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.

Iwata’s dead, Shiggy’s checked out, and there’s no one to tell Aonuma no.

What the fuck is this.

I really shouldn’t be surprised, but I still am. This is the same game. It's the same people who made Breath of the Wild. I loved the first game, but still didn’t pay attention to the hype cycle of this one at all. I guess all the paraphernaleous cultural impact still seeped in somehow.

Remember when people thought there’d be playable Zelda? Fucking lol.

This review is only based on the five (5!) hours it took to get the paraglider, and I gotta say, it only kept making me appreciate the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild more. The thematic cohesion. The mystery. The framing of how that whole game was going to work in miniature. What my abilities would be, what my relationship to game information would be like, what kinds of emotions I could expect to experience playing that game.

Maybe Tears of the Kingdom is a fine game. Maybe it is every bit as fun to exist in as Breath of the Wild, in theory. But in practice, it won’t be, can’t be. It didn’t start in the wilderness, letting me discover its game essence on my own terms. It started with a prestige-game walking-sim lore dump. A lore dump that ended with a bunch of Hot Anime Nonsense™.

Zelda and Link confronting mummy Ganon was like walking into the mid-season finale of a show that’s already on its second or third season. Except I’ve already played the previous season, and that context did not help me at all! Ganon’s no longer a miasma, but a dude with a voice? And there’s a goat dragon that’s Zelda’s great-great-grand-furry? And the Master Sword’s just useless?

Here’s my beef. All of this is great for trailers and generating “hype” because “hype” is fueled on speculation and curiosity. But the elements that generate hype are not the same as the elements that fuel a sincere emotional connection with a character, story, or world. I’m frustrated because Breath of the Wild knew this so well.

The old man on the Great Plateau was mysterious, but allowed to be goofy. He was generous, but mischievous. You could see him in different contexts, learn about him by exploring his house when he wasn’t around. There was a fun little emotional connection built up by being around him. The twist of his true identity, and the further twist of his ultimate fate, made me feel little pings of emotion. Nothing fancy, but he was the tutorial NPC. He primed me to think, “Oh, this is a game and a game world where it’ll be fun to get invested in people.” And he was the perfect segway into telling me what my mission was, what the stakes were, and why I, the player, should care.

The goat dragon great-great-grand-furry is none of this. We know he’s dead when we first meet him. His dialog makes no sense. There are a ton of slave robots on his little island that he comments with surprise are still running. Did he not program them? Can he not de-program them? Am I supposed to feel something about how he made a race of robot slaves? Are they sentient? I would have rather had signs in the ground Super Mario Style telling me all the tutorial things I needed to know. Because it feels weird for a robot to jovially say “Hey, there are some robots that’ll try to kill you, so, like, don’t feel bad about killing them. Here are some combat tips for killing them!”

And then his sequence at the end of his tutorial level practically screamed to me, “Hey, remember when you felt something at the end of your time with the Old Man in Breath of the Wild? We’re doing the same thing here! Don’t you feel something? Don’t you remember loving that?” And like yeah, I do remember that. And now I’m mad you’re trying to copy your own damn homework without understanding why it worked the first time. I have not built up a relationship with great-great-grand-furry goat dragon. I do not know why he is chill with Zelda. Honestly, all the statues with him and Zelda holding hands at the end of every shrine is weirding me out! Is Link a cuck now?

I want to say this is all superficial, but it’s really not, because everything about my time with Tears of the Kingdom so far felt like it was being led around by the tail. This is a re-skin of Breath of the Wild, but it doesn’t even have the decency to be honest with me. If we’re gonna have shrines, and they’re gonna function exactly the same way, why did you go through the bother of giving them new, thematically incoherent designs. Why do the upgrade orbs need new names, new lore. Changing the shrines’ glowy color from blue/orange to green is a downgrade, actually! Those other colors were a lot easier to see at a distance in a game world that has lots of green!

Jumping ahead of myself for a moment, I knew I was done when I unlocked the first new Shiekah Tower. (You can’t even call them Sheikah Towers anymore, these days!) The emergence of the Sheikah Towers in Breath of the Wild was iconic, cinematic, promising adventure in a changing world. The equivalent cutscene in Tears of the Kingdom felt like getting a homework assignment. Hey, someone you know has already explored the world, had time to build fantastic structures in every corner, and just needs a cable guy to come by and make sure the wiring is up to code! You know, that person who was a 100-year old loli in the last game! Well, now she’s been aged up to guilt-free fuckable waifu status! And she’s super plot relevant! You’ll get to talk to her more than Zelda over the course of the game, probably!

