Animal Crossing

Summary

Animal Crossing is a series of casual social simulation games created by Nintendo where you play as a human character living in the same area as animal people. You live an easy life of catching fish and insects, picking fruit, digging for fossils, collecting items, designing interior spaces, and hanging out with your fellow villagers.

The game is played in real time, synched to the console's internal clock. Shops keep certain hours, villagers act on a loose schedule, and the day-night cycle moves in step with the 24-hour day.

Villagers

There are 488 different villagers between all of the games, spread across 35 species, with over 100 villagers that have been in every game. Each villager has a personality that dictates their dialogue and behavior.

Personalities

There are 8 personality types, four for each gender: lazy, jock, cranky, and smug for male villagers and normal, peppy, snooty, and big sister for female ones. The villager personality determines their dialogue and behavior toward the player. By New Horizons, the differences between these personalities have been diluted to be overall friendlier and shallower.

Our Experiences

Our first game was Animal Crossing: New Leaf, available for the Nintendo 3DS. We bought it a couple of years after it was released, but it became a game that we played every single day for almost two years just because it's fun.

Animal Crossing became a more significant game to us in mid-2015 when we began to feel the presence of a new member of our system, but they were having trouble coming to be. Ora decided to let them use Animal Crossing to experiment with their appearance and interactions with the characters and game. It was this exploration that helped Thyme separate themselves from the rest of us and adopt an identity of their own.

This idea came up again when our youngest system member, Mimi, wanted to explore himself and have more time for him to have the front. We got a new game cartridge and let Mimi become the Mayor of Tuesday. He loved it. He loved it a lot.

Pocket Camp was released in 2017, and it was a new game while we waited for Animal Crossing to come to the Switch. Mimi took the reins again and had a lot of fun with it, but the worst of mobile game psychology started to take its toll. In-app purchase opportunities abounded, and there was a lot of FOMO-bait in limited time offerings. It became too exhausting to keep up with, so we eventually deleted the app and stopped using it.

Animal Crossing came to our system's defense a third time when Dennis was trying to understand his gender stuff—more on that here. But Animal Crossing let him experiment with dress and name and gave him something to do that he enjoyed even in the worst of his depression.

We bought a Nintendo Switch to play New Horizons. It was the only reason we wanted the console. It would be bigger and better than New Leaf, surely! We noticed a few things about New Horizons that we didn't like, but the game is still fun to play years after its release, even if we never got the same dutiful obsession we did with New Leaf.

We still play New Horizons occasionally, especially since the Happy Home Paradise DLC was added that added a new decorating side system. Unfortunately, when the Virtual Game Cards were added to the Switch software, we lost the ability to play on our main save. In our frustration, we bought Pocket Camp and a new cartridge of New Leaf.

Having since regained the ability to play New Horizons on our main save, we now play at least three Animal Crossing games every day.

New Leaf

In New Leaf, you take a train to a new town, and once there you're welcomed as the new mayor. Despite the mixup, you take the responsibility and join the villagers of the town as it grows and expands.

You can place Public Works Projects around the town and build up Main Street as part of your mayoral duties.

Villagers love getting letters and show them off regularly. They gossip about you and each other, use you as a mailman as they give each other gifts, and request bugs, fruit, fish, and furniture all the time. They're needy creatures, and you're the mayor who must attend to all their needs.

When not in your town, you can visit Tortimer's Island and go on tours or just play on the island itself. The best way to make money in New Leaf is catching beetles on the island, where you can easily make several hundred thousand bells a night.

The interactions with the villagers are the best thing about New Leaf. They have ongoing relationships with each other, inspiring presents and arguments. The letters you write to them are kept as special keepsakes that they treasure and show off. Their houses fill with all the stuff you get for them (for better or for worse, it's a sign of just the amount of work you've put into the relationship). It's rewarding building up those relationships by performing acts of service.

Pocket Camp

In Pocket Camp, your domain is a camper van and a campsite. You can travel to four different locations to fish, gather insects, pick fruit, and collect seashells. At each location, a villager is there that has three requests for collected items. Fulfilling their requests levels up the villagers, and you earn rewards and level up yourself as the villagers level up.

You invite villagers to your campsite and cabin so they can interact with the furniture you put there. As you level up villagers, you can dress them up or they can make new kinds of requests.

There are tons of events and limited-time items. In the original Pocket Camp, there were also a lot of microtransactions and subscription fees that, if you didn't engage with them, you had a significantly lesser experience. As of December 2024, they released Pocket Camp: Complete, a one-time-pay app without online features and reworked mechanics. There's a few things that Complete doesn't have that the original Pocket Camp did, but overall it's a significant improvement in the way we approach the game. We feel far less pressure to get everything, so it's a lot more fun.

New Horizons

We have complex feelings about New Horizons. It came out right when COVID lockdowns hit, so it quickly became something that we spent a lot of time and energy in. Instead of a town, you run an island that blossoms into a community over time. The initial pace of the game is agonizingly slow, and there's a lot of features that take a while to establish themselves, like the Museum. There were also staples from earlier games missing from the initial release, such as Redd the traveling art salesman and gyroids, that only came about in 2.0, released in November 2021. The DLC, Happy Home Paradise, was also released at the same time as 2.0.

Pros:

Beautiful graphics
Crafting and cooking are great systems, from resource acquisition to actually preparing items/food
Interior decorating is easy
the Museum is stunning and exciting to explore
Many, many fun reactions/gestures to do with friends or in front of other villagers
the Happy Home Paradise DLC makes great use of how easy it is to decorate, and it has great rewards for its completion
Nook Miles are a great reward system for daily play, and they are much more flexible and useful than their predecessor (MEOW Coupons in New Leaf: Welcome Amiibo)
Greater control over where villagers live and what their houses look like. Well-loved villagers in earlier games might have very eclectic and unappealing houses because they're filled with random items, but in New Horizons you can directly decorate villagers' interiors if you have the DLC
Unprecedented control of exterior spaces, such as placing whatever items outside and literally reshaping rivers and cliffs
Lief and Kicks at Harv's Island have expanded stock at a time

Cons:

Villagers are shallower and less fun to maintain relationships with (don't show off letters, very repetitive dialogue, fewer requests, fewer games)
Some aspects of crafting and cooking are unnecessarily annoying, such as not being able to use items in storage or not being able to make more than one of the same item at a time
2.0 released after a lot of people felt burnt out with the limited experience presented in 1.0, so it was hard to want to jump back into the game to make the most of it
Cyrus is relegated to Harv's Island and processes changes immediately. In some ways, the immediate changes are a pro, but it lacks the charm and sense of hard work of waiting for half an hour or so for items to be done.
Missing furniture sets from previous games
Missing NPCs, like Pete and Blanca

A lot of feelings. Still, it's a very fun game! We would recommend it, especially to people who like playing games that let you customize spaces. That's what New Horizons is best at.