Everyone was talking about it during the coronavirus pandemic: everyone was playing, or at least knew about, the new Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The hype and the pandemic have long since passed, and I decided to take another look at the game. Is it really that great?
Sometimes, games manage to be in the right place at the right time to become a blockbuster and cement themselves in the pantheon of great games. One of these games is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which launched on March 20, 2020, right at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The game quickly became very popular and is still one of the best-selling games for the Nintendo Switch today. For many out there, myself included, the game was the primary reason why I picked up the Switch. However, is the game really as good as we remember it, or did it live off the hype around its release?
The best Animal Crossing ever?
I’ve been a passionate gamer since I was a child. Basically, I have played every Animal Crossing release extensively since Wild World appeared on the Nintendo DS. Based on this experience, I can say that New Horizons is definitely the best Animal Crossing to date. The game preserved and then improved the unique Animal Crossing character.
In particular, for people like me who prefer to play alone, the game offers far more content than its predecessors. Decorating your own island is fun and when I see what some people, of which I am not (yet) one, have achieved here, I am always impressed. However, this is also where my unreserved praise ends, because as much as I like the game, it does have its flaws.
Quality Quantity of Life
Playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons over a longer period of time can be exhausting. This is because the developers deliberately omitted numerous Quality of Life features. The goal is for players to spend more time in the game. For instance, if you’ve ever been annoyed at crafting one item after another at the workbench, now you know why. After all, if you could simply craft several items at once, everything would progress much faster and you would put the game aside more quickly.
Overall, everything in New Horizons takes longer or is more complex than it needs to be. Does it really add to the overall fun factor, that your fishing rod always gives up the ghost at the most inconvenient moment? No, but it does ensure you catch more and more fish with the hope that one day, you will unlock the golden fishing rod. It also extends your daily playtime, which makes you more attached to the game.
Nevertheless, I don’t think the DIY system is fundamentally flawed. If you didn’t have to obtain all materials from storage every single time you wanted to build something, it would probably be a lot of fun.
The Multiplayer Compulsion
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the most fun to play when you play with friends. Not only that, you simply cannot unlock numerous items and features on your own. These include, for instance, the many types of fruit that you can grow. If you don’t have any friends to play with, you’ll have to resign yourself to three types of fruit. You can’t unlock any more after that without the help of others. At this point, it’s also important to mention that Nintendo conveniently just so happens to charge a monthly fee for access to online features.
That’s a shame because it makes many items increasingly elusive. When everyone was still playing the game, it was easy to find people online and visit their islands. Since then, however, this has become increasingly difficult and may even be impossible in a few years if Nintendo ever shuts down the Switch’s online servers.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Conclusion
Overall, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has its weaknesses, but it is still a very good game. The basic principle of Animal Crossing is still fun, no matter how often I am confronted with it in different variations. New Horizons brought the game series forward immensely, and is, rightly so, one of the best-selling games on the console. Its release at the right time has made the game more popular than ever, but it is not solely responsible for its success.
With the imminent release of the Switch 2, the next Animal Crossing iteration is no longer a pipe dream. My hope for the game is for developers to take feedback from the community to heart and understand that the game does not suffer from Quality of Life features. On the contrary, a large part of the community would probably spend even more time in the game if only things were ever so slightly less tedious.
