Animal Crossing, as mentioned earlier, began its life 19 years ago to the date on the Nintendo GameCube and was unlike any game Nintendo released before. A simulation game where you were human but surrounded by anthropomorphic villagers, you began life instantaneously in debt. You had a museum to contribute to, trees to plant, relationships to build, and special events to attend to as you very slowly worked towards everyone's virtual and real life dream of owning your own home. As the series evolved, we saw installments grace the DS, the Wii and the 3DS each bringing their own new improvements and innovations. (We don't talk about Amiibo Festival for the Wii U...)
We didn't really see a major reworking of game mechanics until New Leaf on the 3DS, though, and even then, it wasn't too long until the usual trapping began to show. Now Animal Crossing has released for the Switch in the form of New Horizons and introduced many, many improvements to the franchise. Yet, all the new improvements have only illustrated just how far this franchise still has yet to go to become the perfect life simulator.
There's so much to talk about in terms of quality of life improvements that quite honestly, I have no idea where to start. Let me just begin talking about what I left off doing in the game as I had to dock my Switch to charge.
Terraforming
A brand new mechanic introduced in New Horizons lets us make cliffs, create ponds, rivers and waterfalls, and paths of varying textures all at will, and all for free. You'd think this would be amazing to play with, and for the most part it is, but it's not without its drawbacks. For starters, let's talk about how long it takes should you have any major landscaping projects you want to undergo.
Let's say you have to chip away into an upper tier. You can only clear one square at a time instead of holding down the A button and just pushing your way through the cliff, as if you were moving furniture. Next, there's an issue with cutting terrain at the precise angles. For waterscaping, it's impossible to make a perfect V. You'll either take a square chunk out of the land, or slice an adjacent square of land in half, but if you want the other size of a V you're carving, that point will either be filled in the next time you hit the A button, or a square chunk of land will be removed. I was trying to terraform a Triforce pond and although you can still make it out, it's nowhere near the level of perfection I wanted. As far as making waterfalls, you cannot make waterfalls round the corners, which is a shame as that would make for some really cool waterscaping.
Relocation
I kinda wanted to put this under Terraforming, as it involves moving things around your island, but it's not using the terraforming app, so I decided to give it its own section. So a new feature with New Horizons is moving your buildings around. You're given the ability to place any building wherever you want (accept for the Resident Center, which is anchored in place for all eternity). If you're not happy where a building is, you can relocate it, but it's not as simple as a drag and drop.
Before I continue, I want to talk about how AWESOME it is to be able to very easily redecorate your house in New Horizons. Supposedly taken from the 3DS's Happy Home Designer, which I don't consider to be a mainstay Animal Crossing game, you can enter a mode in your house that lets you move everything around your rooms from the floor to the walls with ease. You can even move multiple items at a time, which make decorating SO EASY. But then you go outside, see all the work you need to do on your island... and slowly revert back into your home, pull the curtains and succumb to an anxiety attack....
Because that's how I feel right now trying to redo my island. I was up late last night fretting over trying to get my land prepared to accommodate a bridge and make sure it wouldn't interfere with the relocation of one my neighbor's homes. Before I knew there was a limit on bridges, I had already built the allotted eight. My plan is to move all my residents around my resident center to creat a neighborhood, but that involves relocating six residents, three buildings (at 50k a pop, so that's 450k in relocation fees) and destroying and rebuilding four bridges, as I'm building a moat around the resident center. I know it takes a day to move a building, but it also takes a day to destroy a bridge, and then another day to build it again where I want.
It'll take around nine or 10 days to get everything done the way I want. So now, I'm left with an unorganized mess, and I don't even want visitors over right now. So when I think of how easy it is to move things around in my house compared to how painful it is to move anything on my island, I get highly discouraged. But, I committed myself to it, so I'm going to see it through. I just hope that Nintendo patches in a map editor mode like they did with their home editor. It would alleviate a lot of headaches. I also get that some might say it's not realistic to be able to move buildings around at the drop of a hat, but let's be honest here. This game is far from realistic. I mean, you can put a giant Godzilla statue in your pocket and create mountains and rivers at will. Come on...
Crafting and Storage
New to New Horizons is the crafting element. Also new to New Horizons is built-in storage in your room. Now, you no longer need to throw a dresser or a refrigerator in your room to access your storage; it's readily available anywhere in the house and greatly increases with each upgrade to your home. Both of these elements need work, though.
So let's talk about crafting. Crafting is a lot of fun, I'll admit. You can make a lot of things on your own without spending a single bell at the store, all from resource gathering. It's cool to be able to make something no one else can, especially if it's a unique item not found in stores. The one major gripe I have is the fact that you can only craft one item at a time. Batch crafting is something that NEEDS to be implemented as soon as Nintendo can do it, because if you've ever tried to craft 30 fish baits, you know how tedious it gets. Hell, after the Bunny Day event was over, I had so many eggs, I crafted over 330k bells worth of Bunny Day furniture. Just try to imagine how long THAT took! Batch crafting: MAKE IT HAPPEN!
