Photo by BagoGames via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Animal Crossing is a game series that I have a patchy history with. I have played two of the other games in the series but those were quite a wild ago. Every time a new one came out, I was never inclined to try it out because I always had a feeling that it was just more of the same game but on a different console. I was usually right. When Nintendo began to make spin-offs for the game like Pocket Camp and the cardinal sin that was Amiibo Festival, I began to think this was yet another franchise that will fade into obscurity as it swirls down the drain of failure and mediocrity.
Then Animal Crossing for the Switch was announced.
At the time, I didn’t think much of it. While I was interested in the appeal of bringing animal crossing on the go again without having to bankrupt myself or sell yet another organ because every mobile game just has to have microtransactions nowadays, I wasn’t too sure how long I could tolerate all the things that I disliked about the previous games.
Now that I’ve played the game for about a week and a half I’m ready to give my thoughts on a product that you’re supposed to in theory play for years to see all the content.
This time around you start on a deserted island to start a fresh new life in a new place. You are a regular citizen on the island, but also, you have to contribute almost everything themselves to make any sort of progress on the island. That makes it almost a combination of the two different approaches that Animal Crossing had taken in the past.
One of the key aspects of Animal Crossing that had always bothered me was the fact that everything in the world had a set schedule. Shops and other amenities had specific schedules that, if you lived anything besides the most idyllic lifestyle, you would not have the opportunities that people who live perfectly scheduled and efficient lives do have. That is mostly gone in this game. Most of the essential shops are constantly open and those that are not like Nook’s Cranny which is where you sell all of the random garbage that you collected on the island now have features that remain available even if the store is closed.
Another thing that always bothered me was the fact that you can only get certain tools like axes and shovels in the shop that always seemed to be closed when you most needed the tool in the first place. That too is gone with the addition of the DIY mechanic that allows you to create your own tools no matter what time it is on the island.
However, one of the biggest additions to the game is the lengths one can take to customize their island. You now decide the location of pretty much every shop and home and can now shape the terrain in ways unheard of in other Animal Crossing games. It was one of the features that really drew me to the game in the first place and right now I am not disappointed by the amount I am already able to change at this early stage.
Now for some of the downsides.
Something that really bothered me in the previous titles was just how little money you could make in a single day. For certain projects that you wish to do on the island, it can take quite a bit of money and it can take forever to rake in the dough to make it happen. Everything that you can sell from your island has the value of a handful of dryer lint. That is if you don’t go to other islands which is another thing I dislike.
The multiplayer in the game is inefficient, clunky, restrictive and essential to making decent money. Every person that enters your island wastes your time by having a lengthy animation. When people do in fact come to your island, many features of the base game are locked off until the guests leave. “Why would you want people to come to your island then?” you may ask. There are certain aspects of the game that randomize for each player. One of which is turnips and the other is fruit variety. Both of these two are random on the island and if you sell a fruit that isn’t native to the island you get substantially more money from it. Turnips, on the other hand, are randomized for each player every weekend and are the real money maker where the price for each turnip is randomized and so is the selling price. That is how you make the most money on your island.
To conclude, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a game with many progressions when compared to its past titles. However, despite the fact that it is one of the fastest-selling switch titles ever, I don’t think that the features of the game are worthy of that title.
Edward Park is a second-year BSED English major in the writings track. EP909756@wcupa.edu