I wish to stop talking to the weird robot animals, Nintendo

and, furthermore, I don’t really believe that inviting them into my house is going to change that.

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I don’t wanna be the guy that tells everyone else to stop having fun, and if the upcoming content updates (paid & free) to Animal Crossing New Horizons have got you pumped, then do not let me.. Un-pump you. But for me, this news demonstrates a misunderstanding of what made the game blow up last March, what caused the game’s hype to die down shortly after, and honestly, what made the Animal Crossing series so interesting to begin with.

Let’s rewind.

The Moment

So, when I played Animal Crossing on the Gamecube for the first time, one bit kinda blew my mind (I was 7). The first mission Tom Nook sets you upon when he forcefully drags you into the workforce is to plant some flowers around his store. You can probably plant them anywhere, but I did plant them around his store. After this, you’re tasked with traversing the town to acquaint yourself with all of the villagers who live there, you’re the new kid on the block and Tom insists it’s the right and proper thing to do. I distinctly remember Wolfgang, a wolf who lived on the south side of town that absolutely had no interest in being acquainted with me or seemingly anyone.

It was after I stopped playing, though, that the mindblowing bit happens. So, being 7, and clearly a forward thinker in the year 2003, I was already aware that actually, watching other people play games is what it’s all about, so my next move was to convince my mum to play Animal Crossing while I watched. The opening scenes of the game were similar, but a little different. Mum didn’t get a chance to select the name of the town she was moving into, for instance, and when she approached Tom Nook’s store to get her first round of jobs… Hold on, are those- Those are MY flowers! Those are the ones I planted! It’s the SAME town!? Not like, a copy, a new save file, we were going to be living in the town TOGETHER?

Mum ran over some of my flowers and unplanted them, I was pissed. But god DAMN it was cool.

(I remember thinking that Wolfgang was going to be pissed too, since now two unsolicited visitors were going to have shown up at his door in one day claiming to represent the local corner store.)

It’s not such a big deal now, but the idea of of what the back of the box referred to as ‘1-4P Alternating’ multiplayer was so cool. Animal Crossing was ostensibly a one player experience, but it was more like logging into a world that was always growing and changing, one that invariably wouldn’t look quite the same as it did when you last logged off, and the presence of other players could be felt in the changes they’d made and the tasks they’d completed. The game had lots of little features built into it to excite you more about the starring role that this Alternating Multiplayer system held, and all of the core mechanics were designed around it. My favourite was the ability to leave items for sale for whatever absurd price you liked at the front of your house for other players to check out. In what other title could I roleplay as a scam artist trying to pawn off expensive oranges to my neighbours?

This sociability gives weight to the personalisation we do in Animal Crossing as well. Think about your house - It’s such a core part of Animal Crossing. All the trees and flowers and fossils in the world are fair game to be stolen, stepped on, replaced, grown, whatever, but your house is the little corner of the game where you get to put your best work forward and say Look But Don’t Touch. I have as much fun making a neat Minecraft house or decorating my Animal Crossing home as the next guy, but isn’t there so much more weight to it when you know the other players in town are going to come check out how your house is looking when they next hop on? I think Nintendo themselves is even chasing this high a little when they force all users on a single Switch console to coexist on the same island instead of giving everyone their own save file.

Writing Letters To A Machine

The original inspiration for Animal Crossing, according to creator Katsuya Eguchi, comes from trying to capture and recreate his lived experience of having moved away from friends and family in his hometown to the very different Kyoto City. An isolating sensation of fitting into a world bigger than yourself, a world that has existed before your arrival and will exist after your departure. It’s an evocative image, and I love games that try to tap into emotions a little more on the subtle side like this. I think there’s a pretty clear connection between this stated design goal and what we’ve talked about so far, right? You live in this world, leave your mark on it, but it isn’t yours any more than it is Wolfgang’s. Not any more his than it was my Mum’s for running over those flowers.

Villagers like Wolfgang are a key part of this, and much has been made on the internet already of the ways villagers have been pushed further and further out of the spotlight over the development of the series. To avoid dwelling on things that This Piece Of Writing Isn’t About, suffice to say the modern Animal Crossing Villager is about on par with any given piece of furniture that you can earn, except now the furniture speaks to me in the same Nintendo Treehouse Employee Quirky Diction. You’ll recognise it speaking to you if you’ve played any of the later Paper Mario entries, made famous in those games as the voice behind Every Single Toad.

Okay, I’m starting to get into the negative part of all this. There are a few ways to examine how the philosophy and magic of the series is dwindling, but lets do it with letters.

