No you're NOT a gamer

I'm so sick of all these people who think they're gamers. No, you're not. Most of you are not even close to being gamers. I see these people saying

"I put well over 100hrs in this game it's great!"

That's nothing, most of us can easily put 300+ in all of our games. I see people who only have the Nintendo switch and claim to be gamers.

Come talk to me when you pick up a PS4 controller then we be friends.

Also DEAR ALL WOMEN: Pokémon is not a real game. Animal Crossing is not a real game. The sims is not a real game. Mario is not a real game. Stardew Valley is not a real game.

Mobile games are NOT.REAL.GAMES. Put down the baby games and play something that requires challenge and skill for once

-sincerely, all of the ACTUAL gamers

i have pretty harsh feelings about this game. i love animal crossing, i always have. it was a huge part of my life growing up and some of my most wonderful memories are of playing City Folk at night in my grandmas house. That game was there for me then, and new leaf was there for me as a teenager. so when this game came out, i thought this would be the animal crossing game that would be with me through adulthood. I was so excited for this game, it was giving me panic attacks the week before release.
When i first started it up, i fell in love with it. it looked beautiful and it was so amazing seeing my favorite characters in HD as opposed to the crunchy 3ds screen. i thought the villagers were very well written and funny, and i still do kind of think that some of the dialogue is genuinely good, but it started wearing off fast.
The game is so empty. theres nothing here. Every time i used to open this game, all i can picture is the boardroom meeting in which they were plotting to make the game more marketable. Its been gentrified, that's the only way i can describe it. The villagers offer you nothing emotionally, theres no GracieGrace, no city, no little secrets to find. there is no depth here, a world that moves without you, or a sense of wonder. all the hallmark features of previous games have been removed. it is a marketable product. A product that produces products, merchandise for profit (new leaf never ever had this much merch, but i noticed immediately how much they were making for this game). And ever since i realized this, games just havent been as fun. I feel like they all embody this game in a sense, giving up what makes it impressionable and personal to become something else. i worry very much, because every single mainline game ive ever cared about seems to be following this path. it's upsetting. I simply can not see how you could enjoy this game, unless you simply didnt know what you were missing out on.

animal crossing finally concludes its slow and steady descent into a list of chores served alongside a heaping helping of bread and circuses. the experience of playing new horizons is closer to playing a dead mmo than it is to any sort of zen-like getaway game.

animal crossing has always had a nasty hook monster but it is no longer lurking around the small town, showing its face to you rarely and at a distance. now, it has picked up a beach-front property and firmly moved in. it is now the most important resident, and by god, if you do not play by its rules, you are not going to have a good time.

edited 1/30/22

Covid-19 is intrinsic to Animal Crossing: New Horizon's profile. I have a lot of games I played during this scary time in our lives, but it's AC: NH that defines it; merely days after it dropped, my state went into lockdown. At that point, my family and I were quarantined to try and remain safe in the hopes of weathering out the pandemic. When I think back to those first few months of lockdown, I think of how much of a comfort waking up to play on my island was. I would play for quite literally hours at a time, though I only recently clocked in with nearly 400 hours of gameplay.

All that said, I don't think that this was a game meant to be played for an upwards of 400 hours in less than two years. That might not seem like a lot, but the majority of my playtime these days is firmly settled on maybe an hour a day⁠— when I remember to play, that is.

This game is often, understandably, compared to AC: New Leaf. There's an important piece of that discussion that I feel is often ignored: NL introduced the Dream Suite, which allowed players to create a dream address for their towns they could then share online. This let other players visit their towns without the mayor needing to allow them entry. It essentially was like exploring a cloud backup of a town, and some players got extremely creative with this, giving their towns themes and stories for dream visitors to uncover as they explored. An example of this would be the infamous Aika village. Additionally, the Able sisters' shop had a machine in it where players could make custom designs that they could upload to the internet. Other players could then download it through an assigned QR code that would be punched into the same machine in their game. Players could use this design to customize their town or their character. The 3DS’' touch screen changed the landscape for customization in Animal Crossing. While there was a lot to do in NL, the customization aspect was probably what I most remember and arguably what kept NL puttering along until the big "Welcome Amiibo" update. I think NH is the continuation of that, with perhaps the biggest proof being how quickly Luna was introduced into the game. However, in order to focus on aesthetics, the game has been stripped down to the bare essentials, with Nintendo arguably putting out an incomplete game.

