Animal Crossing: New Horizons Review

In this time of global pandemic and social distancing, the world has basically ground to a standstill. Economies have slowed, businesses have shuttered, global unrest has grown, and live sports are still largely on hold. This is a perfect time for a little escapism from the drudgery of the everyday, and on March 20th, Nintendo came through, as they often do, releasing Animal Crossing: New Horizons to critical acclaim and strong sales, but, does it deserve the acclaim and record shattering sales it has garnered? Short answer? Yes it does! But let’s find out why!

Starting out, Tom Nook, the player and two other animal neighbors (I got Buck and Tammy), arrive on the island, lodging in tents until houses can be built. The resident services building, which was initially a tent, grew into a massive building, supporting the island’s plethora of residents, past, present and future. The island, which I named Pooksland, boasts a lush landscape, with copious amounts of trees, a wide variety of flowers and other amenities including (and this has 100% turned into a sales pitch, so forgive me:

A park bench, flanked by both a snack and soda machine respectively.

A recreational/park area, complete with kiddie ride and old time-y popcorn machine.

And much more in the way of amenities. But it didn’t get that way overnight, Rome wasn’t built in a day after all! How did it go from remote island, to flourishing community? It’s simple really. It took a lot of work, chopping down trees, weeding the island, catching fish, planting foliage and selling various things to earn Bells, the currency in all Animal Crossing games, which you can use to upgrade your home with furniture, new flooring and new wallpaper. Ostensibly, this is a game about building and progressing your island until it becomes a flourishing community. The only spelled out goals are in the early game, when you take out loans from noted crime boss Tom Nook to upgrade your house, whether that means getting it built, or the phase I’m currently in right now, adding on another room. Speaking of the house, let’s take a tour, shall we?

As you can see in the above image, we have the living room/bedroom/dining room. I didn’t expect one room to serve the purpose of three, but in Animal Crossing, you don’t have to abide by the typical home conventions at all. I think my favorite feature of this is either the wheelchair that serves no actual locomotive function, given to me by my buddy Sawyer, whom I’ve mentioned on the blog before, or the tape deck/old school tape player combo, which both play music bought from the Nook Shopping kiosk, in the Resident Services building, which I’ll talk about in a minute. There are various other fun things, dinnerware and table settings on the dining room table, a TV tray in one corner and a delightful old school fan in the other. The bed and wardrobe are also nice touches, in my estimation. But where things get really interesting is the second room in the house. Presenting…my office!

As one can see, this office offers all the conveniences of the modern workplace! There’s an office chair, a desk, a water cooler, a record player, and a fax machine, for when I need to send over important documents to clients. I wish to purchase a computer, which one can do at Nook’s Cranny, the shop run by Tommy and Timmy Nook, nephew of the head honcho of this whole island venture, but a computer will run you 50,000 bells and I don’t have that kind of money right now, because of the absolutely massive loan I took out to expand into the next room (about 348,000 bells if I remember correctly). Never before has a game about paying off home loans hooked me so fast, and been so interesting. It’s interesting because of the music, which has a relaxing, breezy quality befitting of this kind of game, serving as a noticeable enough counterpoint to the gameplay to be relaxing, yet noticeable. It’s also interesting because of all the characters you’ll meet. One of the main objectives of the game is to get characters to move to your island. It’s a fairly simple process, talk to Tom Nook to set aside some land, put 10,000 bells down as a part of the fee, and a few days later, somebody new moves in. And right now, I have 10 plots, though the screenshot below is inaccurate, as Knox (the chicken) moved away a few days ago and the plot is unoccupied:

As you can see, there are a lot of neighbors to visit, and talk to! And I try to give each of them at least one conversation per day. Let’s go over each of them, though I don’t have screenshots of each of their homes’ interiors, I regret the error.

There’s (from left to right)

Myself, Naomi, Tammy, Knox (no longer on the island), Buck, Peaches, Drake, Pashmina, Audie and Raymond. They all have their own unique personalities and things that they do depending on the time of day. My personal favorites are Buck, Drake and Audie, but Raymond, the scientist cat, clad in a fancy suit, whose house is just one giant laboratory, is quickly climbing up the list of favorites.