As for storage, yes it's readily available within your house, but it came at a weird trade off. Now, every piece of functional furniture that you used to use for storage, such as a freezer, now serves the purpose of being a closet to change your clothing. Why anyone would be changing in their freezer is beyond me; it's just nonsensical. So what I would like to do is for Nintendo to revert the storage items' original purpose back to accessing storage for one major reason: setting storage items outside of your house. Today, I made a cool 5.6 million bells selling bugs to Flick, but it was a very long and tedious process going back and forth to the house. You can also only select one item at a time to remove from storage, so I would also appreciate letting us select multiple items from storage at once. But imagine how much easier it would be to drop a storage item next to Flick, pull out forty bugs at once, and then sell them with Flick standing right next to you. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Bring Back New Leaf Components
It's obvious that New Horizons feels like a major extension of New Leaf, because New Leaf had an island you could visit whereas New Horizons is one major island. Yet, we're left in disbelief as one of New Leaf's most awesome features, swimming, was left at the bottom of the ocean. If you don't know by now, yes, you can no longer swim and dive in New Leaf. This means no hunting for sea cucumbers, anemones and anything else on the sea floor. This also means no more cool wet suits.
Although you can visit separate "mystery islands" (I'll talk about those later), they aren't like the island in New Leaf. For one, you can't travel to one with a friend. Because of that, you can't also partake in mini games with your friends. Multiplayer is still here in New Horizons, but without anything to really DO together like in New Leaf, it gets boring after a while. We NEED mini games to return.
What I also don't get is why the foreign exotic fruits like durian, lychee, persimmons and bananas have not returned. I really enjoyed having a wider variety of fruits, so to see New Horizons revert back to the original six was disappointing. Maybe we'll see them return? What I would also love to see the return of is the megaphone. It was so handy to call out a villager and hear them call back so you'd get an idea of where they were. In fact, just gives us a real time display of where they're moving on our mini map. That would be ideal. Also, give us back the credit card. That was so handy!
Make the Mystery Islands Worth Something Each Trip
Now, I can kinda understand that some people will be happy the way the mystery islands work, as it's all random, so landing on Tarantula Island will be very exciting, but there are too many islands that just aren't interesting at all. These plain islands offer nothing new in the way of flora or fauna, and a string of bad luck will see players waste tons of Nook Miles tickets. After the first several waves of Nook Miles milestones are achieved, miles come in very slowly in the form of tasks, and sometimes it can take an hour just to get enough miles to get one ticket. I see this area of the game as needing a lot of improvement, because something good should always be given when that much time is spent gathering miles. I'm not saying every island should be Money Rock Island or Tarantula Island, but you should at least land on a foreign fruit island for your troubles.
Let Us Change the Camera Angle
I know this might seem like a big ask, but it's time. It's just time. They let us look all around in our room, so why not all around our island? At least we have a more overhead view, but still, the camera options in this game is very limited for a franchise that's almost 20 years old. It would be really nice to look around all your trees to make sure you didn't miss a fossil spot or a piece of fruit that fell. If we don't get any new camera options, at least make things transparent when we're behind them.
Give Us More Inventory Space
Ok, now I'll admit this one is just plain greedy. The game starts you out with 20 slots, which is five more than any other AC game and after your second upgrade, you're up to 40. That is a LOT of inventory space, but I still find myself running out of space when I'm doing chores. I plant a LOT of fruit, and I never have the space to carry it all in one trip, and it's annoying to have to stop what you're doing, haul everything to the store to free up space, and then remember where you left off. True, this is done far less with 40 slots than in older games with 15, but it's still happening, and when your franchise is improving, you don't want inconveniences to lessen; you want them gone.
There's a few ways to alleviate this. One would be to let everything stack to 99 like weeds. It's weird to me that fruit only stack at 10, but wood can stack at 30 and fence pallets stack at 50. You're telling me I can hold FIFTY pallets of fencing in one slot, but only TEN fruit?
So you can see that if one thing can stack at 99, then it's possible for everything to stack at 99, and yes, I mean everything. "But not fish! Surely, not fish!" Yes, fish, too. Why? Because those sea shells you're picking up, they're alive, and they stack. You can stack corals, and sea dollars and giant clams. You can stack flowers, weeds, fruit. These are all living, so why not make bugs and fish stackable as well? Don't believe me? Play an MMORPG. I think it would help pacify everyone's anger about wasting so much space with sea bass.
Make Sea Bass Extinct
Make Sea Bass Extinct
But seriously, back to inventory. Another way to increase inventory is to give us a tool box. We now have more tools in New Horizons than we do any other Animal Crossing game. In fact, we have more tools than we have spaces in our tool ring, which should also be upgraded. You have your shovel, axe, stone axe if you're looking not to chop down trees, fishing rod, net, slingshot, watering can, umbrella, musical instruments, party favors, ladder, pole vault and lastly, the magical wand. If you decide to carry one of everything, that's three inventory slots used up just in tools. Having a tool box - or utility box, or even utility belt - take just one space would be a godsend. Or you know, the new backpacks we can wear should hold more stuff too...