This is a YMMV thing, I suppose. I see people creating in depth, stunning islands, and my immediate first thought when I spot them is that I am frankly not playing the same game as them. In the hands of someone with more creativity than me, I can see how this game could be a personal favorite. Most of the focus has been shifted to online play, trading, and island customization. I've seen "playable islands," which is stuff like island wide mazes, something that Nintendo has gotten in on themselves.

One of the biggest reveals leading up to the release of New Horizons was that your island was fully customizable. You could create your own cliffs, rivers, waterfalls, and there were a number of different customization options for bridges and inclines. DIY’d furniture could be customized, refreshed with a new coat of paint in the absence of Reese and Cyrus’ shop. These two factors, combined with how fast Luna was implemented, seem to indicate that aesthetics were the driving force of development in New Horizons. This would be fine, except there’s a number of problems that become even more strained and obvious the longer they go unaddressed.

Firstly, I would be remiss to not mention Nook Miles. A new addition to Animal Crossing, Nook Miles are a new in-game currency that you could use to purchase different items through a curated catalogue hosted by Nook Industries. You can purchase items, DIYs and Nook Mile Tickets with Nook Miles, but all of these come with a caveat. This title, more than previous titles, has had it’s online play stressed again and again for better or worse. In your Nook Miles shop, you’ll find a street light. Mine is brown, personally, but yours might be a different color; white, maybe. You will only be able to purchase that color from your Nook Miles shop— if either of us ever want a different color street lamp, we will need to get it from a second party every single time we want one. This is the same for any item for sale on the NM shop: Trading is a necessity if you want to focus on the aesthetic of your island, something that is encouraged by the game’s design.

Design surrounding customization and aesthetic in this game seem to be carefully chosen to encourage players to, well, play. Seasonal DIYs drop from balloons. You can only get certain DIYs from completing tasks— if you want the Mermaid series back, you need to hunt for scallops in the Summer so Pascal can pop up and ask you to trade your new scallop for a DIY. Talking to villagers during October can net you some Spooky DIYs. If you notice I keep mentioning DIYs, it’s because New Horizons launched with a limited selection of furniture. The Rococo line is gone, as are a number of others. They could be reintroduced at a later date, but I have to wonder if it’s too little at this point. There are new furniture sets in New Horizons, however: The wedding furniture can only be obtained by engaging in a seasonal daily minigame that loses all its charm the longer you play. The Sanrio furniture line was locked to Amiibo cards that sold out immediately, so your only hope is trading for the items, or buying knock offs of the cards online. Both options technically cost real world money— you need an online membership to trade, after all. I’ve already paid for the game, so tacking on $5 inclements to get more furniture to decorate my island when that’s what was promoted feels… well, not very consumer friendly.

With the mention of real world money and the previous mention of Nook Miles, you might be wondering how strong the similarity between a mobile Animal Crossing and New Horizons is. In talking about New Horizons, I can’t not also talk about Pocket Camp, the mobile version of Animal Crossing that comically enough has more content in it than New Horizons presently does. Part of this is the paywall— you purchase items to decorate your campsite with, but there’s also more fruit to collect in Pocket Camp, more incentive to catch fish and bugs in order to work up to those F2P options. More crossovers, collabs, more promotions; the list is exhaustive. New Horizons, in comparison, feels bare. Comparing the two feels dirty, because a mobile game functions and plans differently from a console game. When I need to pay extra money monthly to fully experience the game as intended, though, I have to wonder if New Horizons is all that different. If you’re still wondering: I wouldn’t say New Horizons has much in common with Pocket Camp beyond Nintendo’s clear greed and anti-consumer fundamentals, but this isn’t new to Nintendo. It’s simply more frustrating to see laid out in plain text.

One of the biggest misses in New Horizons is just how little time it actually spends getting you to play. There’s a severe lack of minigames, and significantly less traveling visitors to your island. Katrina is missing, and famously Brewster, but Kapp’n is nowhere to be seen either, even though there’s a dock on the beach. All three of these NPCs are associated with minigames or game mechanics, which New Horizons desperately needs. For what it’s worth, datamines consistently show that Brewster is slowly being implemented, and Katrina has been spotted on the Nintendo Online app. The dock has been in game from launch. With any luck, at least this trio might be seen in forthcoming updates, but for now, New Horizons is mostly menus and text.