In the past, letters you sent villagers would spark further interactions between them and the other players. If I sent Wolfgang a letter, then the next time Mum wandered past Wolfgang in one of her play sessions, he might decide she was just the perfect person to hear about how terrible my letter was, and how sick he is of that Alex guy, and how the letter doesn’t make any sense, and what did she think of this part right here?? She’d get to see the letter and her responses would affect her dynamic with the character as well as mine, as well as the response I would eventually get in the mail from Wolfgang. Yeah it was a little silly to write a letter to a video game NPC, but it was okay because they were really a kickoff point for sparking more of that social interaction and adding to the ever evolving state of the world, as well as to the believable feeling that it was a world you shared with your wacky animal neighbours. You were writing them for the animals, but you were REALLY writing them for each other. Different stationary was a resource that could be bought so it all worked within the constraints of all the other animal crossing goodness of limited inventory space and it being fun to collect stuff. You could also send letters to other players too as a cute way of leaving messages or a convenient way of sending each other items you didn’t want.

Now, in Animal Crossing New Horizons, you can send letters to a villager and they will send you a reply and a piece of furniture. It’s really just a way to get furniture. I think it might add points to your friendship meter, which nets you a collectible piece of furniture if you fill it up. Do you see how the emphasis is taken away from the social experience along the way and instead put on the piece of furniture you get at the end?

Look But Don’t Touch

So where does this come from? Well, furniture is secretly at the heart of it all. Remember before when I was talking about that ‘Look But Don’t Touch’ corner of the world? As the Animal Crossing series has iterated, that corner of the world has become the world, and I don’t think I need to spend time here elaborating on what I mean by that. If you’re familiar with New Horizons at all, you know the ways in which every little part of your island can be matched to your perfect design.

Do you think Wolfgang would have been okay with me moving his house because I like the way the town looks better if it’s up North? Unfortunately, this design goal of constantly expanding which parts of the world the player can customise is tonally and mechanically incompatible with that original dream of creating a game about settling into an unfamiliar town, and I think it’s for a similar reason that most of the pro-social mechanics have been left behind. The game isn’t about socialising with your friends, it’s about creating your perfect island. The Villagers don’t get to have agency in this because then the player wouldn’t get to have the full breadth of customisation. They don’t need to grow to like you, or gossip with the other players about you, because they’re not really here for that. They’re here to decorate your corner of the world.

Unfortunately though, Animal Crossing New Horizons isn’t really about looking at each other’s Corners-Of-The-Worlds, because it isn’t a shared world, as the 100 slow loading screens make incredibly incredibly clear if you try to engage in the Actual Honest-To-Goodness multiplayer that the game has. It’s slow and painful and restricting and generally requires some work to be done outside of the game in scheduling a play session. If more than a few people are coming and going at different intervals the game becomes borderline unplayable for an absurd length of time, a real shame for a series that is in part about convincing you that wasting time doing nothing can be fun. Even without the mechanical interference, it isn’t too many visits before the island traversing boils down to checking out what your friend has done with their isolated pocket of Animal Crossing, and then heading back home to your own isolated pocket of Animal Crossing. Nintendo seems to know this too, as the Dreaming updates added a less frustrating way to streamline multiplayer into just that. You may as well take the multiplayer part out. Maybe during the Covid lockdowns across the world this was the perfect game to come along and make it possible to see our friends, but the longer the game exists, the more clearly I feel like it isn’t built to those strengths.

All of the new decorating options in the 2.0 update look great, (I’m especially happy to see gyroids return) and if I was still invested in making my house a place worth visiting I’m sure I’d have a blast with all of them. None of them fundamentally change the way I’ll interact with other players or my villagers, though, so it’s hard to see the New Horizons illusion un-shattering for me because of them. In particular, I think the updates to Harv’s Island where the reward is largely to have permanent access to all of the vendors that would otherwise temporarily show up in town once in a while, is very telling. It’s another example of taking the living and the breathing out of the living breathing world I’m supposed to slot myself into, and instead giving the player more ways to get exactly the decorative piece of furniture, clothing, whatever, they need to complete their creative showpiece. This isn’t a world that does what it wants anymore, it’s a world that does what I want.

I think it’s totally fine that for a lot of players, making a custom perfectionist island purely for themselves or to simply show off to friends, is enough. Animal Crossing New Horizons was unbelievably successful. What I want, though, is a game about the magic moment I had when I was 7 and I realised that I could play by myself, but Mum could still see the flowers I planted.

Deep Cut P.S That I Didn’t Know Where To Put:

I actually really like all the additions to the formula! I think crafting makes a lot of sense and the little missions the Nookphone gives you are nice too. They’re both more reasons to explore your island and spend more time wandering and discovering, and it feeds into a nice gameplay loop where you regularly get distracted from your current task by a new task ad infinitum. They all add into more stuff to do in downtime that feeds into decoration collecting. I just wish they existed in a different Animal Crossing ecosystem.