Implement Better Planning With Events
Let's be honest here. The last two events, Bunny Day and the Fishing Tournament, were not that good. Bunny Day was such an atrocity, Nintendo had to patch in measures to tone down the number of eggs spawning. I got so many eggs and recipes the first couple of days, I had everything I needed, so I had ten more days of coming across eggs I didn't want. Maybe when one of the game's core mechanics is resource gathering, don't replace people's main sources of income with bunny eggs so much? It would have been better to just do special tasks for Zippy or Zipper or Zippideedodah and then he'll give you the recipe to make instead of searching for balloon after balloon to only get 30 more sky eggs.
The fishing tournament was also lackluster. To begin with, it wasn't really a fishing tournament. It was just spamming the same "fish as many times as you can in three minutes" over and over again. I spent several hours doing this to get all the "swag" and sadly, I wasn't even impressed by it. There were a lot of different pieces of furniture missing from the set, like a table or a record player or something. I was disappointed with most of the stuff he was handing out, so I'd like to see more thought put into better seasonal items that's worth more of the player's time. ALSO, it was a BAD idea to do this while the Bunny Day event was still going on. You shouldn't be pulling up water eggs when you're under a time limit to catch fish. Real bonehead move there. And the countless interactions with C.J. brings me to my next point.
Let Us Skip Repetitive Dialogue
I swear, one of the worst things about the fishing tournament was having to keep interacting with C.J. After you caught your fish, you had to talk to him THREE more times to start the next tournament. It didn't need to be split up into three separate conversations, and once you're having a conversation, if it's dialogue you've already seen, you should be able to just skip right over it. This goes beyond C.J. This applies to every damned denizen on the island. So much time is wasted in the shop, with Blathers, talking to Nook, your villagers about Bunny Day. We really don't need to see the same chatter each and every time!
Let the Net Catch Multiple Bugs at the Same Time
This would definitely come in handy. How many times have you seen a bug you wanted, went for it and swung, but another bug got in the way and your prize flew away? Or what about the time you were on Tarantula Island and were able to sneak up on two tarantulas and caught one only for the other to bite you? I mean, we see the net pass through both (or even three bugs) at the same time, and we know that in real life, a net would catch those bugs at once, so why not just let us catch multiple bugs at the same time?
Rework the Tool Durability System
What I really want is just no more damn breakable tools, but I get why they're there, and like the breakable weapons in Breath of the Wild, they're never going to go away. But, we should at least be given a durability meter or some sign that our tools are going to break. I remember in the older Animal Crossing games, you actually saw your axes start chipping before they broke. And well, the real prize are the golden tools, and I'm sorry, but golden tools should simply not break at all. Gold ore is SCARCE. I can go a whole week without finding one. You think I'm going to waste these things on tools that will eventually break? Either let those golden tools become unbreakable, or boost the drop rate of gold ore.
Provide More Interactivity With More Items
I'm sure we've all come across awesome items that didn't do much, or even do anything at all. I would love to see more thought and effort put into making more items do stuff. For instance, I spent 5k Nook Miles on a pool that I can't even wade in. I know this may be a lot to ask considering no one knows how many items are even in the game, but I'm hoping that they're at least thinking of making more items do things in future patches. I don't ever want to sell a cool looking item just because it doesn't do anything.
Give Us Rideable Items
How many times have you gotten a bike that you would love to ride? It's time. We should be able to ride bikes and scooters around our islands. Or hell, even a go-kart. I'm not asking to go fast. I mean, we don't even need to go faster than running speed, but I would love to have some kind of locomotion in Animal Crossing. Speaking of locomotion, how about a train? I would LOVE to have a train where you could lay out the tracks wherever you want.
Get Rid of the 20 Percent Tax on the Dropbox at Nook's Cranny
This one gets me. When I first started the game, I LOVED being able to come to Nook and sell anything I got any time of the day. God, I remember the old days of the first Animal Crossing where I stored all my fish in the basement when I got off work, because the store closed before I got home, and I would wake up and quickly sell my fish the next day before I went back to work. But when Nook upgraded his tent into a resident center and diverted commerce to Nook's Cranny, hours of operation returned, which was disappointing.
Yet, there was good news. There was a drop box you could deposit items in and have them sold off hours, but the store took a 20 percent fee. For what?! Considering you have so much storage in your house now, you might as well just store everything and sell it the next day when the store's open again. This penalizes players who can't play during prime hours and since the game starts out with the store open 24/7, it really should stay open 24/7.
Well, there you have it. I'm sure I've forgotten a few things and will probably think of them a few minutes after I post this, but I got a lot off my chest. Now, before anyone gets upset over me criticizing their beloved Animal Crossing, let me just say that I've been playing the hell out of it and really enjoy it so far, but I've always been the type to see improvement in everything. The fact that New Horizons has done so many quality of life enhancements is testament to the fact that they can keep improving the game, and should so since we live in the days of post-launch patches and expansions. I'm sure we'll see a few of these things and other improvements no one thought of in upcoming patches. This is just a list of things I'd love to see myself.
Anyway, thank you all for reading. I know this was a long one, so extra special thanks for that.
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