Speaking of text, you read a lot of it in New Horizons.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a not-insignificant amount of my time in the game is spent doing just that simply due to menus. Since launch, a vocal part of the playerbase has been asking Nintendo to work on bulk crafting options simply because players will often do just that: craft in bulk. As an example, a recommended strategy for the fish and bug tournaments is to craft a multitude of fishing poles and nets beforehand. You go through the same set of menus every time you craft anything, and I can’t imagine that the development team did not expect players to craft in bulk at some point in designing the game— but the crafting menus are not nearly as bad as Orville’s menus. If you want to fly to another island, you’ll need to run down to the airport and talk to Orville, which kicks up a comical amount of menus. Menus lead to menus lead to menus in New Horizons. I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t know if villager hunting was a strategy the devteam planned on players engaging with, but they surely expected us to go to Mystery Islands back to back, right? I’m no longer hurting for resources in New Horizons. I don’t need more fruit or flowers or weeds or trees, so my only reason to go to these islands is to get a lucky roll or find a new villager. In the latter case, I spend much less time on the Mystery Island than in the menus upon menus. It’s odd.

Odd choices are a bound in New Horizons— updates are a Problem depending on who you talk to, but I find a lot of odd decisions are made within them. The aforementioned Nook Miles can also be obtained by visiting the terminal within Resident Services, which is fine because prior to an update where the terminal could now be accessed through your in-game phone, you could only check your new daily set of items for sale by visiting it. Now, you have to walk into the Resident Services, open the menu to get the Nook Miles, and if you’re like me, you already checked the shop, so you just leave.

Another odd decision is that the game functions on a grid. Basically, each part of your island is designed in squares. This means that some items will never be centered, and it makes terraforming— again, one of the Big Promotional Things— a bigger chore than you expect. I understand it fundamentally, but it feels like a midway point where something just doesn’t quite fit. It’s almost there, but it feels clunky and difficult more often than not. Maybe I’m just not good at it.

Additionally, while you can have multiple characters on the island, you can only have one island per console. This is an odd choice for a game where the demographic seems to be families; my younger siblings should be allowed to have their own islands on my Switch. For a game so focused on customization, I don't see why I can't have multiple islands or save datas. Then again, you have to purchase a memory card for your switch in order to have more than a handful of games on it, so perhaps it is simply a memory issue. Regardless, it is a feature I feel is necessary for games like this.

I’ve seen a lot of conversation surrounding the repetitive dialogue in the game, and I will be frank: There is a lot of it. Villagers repeat things, there’s a fair few glitches like villagers “blue screening” and we all had to put up with Raymond in a maid dress. That said, I can’t say it’s better or even worse than New Leaf. I booted up New Leaf because I remembered it very fondly, but after playing around in it for a while, I realized I had run into the same dialogue with my villagers a few times. In my experience, they’re just as lacking as before, but the bare bones gameplay has resulted in this being even more prominent than before. One thing I do miss is being invited over to villager houses at certain times and days, but missing that had no consequence in New Leaf. To be honest, I kind of miss the mean villagers from the Gamecube game. Go figure, right? I want the stress-free game to be more stressful.

This is a lot of text, and you might think I hate New Horizons. To be honest, though, I really don’t I didn’t sink 400 hours of my time into it because I had nothing to do. I got bored of it and moved onto other games: I’ve only played New Horizons in the Spring and Summer, because that’s when I get the Animal Crossing Itch. When I get back to the game, I do spend hours in it. The customization aspect of the game does hit certain points for me, and I have worked a lot on my island. My house is paid off, and nearly all decorated. I don’t open up the game out of spite— I legitimately enjoy it for a half hour or so, and then I’m done. That’s probably the intention of this game, now, but I can’t help but think about how I wish I had more to do in it. How the implication of more is in every corner of my island getaway.

The closed off upper level of Nook’s Cranny, the two empty walls on either side of the top level of the museum, the dock where Kapp’n could park his boat and wait for me to hop on in. The secret beach was eventually revealed to be where Redd docks his boat, and there’s still areas on my island where another building or two could fit. It’s like New Horizons has potential, but it doesn’t know when or how to unlock it. Maybe the problem is me though— maybe I’m looking for something exciting in my getaway package now that it’s started to feel like real life: Trapped in the same routine with no way out, doing my silly little tasks, while I hope for something to shake it up.

