Animal Crossing New Horizons

2026-02-15

The Animal Crossing games are near and dear to me. Each of them helped me become closer to those in my life, be that my two younger sisters, or building new friendships once I had left highschool, as well as understand how community dynamics work and how to be a decent human being. New Horizons, the series most recent entry was the most popular to have released so far. It's release in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was stratospheric and it had a significant impact on many people all over the world. Now, 6 years later, Nintendo has released a surprise update, and it seemed like the perfect time to jump back in. I really struggled with the game during the initial release period. The lengthy introduction meant that each day was exciting, but also the comparisons to other people's islands were rampant. Was I playing the game wrong if I hadn't unlocked the Town Hall yet? Why were my friends getting cool items and building things at breakneck speeds while I was stuck gathering materials for my starting shop? I dropped the game rather quickly (probably after a couple of months), and it made me sad. I was excited to jump back in with the new 3.0 update, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn why this game in particular didn't resonate with me as much as the others.

I've seen a similar sentiment across the web from other Animal Crossing likers, but I really wanted to delve into the nitty gritty minutiae that grates against me each time I play. I want to be clear that I don't think New Horizons is a bad game. It is obviously very appealing to heaps of players, even me! I think it's fun to think and talk about videogames and how they make us feel, and this is a great opportunity to talk about a pretty complicated one with some pretty complicated feelings.

Welcome to your island

New Horizons' island setting is an understandable progression for the series, but unfortunately it seems to undermine what I feel to be a key part of Animal Crossing's unique tone. In the previous entry, New Leaf, players eventually gained the role of Mayor (of a town they had only lived in for a few weeks, might I add). This allowed them to create pieces of infrastructure around the town, and meant creativity could be expressed across more than just the player's own house. It went over well, and people still look fondly on this entry today. Previous entries hadn't had anything of the sort, and any decoration outside your home was limited to planting flowers or trees. It made sense for Nintendo to expand on this feature in the subsequent game, it was the key feature lauded in the series most popular entry yet. To give players more capacity for customisation and expression sounds great, and to facilitate this the game is set on a remote island. It makes sense to start the game with a blank slate where each of your contributions makes a big impact, but I think this setting also brought with it some complications which have negatively impacted Animal Crossing New Horizons.

At the start of the game, only a small segment of the island is accessible, rivers and cliff faces keep the rest of the island out of reach. This makes sense, I think, as players could get overwhelmed if they could roam around the full extent of the island, and means that they won't get lost or forget where something is. It also keeps much of the island feeling wild and untamed for a longer portion of the game, which is cool. A problem quickly arises though, when the player is asked to place tents for the two other villagers (who have travelled alongside the player to the island) in the limited central area they have access to. Were you planning to have all your houses in the hills toward the back of the island? Too bad. Unless you're willing to keep the vision alive for multiple real time months and invest a bunch of time and energy, those two houses are probably staying right next to your town hall forever. Same goes for the Museum actually, another island addition that arrives before you can fully traverse the island.

The promise of a village you can tailor to your own tastes and plan with care is quickly dashed. Most of the choices you are forced to make must be met with a compromise that mean your island will never quite be as you like it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but for me, it's worse than just having a randomly generated village to start with, a staple for the Animal Crossing series up to this point. The random placement of a house adds to a villagers characterisation, even if it's purely coincidental. Next to the river? they might like fishing. Placed away from all the other villagers? Maybe they like their privacy. Having to place each and every house contributes to each villager feeling less and less realised (more on this later).

Everyone is on holiday

The island setting itself also inhibits the villager's ability to communicate their character. Every villager on your island is on holiday, taking a break from their normal life as they spend their time in paradise. Their existence is free of struggle, and they can simply sit under trees all day or walk around and sing cute little songs. Unfortunately for us, that means once again we can't project any character traits onto them, and their whole story is simplified down to: "I'm having a great time on the island!". They're not really striving for anything, they don't have any desires or preferences for what life on this island should be like, and they just kind of smile at all the stuff you do and then stretch in the plaza. Like I said, I've got a little more on characterisation later, but just wanted to note that the overall premise of the game is a contributing factor to this issue.

Crafting

Yeah look I don't need to ramble on about crafting in New Horizons too much. The system itself isn't great, and it takes up a large amount of the onboarding for something that you don't really use very frequently in the long term. Something I would like to highlight though, is how the inclusion of crafting had an impact on the item and inventory systems. In order for crafting to work, you need to have materials. Quite a few materials actually, as you usually need multiple of each in order to craft one of your desired pieces. What this means in Animal Crossing though is that there's just heaps of stuff on the ground that you have to pick up. Not only are you harvesting crafting materials from rocks & trees, but also pulling up weeds (which grow out of most of the visible ground on the island to begin with) and catching fish and bugs which are just everywhere. It's extremely common for your inventory (which starts larger than in any other game btw) to fill up in minutes.

