Random Rambles - The Identity Crisis and Contradictory Design of Animal Crossing: New Horizons

 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out in March 2020 after being uncharacteristically delayed a few months. It took the world by storm, helped by the global pandemic locking down everyone at home. It became a way for a lot of people to both socialize and dissociate from reality for a while, and it felt impossible to avoid, at least in gaming circles. While I wasn't planning on getting it immediately, I remember going "ah, why the hell not" and buying it, because I'm an Animal Crossing fan anyway, and it'd give me something to play with my friends. Plus, it brought about an intriguing new twist to the series, placing the player on a deserted island instead of a random village. Within a few weeks, I found myself completely dropping it, and my thoughts about it haven't changed since then, but I'd like to actually analyze why I feel that way.

Now, now, I know what you must be thinking: New Horizons was a worldwide phenomenon and is the second best-selling Switch game of all-time, how could you dislike it enough to write a whole analysis about it? Isn't it widely seen as one of the greatest games ever made? While I won't deny its accolades or people's enjoyment and love of it, of course, I think that ultimately, New Horizons loses its identity as an Animal Crossing game as it tries to innovate on the series' formula.

My experience with the Animal Crossing series is fairly simple: I played the Gamecube original a ton as a kid, and then played New Leaf daily for more than a year once that came out. I didn't play Wild World or City Folk as I didn't know they existed for a long time, couldn't find them at a reasonable price (or at all) once I did, and I don't think I would've been in the mindset to play them very much at that age in the first place. While I have a soft spot for the original Animal Crossing, New Leaf on 3DS is easily my favorite in the series.

What makes Animal Crossing click for me is especially the life sim aspects of the series. The daily chores, such as getting some errands done by talking to the villagers, checking the shops, finding the new fossils, and finding the money rock are the biggest appeal to me, then once that's done I usually play for a bit fishing and catching bugs, then making money or rearranging furniture if I get any. Getting to see what villagers move in is also always exciting despite their personalities not being unique, and in general the slower aspects of the series are what I'd consider its core. Having long-term goals, like the debts for house expansions or just aiming for specific things like filling the museum, mixed with a low daily playtime are also big appealing factors to me as well; it's nice having a game you can play a little every day and feel like you're making progress.

So what does New Horizons do that disturbs the core appeal of the franchise for me? The biggest one is the one-two punch of crafting and tool durability. Tools are a core mechanic in the franchise, with shovels, fishing rods, bug nets and axes being the four big ones. In New Horizons, tools have durability and break after a certain amount of uses, with new Flimsy and Stone variants being more fragile but easy to craft. While this does help justify the crafting system in a way, it also immediately adds an extra layer of busywork when gathering things like fish and bugs, or even just getting wood from trees or rocks from... rocks. For example, now when going fishing you need to either stop every 10-15 minutes to go back to a crafting station to make a new one, or carry a bunch of fishing rods in your pockets, which in turn means you have less space for getting fish. This adds... I hesitate to call it stress, but friction to the normally laidback gameplay of Animal Crossing. Gathering becomes an actual chore due to the start-and-stop of tools breaking and having to craft new ones. It's to the point that even watering cans have durability!

This was an immediate turn-off for me and instead of making me want to invest time in gathering materials, it made everything feel unfun. Even moreso when I learned that the Golden tools, often a reward for doing something very time-consuming, also have durability when I assumed they'd be unbreakable as a way to make earning them feel worth it. As a positive, though, New Horizons does make axes more useful since wood and stone can be gathered with them. Either way, though, going from games where I can spend a few hours fishing in the ocean or trying to find bugs to a game where I need to stop doing what I want to do to go make new tools was very jarring, and I feel like it takes away from the appeal of the series as a whole. I get the whole deserted island DIY feel they're going for, but I don't see what tool durability really added to the experience, unlike something like Breath of the Wild where the whole point is to adapt to the environment with things you can find. It feels like New Horizons is trying to have light survival game mechanics despite not being built for it in the least. It doesn't even make tools not take space in your pockets or stack, making the entire thing even more frustrating.

Something else that stood out to me was the villager personalities being simplified. This appears to be a more subjective issue from what I'm seeing online nowadays, but for me, while villagers have never exactly been "interesting," they at least had quirky lines and traits that felt at least a little randomized. In New Horizons, they're at their most watered down in the series, feeling even more automated and lifeless than ever for me. Lazy villagers often talk about bugs for some reason, Jock villagers are self-centered sporty jerks, and so on. It just feels so lifeless seeing them repeat the same few phrases over and over again, and there's even less reason to talk to them in New Horizons since they rarely, if ever, have errands for you. Errands were a great mechanic in previous games, where you essentially did fetch quests for villagers (usually just "go give this to this person") and got random rewards. While you'd only get a certain amount of them every day, it was a fun way to try and earn things. Now, with them being so rare, it feels like there's little reason to talk to your fellow villagers. It's a life sim element that's been watered down instead of expanded upon, and I find myself getting less attached to the villagers, not more, when I see every villager of a personality type say the exact same few lines.

Another big change to the franchise is the addition of Nook Miles, basically an in-game achievement system where you get points for doing certain things, and can redeem them for rewards. This is a cool idea on paper, since it also gives you daily quests that can be added to your daily chores in a way. In practice, it's just a checklist of things to do, and having a daily mission to "take a picture" or "change your outfit" isn't really interesting, same for missions like "catch a fish" or "spend 5000 Bells." It's more miss than hit in practice, even though it could be an interesting idea. Most damning are the standard missions, though, which you'll eventually fully complete and then be left doing dailies every day to get more Nook Miles. Though it's a cool idea, it doesn't feel like it was thought out very well, especially since a lot of them are quite easy to do. Since dailies refresh as you claim them, you basically have an infinite amount of things to do.