Anyway I think New Horizons is not a very good game

ETA: my opinion of 2.0 is reflected in how i took away half a star for it

It's always nighttime on my island. It's also almost always raining.

Each day, first thing, Tom Nook stands alone, in the dark, in the rain, and tells me that nothing newsworthy has happened on my island.

The raccoons want to open a store. Doing so requires 30 iron nuggets. There are 3 rocks on my island. Each day I log in, do a little circuit and whack each rock with an axe 6 times. 1 or 2 iron nuggets pop out. I dutifully gather them. It takes days of this to collect enough iron to open a store.

The store is built. I learn that the store is closed at night. I've never seen the interior.

There are 5 of us standing around outside a locked business, in the dark, in the rain. They call it a ceremony. They ask me to say something. I say "Woooooo." They ask me to take a picture, which I do. The picture is too dark to see anything.

I really wasn't expecting Animal Crossing to involve so much existential dread.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a game for content creators, stars and influencers.

It lacks of content and many updates just add stuff that should’ve been in the game from the start and that was already in New Leaf.

The NPCs have much less text lines and personalities than in prior titles and thus, feel absolutely soulless.

It is very polished and beautiful, though.

Almost a year after this game was released, I think this might be the most high-profile assassination of a beloved Nintendo IP since Skyward Sword's with Zelda. You could argue for some of the bullshit Metroid or Star Fox has gotten since then, but I didn't play those because it was too obvious. This one took a while to really get there, catalyzed only by the constant exposure to it since the pandemic started.

The issues I levied against it the first time have either been kept around or alleviated in some way, but the clear sign that my initial hunch was correct of this being a corpse of an Animal Crossing game is how atonal it ends up being? This game is the polar opposite of relaxing to me, it's like being told to Smile While You Work by your boss. By keeping these completely invisible marks of quality around while insisting that The World Is Yours (which, frankly, I don't want it to be) we have arrived at a game that lacks purpose but is also too weak for you to make one for yourself. So, if you're like me, you scramble to find anything worth doing.

And like, whatever, Animal Crossing games can and do eventually feel lifeless by the end of your time with them - what makes this game different? Well, being CONSTANTLY bombarded with screenshots and videos and anecdotes on social media about how this game has the power to connect people in ways only the masters at Nintendo could do... it certainly doesn't help. It was a struggle to care, but people's insistence that everything was fine minus some pesky QoL issues really drove it downwards for me. Though the obvious bends towards modern mobile/F2P design don't help this game's case, it doesn't get substantially better if you can keep your tools forever. It doesn't if you are able to buy multiple things from the catalog every day. What it needs is a fucking pulse.

My first time with Animal Crossing was enjoyable but it didn't keep me hooked for more than a few months (which is still pretty good). Being able to build your own island can be addicting especially with the need to earn more bells.

I just wish Nintendo didn't make really arbitrary decisions like 1 island per console / having you confirm every little action. Also I hate how there isn't a better way to place buildings other than guessing. All smaller things but they build up.

Otherwise the game looks great, sounds great, and is a pretty relaxing time sink.

i played this during lockdown, from hours to days, days to weeks and weeks to months until lock down ended and we could all walk outside and then i totally forgot about it. i think about all that time wasted on this game; was i enjoying it or just distracting myself?

i always think to myself, maybe I should get back to playing this game... i spent so much time on it after all and it would be a waste not to complete my island that i had been working on for so long, but the dread of min-maxing my revenue to pay off my debts and hope that the shop provides me with something i can use to decorate my island and to collect all the fish before the season ends and to make sure i water all my flowers and pluck all the weeds and buy all the items so i can save it in my catalogue and to make sure i talk to my villagers everyday and... well the list goes on. this is just busy work to keep me distracted from... um enjoying the game? but is it me that's the issue? maybe i should learn to have fun with this game. but then you realise everything is stuck behind your revenue so you're back at square one.

is this game fun? what does this game even mean to me? who thought doing god damn chores was fun in the first place? this game made me really think about what people enjoy in gaming, and this is one of those anomalies that i never quite understood. this game quite literally distracts you from the real life just so you can do more unnecessary distractions in game. imagine having to earn you dopamine in a game, haha couldn't be me.