Crafting, to me, feels like a product of boardroom game design. "It worked in other games, so why not include it here?" It kinda makes sense for the setting, and solves the issue of there being not a whole lot to do day to day (though if you ask me that's more of a feature...). The side effect though, is that the player is constantly laden with materials, and often only a few away from being able to make the random thing they wanted to make. After building the shop (with 30 of each type of wood, determined at random each time you chop a tree, not great) there aren't really any big projects for you to contribute your materials to (It would have been great to split the cost of a new bridge between bells and materials, for example). I feel like I could waffle on about crafting, but I'll stop here. There's something I believe to be much more sinister that casts a dark shadow over the island in New Horizons.

The NookPhone

At first glance, there's nothing wrong with the NookPhone. It's a simple way to integrate UI elements diegetically in an interface that most players will be familiar with. However, as one more familiar with New Horizons, the NookPhone starts to paint a dire picture of how we all relate to our own worlds and devices.

Firstly, I should say, I don't care for smartphones in general. I've spent a substantial amount of time and effort trying to minimise the use of my own smartphone in my day to day life. I admit they are increasingly convenient and come in handy quite often, but I regularly feel exploited by these glassy rectangles. Probably extending from my general distaste for them, depictions of smartphones in videogames (particularly nintendo games, often geared to accommodate younger players) have always felt weird to me. Pokémon's "rotom phone" feels lame, especially when compared to the standalone pokédex from days of yore, and similarly the NookPhone here in New Horizons eventually becomes a representation of our helpless acceptance of these attention stealing devices.

My biggest NookPhone gripe in New Horizons, by far, is Nook Miles. Nook Miles are introduced pretty much immediately, as the player uses them to repay Tom Nook for their island trip. The neat thing about Nook Miles, is that they are tied in to the general gameplay experience. Pull some weeds, say hi to villagers, sell fruit, all these things earn you nook miles, and allow you to progress through the game, hooray! This is a pretty elegant way to introduce potentially new players to all the things you can do in an Animal Crossing game, and then once you're familiar, the game can start opening up. The issue I take with Nook Miles is that every time you earn some, you get a notification on your NookPhone, which plays a little chime and pops up in the top left corner of the screen. This quickly conditions the player into jumping into their phone any time they do a random thing, just to get rid of the little red dot in their peripheral. This is compounded by the addition of "Nook Miles +" later on, which cycles a never ending list of quick to accomplish actions, basically guaranteeing a notification any time you try to play the game.

Strangely, this system boils all of the things to do in an Animal Crossing game into point gathering chores. To add to this, Nook Tickets, needed to visit remote islands to gather more crafting materials, and acquire more villagers (and thus engage the overarching progression of the game) are purchasable only with Nook Miles. In the games heyday these quickly became saught after, as Miles accrue slowly, and Tickets cost a hefty 8000 miles each. (I'm not going to go into the overwhelming player culture of online trades and "Nookazon" here, as I never really engaged with it, but it remains an interesting response to the design choices made in New Horizons, and I'd encourage you to look into it further if you are unfamiliar.) No longer are things like fishing, bug catching and flower planting hobbies you can enjoy in your downtime, they are carefully balanced number farms that you are encouraged to squeeze as much as possible every day in order to maximise your Nook Miles economy (This is probably also a factor as to why the island is just teeming with bugs and fish).

Personally, I got fed up with Miles pretty quickly in my recent playthrough, and I had to force myself to ignore them altogether, only collecting them once I was done for the day and about to shut the game down. As a result, I didn't engage much with the miles activities, and they became more of a nuisance than a motivator. Even the regular, achievement style miles cards stopped feeling celebratory, and more just ... annoying. The last thing I want to do when in an "island paradise" (or even when I'm playing a videogame tbh) is check my phone. It's surprising to me that this managed to make its way into a game that was initially designed to explore the joys of a life lived slowly, and fostering meaningful, face to face connections daily. (I think there's also something to be said about retention mechanics and daily bonuses here. They were a big focus across many games at the time, as live service games were showing promise monetarily, and the only limiting factor big tech companies could find was the number of spare hours someone had in a day. If New Horizons were to be made today, I'm not sure Nook Miles would make it into the game in the same way, as these kinds of systems have fallen out of vogue.)

And this is where we get to the crux of the issue: The NookPhone doesn't really solve any potential issues in the game, but is included as if it's a foregone conclusion. I feel like the core "apps" included as a part of the NookPhone could be replaced with something more in-line with the game's style. Take the Critterpedia for example, an app which tracks your creature captures and provides info about each. Would a scrapbook not be more appropriate? In fact, throw the Map, Custom Designs, Best Friends List, Island Life 101, NookMiles and DIY Recipes in there too! (DIY Recipes is the most confusing with the NookPhone actually, as the player must pick up recipe cards that then disappear once read, and are logged in the phone, requiring some strong suspension of disbelief. In fact, I often forgot that I had to read recipe cards when I acquired them, and expected them to automatically appear in the phone anyway.) The camera could be replaced with...an actual camera, and things like the Rescue Service and Call Resident could be simple menu options, or have the character pull out a satellite phone or something if you need diegetic actions.