Where I find myself disliking Nook Miles, however, is how they're integral to another new feature: Mystery Tours. By using Nook Miles, the player can purchase a ticket that allows them to go on a Mystery Tour: they'll be dropped on a small, randomly generated island from a pool of templates, where they can gather materials, rare bugs and fish on occasion, fossils, new crafting recipes, and even villagers you can convince to move in to your island. This very quickly will become the main thing most players do early on as they try to get the villagers they want in their village as well as get things to sell for Bells or to fill the Museum. So not only you can get the villagers you want with enough time, but you can get a lot of valuables from each island.

These two features make New Horizons a game that practically encourages and incentivizes long play sessions, unlike the rest of the series. Gotta grind out dailies to get tickets to go to islands to get things I want or make money! It's no wonder the game captured people's attention: it's addictive and always gives you something to do... except during the starting period. 

Here's the thing: Animal Crossing as a series has always had an issue with time traveling exploits; changing the system's clock forward to get things faster. By doing this, you can keep refreshing shop inventories, have upgrades immediately instead of the next day, and so on. This thoroughly and utterly defeats the purpose of the series and is discouraged (but tolerated) by the series' developers, but it's always had this fatal flaw (it only avoids it on the Japan-only Animal Forest on N64, since that has no modifiable system clock) and has never been able to escape it since requiring the games to be online-only with a server clock is a terrible idea. The problem is that New Horizons, in a way, indirectly incentivizes it by making the start of the game terribly slow compared to everything else, to the point that the first few days of gameplay end up feeling incredibly empty and lame. It's an awful first impression, as at least in previous games you could get used to your town and meet the villagers, while now half the island is inaccessible and there's only two villagers with you. 

Plus, at launch, New Horizons was also lacking a lot of features available in previous games, such as diving/swimming, Redd's shop for art pieces (or forgeries!), multiple special NPCs for events, and the Roost café, the latter of which took more than a year and a half to add to the game. Events like Halloween were added with updates as well, which makes sense during the first year and was likely a way to punish time travelers early on to an extent, but nowadays it's kind of moot.

So on top of having an uneven experience that lends itself to time traveling at the start and then prolonged playtime later, New Horizons also, in my opinion, gives the player too much power by the "endgame." Previous games have always been about moving to a randomly generated town and making the most of it, living with whatever the layout was but also making upgrades to it over time, with New Leaf in particular making you the mayor and able to add things like bridges and new buildings. New Horizons, on the other hand, gives you the ability to eventually terraform the island, allowing you to shape it in whatever way you want. And while this enables people to be insanely creative and I've seen incredible islands, I also feel like this feature kind of... goes against what Animal Crossing is? From the Mystery Tours letting you "easily" get villagers you want, to this terraforming ability allowing you to completely reshape the island however you want it to be, it ends up making New Horizons less of a life sim and more of just a sandbox where you place your dolls and buildings wherever you want. You can make absolutely gorgeous islands, of course, but it feels hollow to me. It's hard to put into words.

I find that it all makes the game reach a point where there's nothing else to really strive for. You have all the villagers you want, likely a perfect island to accomodate what you want to do in the most efficient way possible, endless daily quests to do for Nook Miles to spend on other things like Mystery Tour and whatever else, and tools that keep breaking, requiring you to go through the loop of getting more materials to make more tools to get more materials to make more tools. Villagers are deemphasized, as is customizing your house. New Horizons takes a slow life sim franchise and turns it into a grindy sandbox with ill-fitting survival elements. It goes completely against what Animal Crossing is all about in my opinion, hence why I found myself dropping it very quickly. It makes using tools a pain, it makes talking to villagers a waste of time, it makes getting used to the island inefficient since you can just change what it's like later...

 

I wanted New Horizons to expand on villager personalities, whether it be with more dialogue overall, or with sub-personalities templates that are carefully given to each villager to give them a modicum of uniqueness. I wanted New Horizons to expand on the house building aspects, maybe letting you customize the room sizes and layouts more, and giving you more of a reason to care about your house in general. I wanted New Horizons to expand on its life sim aspects and make it a truly cozy game to play, whether with friends or alone. Instead, what New Horizons gave me was a game that contradicts itself, unable to decide whether it wants to be a slow life sim or a fancy sandbox with light survival mechanics. It starts expecting you to play a little every day, then quickly balloons into a grindy, daylong affair which refuses to let you go.

It simply isn't what Animal Crossing should be to me. It lost its core appeal to try and become something it's ill-suited to be in the first place while chasing innovation and reinvention to differentiate itself from its predecessors. Instead of a charming little life sim, it's now a dry resource gathering game. I understand a ton of people like or even love this game, whether it's their first time playing a game in the series or not, but to me it's comfortably, easily the worst game in the series. I get the feeling it wouldn't be as beloved had the pandemic not happened when it came out. I think what bums me out the most about it all is that due to its crazy success, it's likely the next game in the series will go further down this path and lose itself even more.

Images taken from various sites and articles about Animal Crossing: New Horizons. When I wrote this, I didn't take the time to note down what came from where. My apologies!