The Year of Animal Crossing

by Gretchen Lenth

Introduction.

I don’t argue with my best friend very often. On those rare occasions, however, I can usually link our petty disagreements back to one unlikely source: Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

It’s strange to think that the video game that unified the world in March would later turn into a source of discourse for friends, lovers, and internet users everywhere.

Perhaps I’m being a bit dramatic. But I don’t think I am.

For those uninitiated, Animal Crossing is a Nintendo-developed game franchise that invites its players to live in a sleepy village where they have free reign to do whatever they want. Besides the fact that it runs on real-time, the Animal Crossing world bears little resemblance to our own. There, neighbors have been replaced with talking animals in t-shirts, presents float through the air on balloons, and you don’t pay interest on your home loans. For the reasons above, it’s clear Animal Crossing presents an idealized version of our lives rather than a realistic one. After all, what could be better than free concerts every weekend put on by a Jack Russel Terrier playing guitar in the nude?

Throughout my childhood, the Animal Crossing franchise existed as a source of joy and as a way to bond with my twin sister. I still distinctly recall the wintry Christmas night of ’08 when I first slipped City Folk into my Wii. I sat on the floor of my grandparents’ house while attempting to drown out the adult conversation drifting over from the dining room. That wasn’t difficult to do, as my sister and I soon engrossed ourselves in our village (called Poketown because we were seven and we were losers).

If I boiled down the essence of what makes the world of Animal Crossing so enticing to both my current and seven-year-old self, it’d be with this: escapism. Much like a trip to the movies, a few hours on the couch planting digital flowers and catching digital bugs can give the mind a break from the stressors of reality. This has been true for as long as video games have existed.

When Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched on March 20th, it did so to an audience that suddenly had more free time than expected. With vacations canceled, spring breaks extended, and schools scrambling to prepare for remote operation, our lives went up in the air.

I know.   

At this point, the “COVID spin” on everything feels tiring. Hell, you’re probably also sick of people apologizing for bringing up the pandemic while continuing to do so anyway. But try to think back to that first week. That first week when it dawned on you that you wouldn’t be seeing your friends or sitting in a restaurant for a while. You didn’t know how long “a while” would be, and that only made it scarier.

Needless to say, I was beyond excited for New Horizons’s wholesome escape from life. It’s no wonder I spent more time perfecting my island than participating in the real world. These days, I still see friends just as infrequently as before, and I can hardly remember feeling comfortable eating in a crowded area. All the same, it’s uncommon for me to check in on my villagers more than once a week. I know I’m not alone.

In order to evaluate New Horizons’s unusual life span over the past nine months, I’d like to trace how fans went from their springtime obsession to the silence of today. Along the way, I’ll give my own two cents on where the game could have made some improvements or where I think fans have been unfair. 

No matter its charms, New Horizons could never be a game to satisfy all types of players for all types of reasons. Especially when someone expects an anthropomorphic villager that cycles through the same twelve dialogue lines to replace reality.

How things started out.

On New Horizons’s launch day, I’d only just found out that I wouldn’t be returning to campus for the rest of the spring semester. A few days after, I entered my dorm room one last time for the express purpose of scrubbing the place of my existence.

It was an emotional time to be a college freshman. This only made me more excited to turn my critical-thinking brain off for a few hours each day so I could enjoy life as Resident Representative of my own deserted island getaway. Almost immediately, a few hours a day grew to a dozen. In the first week alone, I clocked nearly 60 hours into New Horizons. My sister played for 80, and I found people on my friends list whose time spent grinding went well into the hundreds.

New Horizons already stood as one of the most-anticipated Nintendo releases of the year. With an eight-year gap between main series titles, there was a lot to get excited about. Worldwide lockdowns only amplified things.

Due to this excitement, it’s no wonder everyone I knew on Twitter became Animal Crossing fan accounts shortly after release. At this point, the community consisted mostly of wholesome content ranging from custom clothing designs to impressive terraforming feats to videos of villagers singing along to Bubblegum K.K. Spirits were high, the stalk market was booming, and any early Animal Crossing critics were drowned out by an optimistic majority.

Like all good things these days, it was only a matter of time before it crashed and burned. I blame Egg Day.

Where things fell apart.

The issues with Egg Day were apparent almost immediately following the update. Eggs hung out in the trees, rocks, ocean, and sky. Making the overabundance of the pastel monstrosities worse was the fact that the furniture you could make with them was tacky and ugly and didn’t require nearly the number of eggs the game provided.  

