Introduction The Animal Crossing series defined my childhood. I easily spent thousands of hours across all of the games in the late '00s, playing with other players through Wi-Fi and even building social skills along the way.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf released towards the middle of my teenage years, and was mindblowing when it first released. Amazing game. But towards the end of my playthrough, I began seeing the villages people uploaded to the Dream Suite and decided to start making my own town into something beautiful and ambitious. Unfortunately trying to control how a village develops in New Leaf is an awful experience, so I burned out quickly; it simply wasn't meant to be pushed to its creative limits like that, and that's clear by how you had to do hours of soft-resetting or pattern manipulation just to control where villagers move into.
When New Horizons was revealed I was a little concerned about the deserted island setting making the player feel a little lonely, but overall I was excited about how much creative freedom it provided. Finally, outdoor furniture! Everything is within the player's control! I can build the town of my dreams! So when a friend on a server I'm in called the push towards a system where the player has control over everything a problem, I was a little confused as to why. They mentioned that they didn't want to feel like a god and wanted to feel a sense of community with their villagers, and I just... didn't get why they wouldn't want more creative freedom. Curious, eh?...
Approaching New Horizons So what is this game? Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an amazing game for those who just want to escape into another world and build the island and character of your dreams. You can truly be anyone, and you can build anything. That's the core of this game.
The creative options are plentiful. There's a piece of furniture for almost any object you might want to use, and hundreds of clothing items to choose from. Fashion options aren't even limited by gender; something that more games these days need to embrace! Terrain modification and outdoor furniture also revolutionize the direction of the series, allowing every island to be truly transformed and turning the series towards a construction and creativity focused direction.
And as per usual for the series, New Horizons is a real-time game. This synergizes quite well with the new direction of the series, as creative players will log in every day to do their daily tasks and come up with new ideas to improve their island along the way. There will always be something to do, something to improve.
There's a few small nitpicks that I have. There's an arbitrary limitation of one island per Switch, so players who don't want to share their island with their family will find themselves disappointed. Furthermore, the hourly soundtrack doesn't begin playing until you complete the Town Hall, which may be weeks into your playthrough. The hourly soundtrack is the best part of Animal Crossing from a musical perspective, so it's a fairly baffling decision as I can't imagine that only hearing one overworld song for over a week makes for a good first impression.
Regardless, the game design of New Horizons is excellent. It's clear that Nintendo went into the development of this one with the goal of reexamining the purpose for every mechanic. And while many consider tool durability controversial— I'll share my thoughts on that in the following section— it certainly does a great job at getting players to engage with all of the game's systems by asking them to gather resources.
Caught Up in Appearances But it's time for me to move away from the more objective assessments of New Horizons. Video games are interactive experience, and that makes them inherently subjective. So here's my experience: Frustration. Boredom. Disappointment. Yes, really. I've spent thousands of hours playing Animal Crossing and I couldn't fall in love with what's easily the most successful game of the series? Unfortunate.
The music is eh. It has a very cottagecore feel to it, which doesn't feel very appropriate for the island setting, and the melodies get older much faster than they did in earlier games. The setting DOES make me feel lonely like I anticipated, and I do wish that I could travel off to the city or main street to get a scope of how large the Animal Crossing world is like in previous games. But most importantly, playing this game feels like I'm constructing a dollhouse— one that never feels pretty enough to meet my own standards.
Everything in New Horizons exists for the sake of making it easier to construct things, giving players more options to construct things with, or collecting more critters to show off in a museum. Everything unnecessary, such as the cafe, was cut; and those cuts make the experience feel awfully hollow. And because I've got high standards, I spent dozens of hours doing tedious work that I found excruciatingly boring just for the sake of building a pretty island. And even after a few hundred hours, I'm still logging in and walking through my island just to be disappointed by how it looks. And I could keep working on it, but why would I keep wasting my time? Every building animation is slow as molasses. I just can't take it anymore. I can't even bring myself to care about series staples such as fishing and bug catching because I've always got to look at my disappointment of an island in the background while I do them.
And like I said, they cut a lot of fluff features; unfortunately, this included a lot of features which made the world feel more lived in. Now I could just return to monke and destroy everything I've built (which'll take over 10 hours because of how slow deconstructing is), then leave the island nigh untouched from how it looked when I first moved in. But what's left? Fishing and bug catching? Every other game in the series has that. They cut everything else. Ignore building, and then you realize you're left with less content than almost every other game in the series. As a result, booting up this game is just a constant loop of frustration for me, not the relaxing experience that I fell in love with the series for. Log in, feel frustrated by how your island looks, talk to your favorite villager, log off. Every time. And I know I'm not alone, as I've seen dozens of people share similar experiences over the months that I've spent in the Animal Crossing community. And most unfortunately, I regret having spent a few hundred hours painstakingly constructing an island that I'd never be satisfied with because "it'll all be worth it in the end!"... yeah, it wasn't. I really tried to like this game, though.
I could go on and on about this New Horizons— about the datamined content that this game desperately needs fully implemented, about the little details that I like and dislike, etc. But it's time to move on, as this review is already quite long.
It turns out that what I really loved about the Animal Crossing series was the escapism of it all, the peace that it brought, the sense of community that you'd feel with your villagers. Not feeling like a god. It turns out that my friend was right. And god, I wish they weren't.
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been playing since wild world and this is actually my fav, but new leaf and gc definitely have some stuff over it. ww was the peak of writing but that’s an anomaly, that game was mid otherwise