I'm confident the development team had discussions along these lines, and yeah, it's more efficient to put all of these features into one container rather than creating a bunch more assets just to make it feel nice for the one guy who cares and thinks about it too much (me). I do, however standby my feeling that at it's best, the NookPhone is an unimaginative solution to a non-problem, and at it's worst, an annoying assumption that we all love smartphones and wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if we didnt' have access to one for 5 seconds, even on a remote island.

Characterisation

The characterisation of villagers is often referenced when talking about it's shortcomings, and I'm inclined to agree. I'm not going to write much about the villagers here, but if it's something you'd like to learn more about in comparison to other games in the series, I liked these videos from yungcrossing and Dagnel. One thing I'll highlight here though, is that interacting with villagers in New Horizons is not very fun. They always start with a standard opening line that you've heard many times before, and then if you pursue conversation further, they give you basically nothing. It's hard to see the villagers as anything other than walking decorations in this game, especially when combined with the issues mentioned earlier on. They don't even interact with the same stuff you do, really. Sure they craft stuff on occasion (if only to provide you with recipes), but they're never harvesting materials, or thinking about how they would like their life on the island to be.

I'd like to take a sec to talk about the other, non-villager NPCs though. These are characters that are on every player's island and you're pretty much guaranteed to interact with most of them during your time with the game. I think my main issue overall is that they all talk too much and say too little, but I feel like I don't really like how any of them have evolved from previous entires. Again, it feels like the team was trying to fix something that wasn't really broken. Lets take a look at some of the key players.

• Blathers, the owl who tends the museum, has for some reason become very self-concious of his talkative nature. Always giving an option for the player to skip talking to him and treat him essentially as a donations bin. His fear of bugs seems to have been ramped up in this entry, where before he was a little squeamish and averse to them, in New Horizons, he can barely stop quivering at the sight of a grasshopper. It feels like he has been bullied between games about his garulousness, and has regressed to attention seeking behaviour to compensate.

• Isabelle, who basically runs resident services in the town hall, is less of an optimistic assistant, and more of a sad workaholic who has forgotten how to chill out.

• Mabel, who was shy, quiet, and dedicated to her work, would open up to the player if they were consistently polite and tried to say hello. But in New Horizons, she became a little rude and self-important, actively telling the player she's busy focussing on her work, and then when she opens up she's a bit of a gossip.

• Resetti got cancelled? Look, I get it, he yelled at kids and that's not really cool but like now he's depressed and aimless and it gets me down.

• Tortimer died and we're not even going to talk about it? (Ah I just looked it up and he has a minor role on Harv's island after a patch but like he may as well be a ghost at this point.)

• And worst of all, Tom Nook has gone from an opportunistic (and occasionally exploitative) local store owner to some kind of tech CEO hellbent on doing real estate deals and increasing the NookPhone userbase. The problem here is the real life people he is modelled after are people I don't ever really want to know and find largely reprehensible from a distance, and I'm trapped on an island with him and he retains control of the only means of escape.

It seems to me, that once again, the developers were trying to fix problems that didn't really exist. Blathers' talkativeness was never really a deal breaker I don't think, and if it was too annoying, they player didn't really have to interact with him if they didn't want. Mabel's traditional "..." response could be construed as a bit standoffish, but her newer dialogue makes her even less friendly. Resetti...yeah I understand not including him in the same way, but like let him get and education or work on his emotional maturity or something c'mon. I understand that these changes only really affect long-time enjoyers of the series, and that their interpretation here could have some serious jadedness and projection on my part, but still I think there's room for improvement.

I'd love for future installments in the series to really delve into the writing of both the villagers and NPCs. Giving them narrative arcs or interesting, evolving quirks would go a long way. They don't all have to be likeable, and they don't all have to like the player, but they will be endearing if written with intention, and can really hammer home the feeling of understanding someone and being able to overlook some traits that, at first, may have been dissuading.

So what now?

I don't think Animal Crossing is ever going to strive for the same feeling as the early games. I anticipate the decorating focus is here to stay, and crafting will probably be streamlined in future entries (although the thought of "streamlining" the game to allow for picking up items by simply running over them makes me shudder). I do hope that the design pillars of community building, hobby projects and more characterful villagers return with more strength in the next game, but I'm certainly not expecting it.

Intrestingly, a friend of mine also picked New Horizons back up recently, and I learned that it was her first ever experience with the series when it released in 2020. I thought about introducing her to an older entry, but each of them had some pretty serious caveats. Gamecube Animal Crossing is rather clunky and not very visually appealing, Wild World doensn't run very well, and lacks content outside of the basics. The installments on the Wii and 3DS kind of lack the writing I like from the older games, and both have some technical hurdles to overcome if one is to enjoy them with others. I was honestly stumped.

The silver lining though, is that classic Animal Crossing doesn't seem to be a priority for Nintendo any more, and leaves a niche to be claimed by smaller game developers. I'd love to make a game in the vein of Animal Crossing one day. It would take a lot of work, but I think it could be done and I hope there are others out there that share this passion and are willing to put the work in to make what we want to see in the world.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this gave you something to think about. All of the images are from Nookipedia. If you would like to chat more about anything feel free to reach out on bluesky :)

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