Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons
"How will you live your island life?"
Genre(s): Simulation Platform(s): Nintendo Switch Release Date: March 20, 2020 Developer(s): Nintendo EAD Publisher(s): Nintendo Country: Japan Series: Animal Crossing Predecessor: Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a life simulation game developed by Nintendo EAD and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch on March 20, 2020 in North America, Australia, Japan, and Europe. This is the eighth game in the Animal Crossing series.

Why It Lives Its Island Life

1. The graphics in this game are massive step-up from Amiibo Festival, New Leaf, and Pocket Camp. It's more realistic and vibrant than before.
   • The graphics themselves are beautiful and solid as it's the first main game in the series to be in High-Definition.
2. The setting the game takes place in is more original than the previous games. Instead of taking place in an already established town, it takes place on a deserted island which brings something new to the Animal Crossing formula.
3. Even more realistic than its predecessors, the characters are now more realistically proportioned and are more expressive as they can move their eyes.
4. Tom Nook gets a bigger role in this game and is a lot friendlier in this game than in previous entries. As the leader and developer of the island, he allows you to upgrade the island, your house, and various buildings.
5. Isabelle also returns and works alongside Tom Nook in the Resident Services. She can help the player with the island tune, island flag, island status/appeal, and reporting inappropriate language or clothing from/on villagers.
6. There are new bugs and fish to catch.
7. It introduces many new features that make the game stand out from the previous games such as:
   • Crafting things like items and furniture.
   • Being able to place/move houses and buildings wherever you want.
   • You can now landscape your island by creating or destroying cliffs and rivers.
   • You could also create actual paths too, a feature that many fans wanted to be introduced.
   • You can now place furniture and other items outdoors
   • It finally does something about the rampant griefing and flower theft that was present in New Leaf. When inviting people into your town, they aren't allowed to use shovels or axes until you have added them to your Best Friends list.
   • Rocks are now able to be destroyed.
   • If you eat any fruit, bamboo, etc, you could dig up trees and move them somewhere else instead of removing them.
     • Rocks are now able to be destroyed as well.
   • The recently announced Fall Update introduces the feature where you are able to grow pumpkins to use them to create decorations for Halloween.
8. You are now able to have 8 bridges and 8 inclines/stairs in your town.
9. The villagers are now able to do more things than they did in previous games, as they are now able to do things like sitting down, interacting with beds and chairs, etc.
10. Any QR codes from New Leaf or Happy Home Designer can be scanned into this game if you have the Nintendo Online app.
11. The soundtrack is very relaxing.
12. It is the very first Animal Crossing game to introduce a Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are six months apart from that of the Northern Hemispheres and where bugs and fish that aren't available in the Northern Hemisphere can be found there.
13. New clothing features are added here too such as backpacks, coats, and garlands.
    • Also, the clothes are more detailed in this game.
14. Some NPCs make their debut here, including Flick, C.J., Orville, Wilbur, Daisy Mae, Wardell and Niko.
    • In addition to this, some new villagers were added too, such as Sherb, Marlo, Shino, Dom, Audie and Raymond.
15. Harv's Island is a cool new addition to game.
    • It notably has the Photopia, which is a place you can head inside and make sets for pictures with the villagers and furniture that you have.
      • In addition, you scan amiibos for characters you want, and you could also obtain posters of the villagers if scanned.
    • Beginning with the 2.0 update, different shops were added on the island that you can donate to open one on the island, which is used as an easy way of getting shops that would normally be temporary NPC visits on your island to be permanent on Harv's Island. Although, occasional visits from the NPCs will still happen on your island regardless.
16. Thanks to the auto-save feature in this game, Mr. Resetti no longer yells at you for resetting your game. In here, he is now in charge of a rescue service.
17. The new fish bait item that was introduced in this game can be incredibly useful in terms of catching rare fish like the Sturgeon, Stringfish, Mahi-Mahi, etc.
18. Just like Pocket Camp, the events like Bunny Day and Earth Day/Nature Day are going to last multiple days, rather than taking place in a single day.
19. At the beginning of the game, players are now able to freely choose the appearance and gender of their character instead of answering questions just to get the appearance they want in previous games. If you don't like how your character looks, you can customize your character's appearance anytime if you obtained a vanity or a mirror.
    • The game also introduces new nose, eyes, and mouth types.
20. The “lost item” sidequest is so much better here than it was in the previous games; if you give a villager the dropped item and it doesn't belong to them, they will actually tell you who it actually belongs to, instead of simply giving it back to you without telling you the name of the owner and leaving you to find them on your own.
21. Grass deterioration is no longer in the game, which is very awesome for players that like to run around their towns.
22. There were several updates that came out periodically, that added content, most of which, should have been in the game since launch.
    • On April 21, it was announced that there was going to be an update, that launched on April 23. This update contained contain new features such as bushes and paintings, new events, returning NPCs such as Redd, Leif, and Rover, and the ability to upgrade the museum which added the room for the aforementioned paintings.
    • The updates also add lacking features. For example, the planned Summer Update Wave 1 brought swimming and diving into the game.
      • Summer Update Wave 2 brought back the Dream Suite as well as the Fireworks Show.
    • The Fall Update introduces new eye and skin color options as well as being able to grow pumpkins to use them to create decorations for Halloween.
    • The Winter Update brings back events on Turkey Day and Toy Day. It also introduces new hairstyle options and new reactions such as sitting down and taking a picture.
      • It also announced that players can expand their storage from 1600 items to 2400 items
    • The Festivale Update contains the returning Festivale event, new items, and even new dancing reactions
    • The Mario Update released in late February 2021, brings Super Mario-themed items to the game such as the warp pipe which allows for easy fast travel if you have two pipes.
    • On November 5, the 2.0 update added in a lot of missing features from the previous instalments and even added some new features, including The Roost, new furniture items, Kapp'n's boat tours, Harvey's Campsite, Happy Home Paradise DLC for an additional $25USD (or $50USD a year if you subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online Premium Plan), and far more.
      • The Happy Home Paradise DLC is a wonderful expansion to the main game, in which it basically runs like Happy Home Designer, but with more features added in, such as changing the sizes of the room in the house, adding giving the villagers roommates, and plenty more.
23. You can commission C.J. or Flick to make you a statue of a bug/fish you gave them (only if you have given them 3 of the same fish or bug)
24. The Sanrio villagers from Animal Crossing New Leaf: Welcome Amiibo make a return here, along with the fact that their amiibo cards will finally be released outside of Japan in March 2021.

