loved and enjoyed. Just like a challenge like a lot of other game achievements nowadays. While I wouldn’t mind seeing badges return, I don’t want Nook Miles Stamps to, at least not in the way they were done.
- Fences and Pathing Tool
– These were just really nice options to continue customizing your island. There’s no good reason for them to leave and I hope we’ll continue to see both in the future. I hope they will continue to have even more options and colors too.
- Autosave
– I actually really like having Autosave in games as long as you can also manually save as well (as I will save manually all the time). While it can have its downsides (I have a game where my save is bugged and there’s nothing I can do besides going to an earlier autosave state), losing my game data is one of my biggest fears and having had issues where there’d be a short or we’d lose power all of a sudden (or maybe the battery suddenly dying), I’d much rather know my game is okay than risk losing anything. The one downside of this though is that you can’t really test out how something looks and easily reset if you don’t like it.
There are a few things I’ve done where I ended up really disliking it and slowly had to change things back and that wasn’t fun. Having a way to preview things or a decorating mode you can enable and disable would be nice to be able to test things more without Autosave really causing any issues.
- Housing Exterior Customization & Room Sizes
– While there were certainly cute options and being able to have things to hang on the door again was nice and I would like to see everything we did get return in some way, but I want to see it closer to New Leaf in the long run with more house styles and bigger rooms. The Room Size differences for the upper floor and basement were neat, but not only would I want it to be an optional thing, I still think every room should be able to be at least 8×8. Getting smaller side rooms really sucked.
- Housing Interior Customization for you and your villagers
– Where things lacked in the Exterior, we had a lot of neat things with the Interior adjustments between being able to squeeze through furniture, adding certain shining effects, the choice between overhead and classic style with decorating, and tons more options to really customize your house that came with Happy Home Paradise. We even could decorate our Villager’s Houses which let us fix them up and even adjust our starter Villager’s houses to their actual unique house looks. I really hope all of these features will return.
- Villagers Commentating
– Another one that is a bit complicated… I don’t hate this, but the dialogue was too repetitive, it made their normal dialogue even more repetitive, and comments just… didn’t vary enough in general. I think it’s a cute idea, but was executed terribly and I’d rather see Villagers ACTUALLY interact with items more than just commenting on them. One thing I give Pocket Camp a lot of credit is that it’s managed to give Villagers a lot more personality through memories and their little bios even when their personality types overlap. This is something we also got to see a bit with New Leaf’s April Fool’s Day event. Overall, though, unless some big changes are made next time, I’d rather see it go as I feel it took away more than it added.
- Some Expressions solely being tied to specific personality types
– I hate this and really hope they don’t do this again and just give us back Dr. Shrunk or something. As I got all my Dream villagers pretty quickly, I never managed to get some personalities to best friends first (nor did I realize this issue at the time), let alone even have all the ones I needed ACTUALLY on my island. This was such a weird change to make and while it could be cute as an option to get them, I don’t think it should be the only way to as not everyone wants to move out their villagers in the first place.
- Mystery Island Tours
– These were really fun. I liked finding things, seeing new Villagers, and while I don’t think they work as a replacement for Club Tortimer, I still think they are a nice feature in their own right. I would genuinely like to see them back, especially if we have more islands like the May Day mazes.
- New and returning Villagers
– PLEASE KEEP THEM AND CONTINUE BRINGING MORE BACK. Both regular and special! I can’t say enough how happy it made me to see so many familiar faces. I hope that continues. We only had a small percentage of new characters in New Horizons and honestly, while I love many of them (and all the designs are still neat), I think that’s the better approach than constantly making tons of new villager designs at this point. I’d like to see more focus in developing the villagers more, but honestly, I just want to see all these old faces continue showing up.
- Region-free
– While I am grateful for the new friendships I made thanks to the regional differences in New Leaf (huge shout outs to Zed, Ruu, and Mika), I actually really liked being able to experience those holidays and things personally now in my own game. I hope we’ll continue to see all kinds of different holidays and learn more about different cultures, but I also hope that they will do more than just throw an item up that you can order from the catalog.
- Big Overhead Storage
– While putting things in dressers is still fun, the large global storage was really nice especially with so many items in the game. I definitely hope that will continue to be a thing.
- Storyline
– While there has always been some semblance of story, the general gist has just been paying off your loans and making a perfect town with just additions in City Folk that expanded into character’s back stories (With the only real extra information we’ve gotten on regular villagers being through New Leaf’s April Fool’s Day and Pocket Camp) and New Horizons is kind of the first to really put the story as a full main thing. My only issue is the storyline they chose– I like the idea of a story, but feel it was executed poorly by acting like Nook and Isabelle have never met K.K. before. I think the end cutscene was still cute and that’s not my issue, just the suddenly never knowing each other. I wish we had more continuity, or the lines were altered a bit. I just hate when things show proper character development and then either try to retcon or change it to fit a narrative *coughPokemoncoughAshcough* and I would like to see a storyline that takes more concepts and makes the character’s grow and feel like their pasts still matter.
- And to finish this off, the biggest thing for me… VILLAGERS NOT MOVING WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT!!!
– I can’t say enough how much this meant to me. It also means I can continue to check into New Horizons whenever without worrying about losing a Villager I really adore. I don’t even want to consider a new AC without this. If this doesn’t come back, I will cry. Literally the only way I think it could be better is having some kind of option to stop specific villagers from asking altogether.
Honestly, writing this all out has really made me want to poke back in… Maybe we’ll get to that HHP Stream sooner rather than later, as long as I start feeling better anyway…
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