This underwhelming holiday brought with it the first crack in the foundation of the Animal Crossing fandom. From my perspective, it looked like the first hint of mass burnout and spite among players—sentiments that only grew over time. And time was something too many of us had on our hands.

If I were to place myself on the Animal Crossing: New Horizons political compass, I’d fall somewhere along the lines of critical but optimistic. I acknowledge the franchise’s many faults, but I also recognize how New Horizons improved on previous releases. 

My friend, on the other hand, lands squarely in the territory of disappointed and cynical. Despite the fact that she bought a Switch just to play New Horizons, she’s hardly touched the game in months and hasn’t terraformed a square inch of her island. As mentioned before, this divide provides us with the bulk of the tension in our friendship. For the longest time, it was impossible to make it through an entire gaming session without petty conflict.

I’ll admit, some of her accusations get me a bit riled up. Perhaps this is just my gut reaction to a new player attacking a franchise I attach sentimental value towards. But when that reflexive anger passes (and we smack each other with butterfly nets a few times), we often find common ground between our two perspectives.

In that sense, my friend’s attitude toward New Horizons mimics the general consensus toward the game: some points are valid and worth listening to, but others are mostly driven by burnout.

Initially, most of the negative energy I felt radiating from the community came from mainstays of the franchise. In-depth analyses on Tom Nook’s corrupt capitalist agenda or gatekeeping toward time-travelers hardly phased me. After all, I’ve dealt with that before.

Over time, however, the New Horizons community developed its own flavor of controversy. I’d chalk this sudden transition up to the fanbase’s early hyperfixation on New Horizons. After all, when you play a game based on real-time for ten hours a day, there becomes less and less to do each time you log on. To remedy this, fans created their own content to help pass the time. While the innocuous content that made up the early fandom still remained, toxicity soon overshadowed it. The controversies that followed resulted from a player base so wrapped up in their virtual worlds that they forgot they were playing a game about building community.

Sometimes, this toxicity came in the form of judging players who bullied “ugly” villagers off their islands. Others bemoaned the relatively limited furniture selection of New Horizons compared to the mobile app Pocket Camp. Which is weird to me, since I didn’t think people actually played Pocket Camp in the first place. Even so, New Horizons is suddenly the inferior title because it lacks the selection of a three-year-old game run on microtransactions.

Taking an even deeper dive into the weird, you’ll quickly note how obsessed large swathes of the internet once were with bespectacled cat boy Raymond. Stories spread about how players were offering (and paying!) real human money to invite the villager to live on their island. Better yet, one fan screenshotted a Discord conversation with a user who tricked them into paying Nook Mile tickets just to look at Raymond.

Jokes aside, one common serious criticism for New Horizons deals with the game’s major new addition: crafting. In fact, this aspect of gameplay is what drove my friend away from playing altogether. She found micromanaging the building materials in her pocket space exhausting—especially because these materials were gathered with tools that constantly required recrafting. If the charm of Animal Crossing comes from its calming effect, then she and hundreds of other critics were far from enchanted. 

The part where I actually review New Horizons.

 With the introduction of the crafting system, players can take resources and use them to create and customize an impressive variety of furniture items. These items can then be placed in the player’s home or in the exterior of their island. For all the creative opportunities the crafting system brings to the game, it isn’t without its major downsides.

For one, tools are now breakable. This requires you to use materials to remake them even at the highest levels of quality. In addition, items can only be crafted one at a time. This makes for a real slog, especially when crafting in bulk (fishing bait is my personal nightmare). 

One other notably criticized addition to New Horizons is terraforming. As neat as it is to erect cliffs at your feet and to mold the direction a river flows, it’s an incredibly tedious process with a bit of a learning curve. It’s no wonder my friend procrastinated river and cliff building for so long there was snow on the ground by the time she started.

While I personally find crafting and (sometimes) terraforming to be a highlight of my experience playing New Horizons, Animal Crossing’s creative aspects aren’t what bring every player coming back. Some prefer to play it as a social simulator. As such, many are disappointed due to how toned-down the personalities of villagers have become. 

New Horizons boasts an impressive roster of 397 villagers, each of which is neatly slotted into one of eight personality types. With the option to invite up to ten villagers on your island, this means you’re guaranteed to have at least two animals that are essentially reskinned versions of each other.

To be fair, villagers always functioned this way. Still, some players long for the earlier days where a villager might call you a freak or a burden on society when you catch them on a bad day. Compared to back then, a New Horizons cranky villager can hardly be called a crank.