i mean lets be real, what else are you to do during lock down anyways? this was released at the perfect time and i was at the perfect age to enjoy it. escapism into a world that is just as stressful as our own, but i was the one creating this stress on myself. maybe that was the point of this game, that life is about consistency and dredging through the mundane in life and hoping to find gold or a little semblance of happiness at the end of the tunnel.

who am i kidding, it looks cute and has cute characters and got baited into thinking this would be a fun game and continued with it out of obligation. hook, line and sinker. nobody enjoys this game, surely? they only think they do lol

I grew up with Animal Crossing. I remember checking out the original Gamecube game from my local Hollywood Video. I fell in love almost instantly. There was something about the laid-back vibe of the game, along with its real-world clock, that made it feel more absorbing and inviting than games like The Sims. I had a house all to myself and could decorate it any way that I liked. I could hang out with my quirky animal neighbors, do favors for them or get painfully frustrated as they yanked my favorite item straight out of my inventory. I would fish all day long looking for that elusive coelacanth, dig up fossils and have no idea what to do with them, and plug in my GBA to have Kapp'n take me to my little private island, all while humming along to the wonderful hourly tunes. Nook never came by to collect, so I could do whatever I wanted all day until I got tired of it, and I would come back the next day to see what was new. To my mind, then, the game seemed like it would truly never end - there was always another surprise waiting for me, and the memories I made playing it have stuck with me ever since.

Of course, that was in the mind of a kid who had a ton of other things to hold his attention. As an adult, going back to play it, it definitely still has charm - but by modern standards, it's somewhat lacking in content. Its sequels have found ways to remedy that over the years, and I've been an ardent fan of Animal Crossing the whole way, happily picking up the next entry in my favorite series of cozy little time-killers. But for all of the hours I've put into them, I can't say I've ever felt quite the same pull from Wild World, City Folk, or New Leaf that I did from that Gamecube original. It felt like such a fresh concept, then, and while I'm sure I can at least partly attribute the comfort I feel playing the newer titles to the consistency the games provide, I also feel that none of them have done too much to innovate and really elevate the concepts that made them such a success in the first place.

New Leaf came the closest, of course; it finally gave us the opportunity to make our town feel like our own, instead of just our homesteads. Being able to place and move structures, as well as being able to customize other minutiae of our daily lives, allowed us to express our unique tastes in ways that previous games just hadn't been capable of. When the Wii U was released, there was much dreaming of what a properly next-gen Animal Crossing could look like, built on the foundation set by New Leaf. Needless to say, that never happened.

But it was still all but inevitable that Nintendo would release a new game eventually, and I was just as stoked as I think the rest of us were when they finally announced that a new entry would be coming to Switch. It took us a long time to get there - just about eight years! - and when they first showed it off, I felt that the wait might have been entirely justified. The previews showed that we could not only craft and customize items all on our own, but that we could also shape the very layout of our town. We would be able to customize just about every aspect of our new island life, and that alone gave my imagination plenty to work with, wondering what we'd be capable of once we finally had the game in our hands.

And then the game came out. And while it was definitely fun for a bit, things just felt... Off. What was in the box at day one didn't feel like the end result of seven years of development. It felt like more of an experiment. It felt like a collection of fun concepts that just didn't go far enough, and it came at the expense of a lot of things I had come to expect from Animal Crossing.

There were a lot of series mainstays or unique features that were just completely passed over, ostensibly so they could be included in an update down the line. Things like the Dream Suite, more in-depth item customization, home exterior designs, additional standalone shops beyond the Nooklings and Abel Sisters - even series mainstays like The Roost, and iconic items and furniture sets - wouldn't be included until well past release, some even taking well over a year to be added. And even then, there are still plenty of things missing, with characters like Digby, Shrunk, Resetti, Phineas and more being absent. Their contributions as NPCs have either been omitted entirely or rolled into other character's services, and have been limited to cameo appearances, which can lead to the game feeling weirdly hollow in spite of all that's been added.

Even so, the game does have enough content to hold one's attention for a while. Terraforming does indeed let you do some very impressive things with your island, and constantly unlocking new crafting recipes is a good way to nudge you into playing each day and spending time collecting materials.
But for every one thing they've added that makes me happy, it seems there's another thing - usually lurking just underneath - that makes me cock my head and wonder how it is they let the game out the door in the state it's in. New Horizons is just chock full of these "why" moments:

- Why is the introductory tutorial period so long? The game seems to set itself up as a sort of "survival"-focused game, having you collect resources and develop a livable space to entice villagers to live on your island. However, as soon as Resident Services is built, this all pretty much goes out the window in service to a more traditional Animal Crossing experience. Even if it was just a creative framing device used to introduce you to some of the new mechanics, there's no reason why the player shouldn't be able to set the pace for it, especially since it's completely unskippable. It feels like blatant padding, requiring at minimum a full real-life week before you can begin to partake in the bigger advertised features, such as...

