Hey! Hallie here!
If you’ve seen any of my past cozy game reviews, you know that I’ve been slipping in some very judgmental comments about ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’. To be completely honest, the game got very boring, very quickly. It seemed like this game was all everyone could talk about in 2020. It came at the perfect time for all of us to be locked inside and bored out of our minds, and the new gameplay elements allowed for an even more customizable experience than any ‘Animal Crossing’ games had offered before. That meant you could kill a lot of time by reshaping your entire island, moving around buildings, and using furniture to create complicated designs. But despite all of these extra gameplay mechanics, after a good period of people absolutely adoring the game, a huge amount of players collectively put the game down and didn’t pick it up again. Now it’s common to see games recommended specifically for gamers who are tired of ‘Animal Crossing’. But why are so many people tired of ‘Animal Crossing’? Why did gamers find that, in a game with no ending, there still isn’t any replay value?
The Villagers: Let’s start with my personal biggest issue with the game. The entire reason I got into ‘Animal Crossing’ as a kid was the ability to interact with the cute villagers. Every single villager had a unique design, but more than that, every single villager had a unique personality. It wasn’t just that you could tell who the villager was from the catchphrase they used or the items in their house. They all had different goals, opinions, and funny observations. Overtime you could even see villagers forming friendships or rivalries based on how comparable their personalities were. Some villagers would talk often and would brag about the letters they sent to each other. Others would fume after only a few minutes of conversation with each other. Sure, ‘Animal Crossing’ has always had personality types such as cranky or peppy, but past games had a wider range of interactions each villager could have with the player or other villagers. It made them feel more alive. ‘New Horizons’ stripped that away. Now two characters of the same personality say the same things over and over again. If you have two snooty villagers on the same island, you might as well just have the same character. Characters are also less likely to interact with each other. When they do, they filter through the same preset conversations between certain personality types. Normal characters have the same things to say to lazy characters each time, regardless of which lazy villager they’re interacting with. It’s incredibly frustrating. It feels like every villager was reduced down to their most generic traits, a situation where they simplified the game rather than improving on it. If I can’t enjoy talking to the villagers, what can I enjoy?
New Things Happening Every Day: Yes, on a basic level there are new things happening on ‘New Horizons’ every day. Every day new shells appear, plant growth progresses, different fish or bugs show up, and new fossils show up. Some days you’ll even have a visitor to the island that will sell you goods or look to collect specific items. But what happens when you’ve run out of fossils to collect or you’ve collected so many different kinds of fish that you just don’t care anymore? What is there to do when collectables run their course, whether they’re the kind you buy or the kind you find? ‘New Horizons’ doesn’t have an answer. That’s why they came out with a DLC. They couldn’t seem to figure out what else to do with the game. But other ‘Animal Crossing’ games didn’t need a DLC to be re-playable. They had schedules for comedy shows your character could go see and auctions your character could attend to get rare items. Not only that, but past games knew when to keep visitor characters rare. In ‘New Horizons’ there’s an entire island where you can interact with the “rare” visitors whenever you want, like Redd, and buy their goods. And on top of all of that ‘New Horizons’ has less random events. There aren’t days dedicated to the player deciding which villagers house has the prettiest lights or competing to create the prettiest garden. Now some event days are only marked by a rare item showing up in Able Sisters or appearing when you shake trees. Meanwhile, the game overuses event days like the Fishing Tourney or the Bug-Off to the point that the player doesn’t see these events as special anymore. It almost feels like the randomized things that happen everyday are made to become eventually mundane.
The Player Has Access to Too Many Things: This one might be controversial, but I think a lot of my frustrations with the game revolve around the fact that I can just do whatever I want. And I’m not talking about the access players have to designing their island. I like the new design-based gameplay. But I don’t like that I have the power to invite whatever villager I want to live on my island. I don’t like that I have the potential to access every single piece of furniture or clothing I’ve encountered in one place. I don’t like that I can make so many bells in the game that I can actually run out of things to buy. Part of the appeal of ‘Animal Crossing’ was not knowing what you were going to get. Having your favorite villager move to your village was exciting because it was random. On the flip side, angering villagers until they left was so fun because you didn’t know who’d come after them. Getting rare items was important because you didn’t know when you’d see them again. And making your house giant was an effort that made you feel fulfilled once you finally were able to afford it. The reason why I stopped playing ‘New Horizons’ is because, in record time, my house was huge and my island was a five star island. It felt like I beat the game. Credits rolled and everything. That was so much harder to accomplish in the past ‘Animal Crossing’ games, and it made you want to come back to the game more often. I don’t often complain about games being too easy. But when there’s nothing else to do once you complete several easy tasks, I think a game like ‘New Horizons’ could benefit from making those tasks more difficult.
Those are my main problems with ‘New Horizons’. I still think it’s a cute game. I actually picked it up again recently, after erasing my entire island of course, to try to recapture the fun I had in the beginning hours of ‘New Horizons’. But once you get past those hours, it’s really easy to run out of things to do. And that’s very unfortunate. I love ‘Animal Crossing’. It’s one of the games I’m most nostalgic for. And it’s really a shame that I can’t get the same enjoyment out of ‘New Horizons’ that I once got from ‘City Folk’.
Don’t do anything fun until I get back!
Hallie
Oreos & Peanut Butter 