Seriously, that loli was my least favorite part of Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom felt it important to put her loli portrait on her encyclopedia page?? When she will never look like that in this game??? She has the gall to rename Zelda’s magic iPad after herself! I was thinking about her (and taking internal bets as to whether she’d be a waifu or had somehow de-aged even more) hours before I saw her.

ANYWAY. None of what I said so far really matters more than the gameplay. And a Great Plateau 2 this was not.

I was so disappointed with how linear this was. In theory, I understand the concept that led to it existing the way it does. Tears of the Kingdom is a Lego game. It purposefully had sections of little Lego kits structured in a way where pieces from one would not mix with pieces of another and confuse people who have never touched Legos before. But giving kids Lego kits can change the way they interact with Legos. Hell, I remember I thought it was sacrilege when my sisters disassembled my Bionicle to make their own Voltron-esque monstrosities. But to them, who had not, could not, would not read the instructions, their style of play was more intuitive, more pure than mine.

Fundamentally, Tears of the Kingdom was not encouraging me to think for myself, to become resourceful, to seek my own path through things. It was priming me to expect that for any task that needed to be accomplished, the tools and materials would be provided for me. And without the spark of original creativity, putting the Lego pieces together was the dull monotony of fulfilling someone else’s factory work blueprint.

When I saw the jumble of lumber next to a korok in an adorable backpack, I immediately mentally put together what needed to be done, and thought, “What kind of Nintendo Labo bullshit is this?” The tediousness of rotating wood, sticking it to a hook, waiting for the korok to go down the slide - this was minutes of gameplay execution from the seconds of intuition I had of what the game wanted from me. And the reward was a measly two gold turds. I felt like I deserved five.

I feel like Aonuma has gone off the deep end. He’s spent so long in this game engine that he’s forgotten what made the original Breath of the Wild experience so special. He’s made a game for speedrunners without designing a game for the common folk first. In Breath of the Wild, the myriad systems, the freedom of choice, the hidden depth of the game’s chemistry and physics mechanics - all of those were introduced slowly in juxtaposition to a Link who had nothing but a shirt and a stick to his name. Everything felt special because the game beat you down and dead early on to make you appreciate and critically examine anything that could provide the slightest advantage to survival.

In Tears of the Kingdom, you gain the ability to Ascend through ceilings, (without stamina cost!!!), before you get the option to increase your stamina. Before you have even found anywhere worth climbing, any heights out of reach. There is nothing to instill that feeling of “I can’t climb there now, but some day, I will!” This is so wild to me. That emotion will never blossom when you’re given a cheat code at Level 1. It will cause people to look for places they can exploit their cheat code instead of… engaging with what was the entire foundation of the freedom of exploration in the first game!

Cannot overstate how much I felt something thematically crack inside of me when Tears of the Kingdom did not even suggest the possibility that I could upgrade my stamina wheel with my first blessing, locking me into more health. For a cutscene.

For a god-awful cutscene where Zelda fucks off before we chase down some NPCs to chase down some other NPCs to watch her fuck off again.

Does this all sound nit-picky? Do I sound insane? I sound petty to myself! But I have to be honest, this game failed to ignite my curiosity! And I gave Breath of the Wild 5 stars! It really does make me wonder how much of a game experience is built on the expectations built by its opening hours. In a way, if the only difference between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is the introduction and framing, that would be a valuable lesson on how important those beginning elements are.

I know that’s not the only difference. Tears of the Kingdom is anime as fuck. It’s tacky as hell. I lost it when Zelda’s magic iPad made the real-world iPad camera shutter sound.

Tears of the Kingdom is not a new game. It’s a jerry-rigged retrofitting of an existing game by an old man who saw Fortnite once since 2017, approved by a company who has no idea what he’s doing or why the old game sold so many millions of copies. Of course they’d be up for a direct sequel asset reuse that sounded vaguely like Minecraft! I’m just disappointed that the same team who showed they were capable of creating such a fully realized thematic throughline of a game were content to corrupt something beautiful just for the sake of convenience.

Maybe Link’s awful haircut and corrupted hand are a perfect visual metaphor for this game’s soul. A bunch of concepts grafted onto something great with no regard for how inelegantly they clash, while also showing a lack of maintenance to keep what came before presentable.

I’m so glad I didn’t pay $70 ($70!) for this game, or else I would have felt obligated to stick around long enough to understand the gacha mechanics enough to get mad at them.