- Terraforming. Why was the system made so tedious? We already have a very effective interface for decorating buildings that was a huge improvement over the past games. Why was this utility not extended to terraforming? Why do I need to restructure things one tile at a time, and why can I only move one building per day and only into vacant spaces? Why can't I move Resident Services, the airport, or features like docks at all? Why can't I just set up a bunch of changes through another interface and have them take place the next day for a cost? It would be a great Bell sink and wouldn't break the "play every day" concept they're trying to adhere to. As it stands, I'm hesitant to ever make large changes to my island because of how much time I know I'll have to invest just to get the ground-level work done.

- Why is cooking so one-note? As it stands, crops serve as decoration and as a renewable source of income, which is fine. The meals you make can also be used as decoration or for profit. They can be eaten to fill your stamina more effectively than singular food items, which might be helpful for people doing heavy remodeling on their island. Beyond that, there really isn't an incentive to use the system - it's just another form of crafting, and all of the recipes offer virtually the same benefits no matter how easy or difficult they are to make. Why couldn't the recipes have unique effects that would give you a reason to try a bunch of different ones? Foods that make you run or swim faster, foods that attract or repel certain critters, foods that make you luckier or make it easier to befriend villagers. They could even have just-for-fun effects that don't influence gameplay directly, like the mushrooms that would make you temporarily grow in size in New Leaf.

- Why is multiplayer such a pain to engage with? Does there need to be an overly long cutscene each time a player joins or leaves? Why does one person losing connection drop the whole session? Is there anything about New Horizons that makes drop-in-drop-out multiplayer technically unfeasible? Compared to New Leaf, there are even less reasons to participate in multiplayer, as there are no cooperative minigames, and you can't move furniture or terraform which means collaborating together with friends on decorating an island is also impossible.

- Why can I only craft items one at a time, even consumable items? Why can I only purchase Nook Miles tickets one at a time, and why can I only purchase them at Resident Services when it would make much more sense to be able to purchase them at the airport? Why can't I purchase clothing directly from the Abels without having to deal with all the weird and arbitrary restrictions? There are so many basic quality of life concepts that other games have been doing for years, but New Horizon's dev team seems utterly ignorant of them.

- And just a personal peeve: Ignoring the typical Animal Crossing trope of being tasked with doing favors between villagers that might be ten feet away from one another, why do I still need to go on a manhunt to find the one that I'm looking for? Everybody on the island has a phone. Why can't I just call them and ask them to come meet me? Better yet, why can't they just call each other?

If I was being less than gracious, I could easily chalk a lot of the issues the game has to Nintendo just wanting to stretch the content in the game as thin as possible. But even if I try to be more generous, it doesn't do much to change the fact that these issues pepper the whole of New Horizons to the point that they become unavoidable. This is just a handful of gripes I had myself, but other people have also had plenty of concerns that are well-documented online. Players had even taken to showcasing their desired changes in very well-made update concept videos on Youtube. A ton of great suggestions were made, and a while a lot of them were quite novel, plenty more seemed like absolute no-brainers. But with Nintendo announcing that 2.0 would be the last major update, paid or free, and so many basic QoL ideas being left on the table - to say nothing of the features from past games that are still absent - it seems that a lot of potential improvements have been dropped squarely in "the next game will have it" territory. And that's very sobering, because it took quite a while for New Horizons to land, and all signs point to the next entry not coming out until Nintendo's next big hardware release is well underway. Even if 2.0 did add a lot, I really don't feel that New Horizons is the complete package, and that feeling is somewhat exacerbated by a lot of the better additions being locked behind paid DLC. I won't pretend like Nintendo effectively washing their hands of the game didn't sting a little.