Bad Qualities

1. Similar to Breath of The Wild, the tools have become more easy to break when compared to the previous instalments, which is very annoying since you have to keep replacing them by rebuilding or buying a new one. It doesn't help that there's durability bar telling you if a tool that you're using is about to break, unlike Breath of the Wild, and this never used to be the case with the other games except for the regular and silver axes.
   • What's even worse is that the gold tools are breakable as well, which completely defeats the purpose of even earning them, since they were practically invulnerable in the old games.
2. When you start the game, you can't explore the entire island on the first day as you are restricted to a section of the island which is surrounded by rivers that can only be traversed by vaulting poles which you can get on the second day.
   • Also, you can't play with other players until the second day too.
   • This is a minor setback if you are into time-traveling (changing the time on your Switch's system clock). Prior to the 2.0 update, some of the seasonal events were yet to be patched into the game, given that the game wasn't finished by then, compared to the previous games.
3. No Cloud-Saving.
   • What sucks is that any account made on the Switch has to share a single island. If you want to have another island, you have to buy another Switch to do so. This is not the first Animal Crossing game to do so, as City Folk (or Let's Go to the City in PAL regions) did the same thing, but at least it made more sense with that game since it was on the Wii, which did not have the ability of creating multiple accounts.
   • This issue was later resolved when an Island Transfer Tool was released on November 18, 2020.
4. There are not that many shops that are available in the game, only Nook's Cranny and Able Sisters are in the game right now.
   • Speaking of Nook's Cranny, it can only be upgraded once, unlike other games, where it can be upgraded 3 times (4 in New Leaf).
5. You can't craft multiple items at the same time, which can be a problem for people trying to craft fish bait used for catching rare fish.
6. If there are a lot of items or furniture in one particular area, the game will start to lag and you will start seeing items appear out of thin air since the game can't keep up with regenerating the items.
7. At launch, many features from the previous games were absent from the game and were added back in as "content updates", making the game unfinished in comparison with its previous entries. They even had the guts to do a "Day One Patch" just to add the Bunny Day event, which was botched so badly that Nintendo had to update it (more on that below).
   • Back when the game launched, if you were to update the game to have the Bunny Day event patched in, more eggs would appear than materials and fish. This was so much of an issue it caused Nintendo to update the game again so that the eggs generate less often.
8. The dialogue is equally repetitive as New Leaf, if not, slightly worse. To add to this point, the dialogue doesn't have the same timeless feel as it used to in every other game.

Trivia

• Since this game came out along with Doom Eternal, a meme spawned of Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing fused together.
• There's an inaccuracy that the Spinosaurus fossil's tail is shorter when the real Spinosaurus had longer tails that were used for swimming.
• This game sold more copies than all the other installments of this series combined, this is more than likely due to the quarantine that happened before the game's release.
• At launch, the game was used by Chinese citizens to communicate safely due to the censorship and spyware happening in China, unfortunately, the government knew about this and banned the game quickly.
• Many people, such as President Joe Biden, used the game to advertise or show their political views, something which many players, especially veterans, found infuriating. Thankfully this resulted in Nintendo adding a rule to their content guidelines where organizations, groups, and businesses are no longer allowed to use the game for politics.
• Thanks to the success of this game, the Amiibo Cards have received more print runs, and can still be used in New Leaf, Happy Home Designer, and Amiibo Festival, like with the older batches made before this game was released. In fact, a Series 5 set of cards were released exclusively for this game, as well as the new set of Sanrio cards.

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