The good news about trying out Solar Ash is that it clicked immediately since it was not afraid to wear its influences on its sleeves: you’ve got skating mechanics inspired by Jet Set Radio, boss fights and designs inspired by Shadow of the Colossus, and a woozy ambient soundtrack alongside gooey and ethereal aesthetics captured in deep space. It’s not hard to decipher Heart Machine’s vision for the game. The bad news about trying out Solar Ash is that being so heavily inspired by two of my favorite games meant that I was both consciously and unconsciously comparing the game in every waking moment of my playthrough, and the cracks in the armor really started to show. Right away, the most obvious issue is the lack of subtlety. The game is so in-your-face with its lore and the overarching details that it fails to leave much room for individual player interpretation. The protagonist Rei is constantly commenting upon everything she comes across, and the audio logs that she stumbles upon where her old crewmates vividly describe the world’s demise don’t leave much up to imagination either. This over-explanation is further compounded by all the jargon thrown into the mix and the exaggerated voice acting, which not only confuses me, but also feels like the authors didn’t really tackle the tone properly; instead of sounding desperate, Rei instead comes off as somewhat angsty to me. The amount of effort put into flaunting all this detail feels quite unwarranted, considering that Shadow of the Colossus was more than happy to let players just linger in their own space and judge for themselves: what happened to “show, don’t tell” guys?

Further invited comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus make it evident to me that despite the reverence of its boss encounters, Solar Ash fails to emulate much of their appeal in any meaningful way. Nothing comes close to the volume swells present in Shadow of the Colossus, because there’s no focused build-up of anticipation when the player is too busy looking for plasma and voidrunner caches alongside traversal puzzles for destroying Anomalies, not to mention Rei’s stream of self-narration breaking up any prolonged moments of silence. More importantly, the boss fights themselves lack any stakes. Shadow of the Colossus emphasizes its sense of scale, as you carefully climb this larger-than-life creature while it desperately flails about, trying to shake you off before you snuff it out by plunging your sword into its vitals. Solar Ash on the other hand, may as well just be a casual Sunday drive through a Mario Kart course; the sigils have been replaced with temporary targets and context-sensitive grapple points, and most of the interaction boils down to holding forward on the joystick and jumping/grappling at the right time. You don’t even need to adjust the camera, because the game will automatically do that for you when you need to shift directions. Say what you want about Shadow of the Colossus’ ballistic camera during the colossi encounters, but it really lent the fights a sense of powerlessness and urgency during this desperate dance of death that Solar Ash lacks. To top this all off, consequences of failure are minimized in the latter; falling off or failing to hit a target in time just sends you back to a close checkpoint to the boss with only one hit point missing, and you can usually grapple right back on the boss to retry the phase within a minute or two. Considering that health boxes are scattered everywhere, you have to actively try to get a game over. It is kind of funny that the final boss fight doesn’t even provide you with a health bar for a potential game over: it’s a mere formality at that point.

The weird thing is, despite how streamlined the boss fights are in Solar Ash, there’s a real lack of polish from strange jank and design decisions elsewhere. Rei’s standard attack combo string is three attacks at a time, but the game likes throwing enemy variations at you that require four hits at a time (either a pair of smaller foes that each take two hits, or a singular medium baddy that takes four hits). The result is that you have to actively linger in the same space to completely finish off most enemies, and combat then noticeably interferes with the general flow of movement. Regarding lack of fluidity, I also have to agree with nex3’s point that it’s surprisingly easy to lose momentum altogether from strange collisions from geometry. The strange momentum physics are reflected elsewhere too, such as when I noticed that jumping from the end of a rail resulted in significantly less momentum conserved than when Rei naturally slid off the rail instead. Finally, it’s kind of a shame that despite how much plasma is thrown at you and emphasized as the main collectible resource (to the point where one of the unlockable suits doubles your rate of plasma collection), there’s only one use for it: restoring a block of your health gauge’s max capacity after losing a cell every time you defeat a boss. In that sense, plasma feels rather superfluous, much like most of the game’s mechanics and features outside of its core traversal.

In spite of all this, I liked Solar Ash enough to complete a save file. I can’t help but feel bummed though, because I should have loved this. I had a good enough time just gliding about the surface of a post-apocalyptic wasteland and zooming about from rail to rail, but there’s so much stuff in-between that doesn’t seem to add anything pertinent to the base structure. I can’t see myself coming back to this for hardcore mode unfortunately, since it just seems like an artificially difficult no-hit playthrough with extra steps, though perhaps I’ll return someday to see if a speedrun challenge feels any better than a standard run. I find myself agreeing with quite a few others here: if practically everything minus the atmospheric visuals/soundtrack and core traversal mechanics were removed, you might actually have one of the most compact yet focused experiences of recent times. As it is now though? It’s just fine. It’ll always be I suppose.

Honestly I just totally enjoy everything about this game. Incredibly addicting from the first mission and the people who play Deep Rock are so chill and helpful. The gameplay and classes really promote teamwork and its just a ton of fun to play with friends or even some randoms.

The 4 classes are all really well made and even though I'm like 100 hours in I don't really have a single class I exclusively play, their loadouts are pretty diverse and offer many different playstyles.

Love it.