However, my biggest problem with the game is one that has frankly plagued the franchise for a very long time. The "Animal" aspect of Animal Crossing has remained woefully underdeveloped as the years have gone by. Promotional materials for these games always make a point of highlighting the 400+ "unique" villagers you can befriend, which at face value does seem like a major selling point. The problem is, though, that while there may be over 400 unique designs for villagers, there's actually only eight characters amongst them, and before New Leaf there were just six. While Hopkins and Sherb might be of two different species, have different models and textures, different birthdays and nebulously meaningful preferences in furniture and clothing, they still both possess the "lazy" personality - that is to say they are the same character. They share from the same pool of dialogue and interact with the player, other villagers, and the world around them in more or less the same way. You can have all of the characters you want in a game, but when there are only eight unique "types" of character, it could be literally thousands and it ultimately wouldn't make a difference. I understand that actually coming up with unique pools of dynamic dialogue for even just dozens of characters that you're expected to interact with for months on end would be a major undertaking for any developer, but having that diversity is so much more important in a game like Animal Crossing than it would be in just about any other genre shy of an RPG. You will try to build relationships with these characters before inevitably coming to the conclusion that not only is the number of surprises they have in store for you remarkably small, but you running into that wall was all but inevitable - the maximum villager count of 10 means you're going to have a duplicate at some point. Even the eight types that do exist feel very flat, as they mostly rely on very one-dimensional character traits to convey their personalities, and there isn't any character development to speak of. A villager that you've known for five minutes interacts with you almost exactly the same way as one you've known for two years. Considering that your main means of interacting with your villagers amounts to hammering through dialogue, giving them gifts, sending them letters (which is itself deemphasized compared to past games due to the lack of purchasable stationary) and visiting their house - it all makes the overall experience feel very artificial. All of these things were more excusable two decades ago, but this is easily the aspect of Animal Crossing that has been given the least attention as the years have gone by. New Horizons has a lot of charm, but it's the systems surrounding the game that give you a reason to keep playing, not the characters that populate it. There are a lot of flaws in either case, and I hope that the devs will double down on fleshing at least one out for the inevitable sequel. For my money, though, they would benefit a great deal if they found a way to breathe some new life into the social sim aspects.

I can't say in good faith that I didn't enjoy my time with New Horizons. They introduced a lot of good ideas to the series and I definitely had a lot of fun exploring them, but in the end, I couldn't help but be more cognizant of all the things that weren't there compared to what was. At release, it felt a bit lackluster compared to its handheld predecessor, which was already disconcerting. But I held on knowing that more would come with time, and I picked my Switch back up each time an update rolled out. Even still, it never took long for the game to lose my attention again, and now that it's apparently as complete as it will ever be, I'm still left wanting. I grew up with Animal Crossing, but it feels like it still has a lot of growing up left to do, itself. I hope that Nintendo will really take player feedback to heart going forward and try to recapture that magic that made me eager to get up every morning and power on my Gamecube. And for that matter, I hope that magic is included in the game itself, and not given to me piecemeal over the course of a year after I've already purchased it. New Horizons isn't a bad game - just one that deserved to be much, much better than it is.

New Horizons helped keep a sense of normality when the world went crazy four years ago, and coming back to it now on a different platform is like being sent back in time before my dad had the cheek to get sick and pass away. New Horizons doesn't have the same nostalgia factor as Wild World or even New Leaf for me - but my God I can smell our garden in April 2020, I can hear Tiger King on in the background, I can't see my friends but I can tend to a real garden and a virtual island at the same time.

New Horizons is laden with a crafting system that sort of outstays its welcome, an apparent step back in villager interaction where you can start seeing repeating dialogue far quicker than previous entries, and an aggravating Nintendo sense of not being allowed to take things at the pace you WANT to take them. I should be allowed to skip the ridiculously lengthy tutorial section of the game if I previously had a save file on the system. This tutorial legitimately takes about five real life days to complete. I understand the concept of a game you pick up and play for just a bit at a time, but this is a full priced release, not a mobile game.

There is not enough content to justify the absolutely glacial progression and gameplay, especially compared to the offerings from Pocket Camp, a free mobile game. Even simple actions take a small animation to get through and often text that you've read dozens of times before, leading to mashing buttons to skip through them. This is sort of comparable to something like Red Dead Redemption 2's lengthy skinning, looting and cleaning animations - but at least in RDR2 there's something intricate and detailed to look at, while ACNH has a far simpler art style.