While I personally find it weird that people want to be called ugly by a grizzly bear, I think that says a lot about how attention-starved we’ve become this year. Hopelessly, we substitute the social interaction we’ve been missing from our realities with whatever we can find. In lieu of this stimulus, we at least want something to keep our minds busy. Unfortunately, New Horizons may not be the best game for forgetting about life. It runs on real-time, after all.

For better or for worse, waiting for things to happen is a core aspect of Animal Crossing. If you planned on binging the game like you would a Netflix series, you’re likely going to come against some roadblocks unless you’re comfortable time travelling.

One of the best illustrations of the game’s over-reliance on real-time events is in the earliest stages. When you first arrive on your deserted island, it’s just that—deserted. However, as time goes on, you can build more and more infrastructure. 

For example, Tom Nook eventually brings up the idea to start a museum manned by the entomophobic owl Blathers. But before you can even meet the curator, you first need to give Tom Nook five fish or bugs and wait a day. At that point, Blathers will have set up a tent on your island, but he’ll ask for fifteen more specimens before he’s ready to build the museum. After waiting another day, you can finally get the museum up and running.

This came as a massive blow to me when I started playing. With all of my newfound quarantine freetime, I was motivated to get my island started and to invite more villagers as soon as possible. But you can’t even begin building more houses (which can take multiple days to build) without a museum erected first. Though I personally didn’t find any other wait as infuriating, there are plenty more examples of Animal Crossing forcing you to wait just because it wants you to. Whether you’re building a bridge, moving a building, or upgrading a home, you’re going to have to wait until the next day rolls around to make progress. 

 See the pattern? 

Of course, none of the above would be so problematic if you only intended to visit your island for an hour a day. In that situation, you’d accomplish your daily tasks, feel content, then continue where you left off tomorrow. However, as mentioned before, I’m living testament to the fact that many players did not feel content playing this way. 

With so many of us confined to our homes, staring at the same walls and talking to the same people every day, it was tempting to bury our time in a sugar-coated world. But in much the same way that a child on Halloween eventually grows sick of candy, fatigue quickly set in on Animal Crossing players as they consumed too much too quickly.

This is where player pressure became more than a single video game could bear. Especially a video game released in a year that’s made it nearly impossible for any industry to conduct business as usual. Nintendo’s major release lineup for 2020 has looked suspiciously slim, which only furthered fan frustration.

New Horizons still receives regular seasonal updates, and there’s plenty of base game content I have yet to explore. Even so, the faces of Isabelle and company stopped exciting me when the game felt like one more chore I needed to complete. 

And that’s okay.

Final Thoughts.

I can’t blame others for venting about what they wish New Horizons could be. I also wish for a game that could endlessly capture my attention so my eyes weren’t instead glued to news on my Twitter feed. Unfortunately, escapism is an imperfect remedy.   

To be fair, I do still believe New Horizons would be wise to make quality-of-life improvements. I’m also holding onto hope that best boy Brewster will be added in future updates. Regardless, Animal Crossing will always hold a special place in my heart, as I’m sure it does for the people on Twitter who make the occasional jab at it. I really do hope there are seven-year-olds out there popping New Horizons into their Switches and experiencing that same magic I felt many Christmases ago.

With that being said, I’m now old enough to understand that video games won’t bring you joy if you wring the fun out of them. Instead of relying on one thing as my coping mechanism, I’ve found it best to give New Horizons and I some space. At least until we inevitably rekindle our old flame in a few months when I’m ready to shake off that bedhead and give it another try.

Fortunately, there are plenty of video games that cater to a similar audience as Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing’s slow-paced gameplay, paired with its lack of “plot” and soft aesthetic, make it a noted anxiety reducer. In addition, simple daily tasks like decorating a room or delivering a package to an NPC can help a player feel accomplished and in control of their environment. Though I would argue Animal Crossing games are the best at what they do, they aren’t the only options out there. 

If you’re looking for something that scratches the same itch as Animal Crossing but without all that darned waiting, why not try Stardew Valley? As an indie title, its price tag isn’t quite as steep as New Horizons. Not only that, but the farming simulator boasts a colorful cast and addicting gameplay that I’d argue is just as much (if not even more) fun. If you’re looking for something a little more magical, Rune Factory 4 just received a remake for the Switch that’s worth checking out as well. My friend and I both share a passion for these games, and we find ourselves getting heated about them far less often. 

Even as you move on from New Horizons into newer, wilder pastures, don’t forget to stop in and say hello to your islander friends every once in a while. Even they get lonely sometimes.