All of that in mind, though - there's such a genuine charm and addictiveness to New Horizons that I can't help but really enjoy it, flaws and all. Musically it's bouncy and memorable, the graphics are lovely to look at and the weird mix of realistic bugs and fish contrasted against the cartoony environments and characters works surprisingly well. Once you get out of that first week and the game opens up? It's good. It's very good. Not quite great, but I'm enjoying it nevertheless.

NOT GOOD!!! Game lacked content on release, like, way too much content. A lot of content was added after the initial release, but to me that is unacceptable since other titles have released beforehand without missing pieces.

This game also lacks personality! Villagers are boring, which is an automatic let down for people who played the past games.

You are better off playing New Leaf and I know I'm not the only one to come to this conclusion. Unless you really enjoy terraforming and complete island customization, avoid this game and pick up the past titles. New Leaf and the original completely clear this mid.

Good:
+It's Animal Crossing. It's hard to explain exactly what makes Animal Crossing fun in words because it sounds boring on paper. But it's fun, okay?
+The new home editor mode makes customising your house so much easier and more fluid.
+The ability to fully customise your island really helps bring out your creative side.
+There's some really neat visuals, like the wardrobe screen when changing clothes.
+The museum looks beautiful now
+Villagers seem more alive and have more random actions they do around the island

Cons:
-There are some massive quality of life improvements that this game lacks.
-For some reason you have to donate bugs/fish/fossils 1 by 1 during start of game until the museum opens up.
-Can’t craft multiple items at once.
-Breakable tools. Seriously this isn't just the lack of a quality of life thing, it's something they specifically made worse in this entry compared to older ones.
-I've never been a fan of AC's turnip system. Feels like a broken mechanic that just allows you to get insane profit with no effort due to the fact you can buy and sell from ANY island. Due to timezones (or even just time skipping) if you find a player who has a high turnip selling price, while your island has them to purchase, you can literally just make back and forth trips for infinite money.
-For some reason the little indication of what items are customisable is only present at certain times, like in the crafting menu. It isn't present in the inventory or your house storage, so I had to make multiple trips and pocket changes switching items in and out just to find out what I could customise. The fact that a little icon DOES exist in some places just makes it more noticeable that it's missing from other places.
-Trying to set up to travel anywhere, be it a friends island or nook miles island, takes way too long. Supposedly it's just a fancy loading screen, but in that case my complaint is the loading times in this game are atrocious.
-The shop closes at 10pm and they have a little box outside that let's you sell for 80% of their original price...and you only get the money the next day. Why would I ever sell things for less price if I could just keep them in my storage and sell them for full price the next day? If you got the money straight away the 80% would make sense, but there's no logical reason to use it as it is now.
-Can’t build and demolish bridges/inclines at the same time. For example I wanted to destroy the wooden bridge you essentially make as a tutorial and replace it with a better one, but it turns out demolishing an item not only takes a day, but you can't even build a new thing at the same time, so it took 3 days for me to finally get a single bridge (1 day for the bridge to be removed, 1 day to set up the new bridge location and 1 day for it to actually be built)
-The house editing mode is unavailable outside, meaning you still have to place items the old fashion way which can be very imprecise and finicky.

Notes:
•Despite that huge list of cons I still rated it fairly highly... Like I said, Animal Crossing is a hard game to really sell to someone.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons sucks. I put 300+ hours into it and I'm trying to figure out why exactly. I remember eagerly anticipating its release but I may have longed for the nostalgia of New Leaf more than the desire to play this recent title. Admittedly, I had 12-15 hour binges with this game and enjoyed it for a short season. Clearly the music is enticing and its sound effects are satisfying. That's something it gets right. But the game lacks longevity, depth, and is really not worth the hassle. In addition, it was released as the pandemic was starting in early 2020, so entertainment standards were tossed out the window.

I despise how long it takes to terraform every single tile with no way to speed things up. I hate the infinite number of possibilities and the number of times I've destroyed everything to start from scratch from being unsatisfied. Some sims feel rewarding, and the limitless possibilities can feel worthwhile...this game just doesn't do it for me. Really lame how the DLC and second island were released long after everyone already had their islands completed (thus forcing people to start over or majorly rethink their island blueprints). I loathe how items unlock at random. For example, I spent months trying to get jail bars. I time skipped through hundreds of individual days to find it but to no avail. This is truly a slog after a while.

I'm not sure if I'll ever play ACNH again because I found it much more frustrating than relaxing. Honestly, I have no desire to experience the DLC either. Have not turned on the game since long before the DLC was released.