As for the various activities you can do in this game, there’s actually quite a lot, you can catch fish with your pole:

You can catch various bugs and butterflies of varying sizes with the net:

You can dig up fossils of prehistoric creatures and things:

You can visit with your neighbors, who usually have interesting things to say, though not always:

And there’s a lot more to do than what I have shown here. That’s where this game sets itself apart from other “life simulation” games in my view. The characters themselves, the corny jokes and puns vested in the writing whenever you catch a fish, they all contribute to a memorable experience, and in this time of unrest, we need all the escapism we can get. Now for the rest of the buildings on the island. There’s the aforementioned Nook’s Cranny, a shop where you can buy and sell almost anything.

There’s the airport, where you can go to different islands using either a Nook Miles Ticket, a sort of frequent flier reward system that accumulate after doing various tasks on the island and earning Miles, a secondary currency to Bells, and those tasks are dutifully organized in your Nookphone’s Nook Miles app:

Or you have the option go to other friend’s islands to visit them, something that I’ve done several times with my buddy Sawyer. It was something that was sorely needed as we are in need of not only escapism, but the human connection, as I’ve personally been in lockdown for about 3 months. It’s similar to Kojima’s Death Stranding, in that they have multiplayer figured out. It doesn’t need to be hostile, and should be focused on the communal experience of the game. But I’ll talk about Death Stranding later! Back to the other buildings on the island.

The little guy with the bowtie in the above picture is Blathers. He is by far my favorite character in the game, because of his look, and his mannerisms. He detests all bugs, but takes care of them anyway:

He always gets excited when you hand him a fossil to assess. And perhaps my most favorite feature of all, he gives you facts on the animals you give to him!

I’ve learned more about dinosaurs and fish from this one little owl dude than I ever did throughout my 16 years of formal education. If you refuse his fun facts, I’m convinced you detest the pursuit of knowledge and therefore are unworthy of my time! I’m only kidding of course! Mostly…The best thing about the museum in my mind is once the specimens you’ve snagged are handed over to Blathers, they are almost immediately put up for display in elaborate wings of the museum and each wing gets a couple separate rooms of its own! For instance, here’s the wing where all of the bugs are kept:

Here’s the fish wing:

And last and most impressively in my opinion, here’s the dinosaur/fossil wing, in pictures, because it’s more impressive that way:

This game does a fantastic job of marking your progress in tangible ways, and the museum is definitely one of them. Your house is another. Like I said in the intro, you start out in these tents and rough it until you’re given the option to expand. The same is said for all of the buildings, and it really makes all the work you put in feel worthwhile. This game also runs in real time, with a day/night cycle and different weather sometimes. Also different characters show up on the island depending on the day of the week, most of the time to sell you something. There’s Leif, a sloth, who usually sets up in the middle of the week, on Wednesday or Thursday and sells you plants and buys back weeds that you pick. There’s Daisy Mae, a pig who sells turnips on Sunday that function as shares in a stock market, which you can then sell back to Nook’s Cranny for a high number of bells usually. If gambling and risking your fortune on the promise of exorbitant riches isn’t your speed, you can always dig up a bag of bells:

And then plant it back in the ground:

Then a few days later, this will happen:

It’s a different tree, but the idea is still the same. If anyone ever tells you that money doesn’t grow on trees, show them this photo! The trees usually produce 3,000 bells, but apparently depending on the amount of bells dug up initially, the fully grown tree will produce three times the initial amount. So if 2,000 bells are dug up, 6,000 bells will appear days later. It’s good money, and if you’re doing a lot of improving, it will be sorely needed as some costs are exorbitant! Anyways, back to the buildings of the island. I’m sorry, I’m going off on a lot of tangents today! There’s just an awful lot to cover, but we’ll get there!

Here we see the tailor’s shop, run by the Able Sisters! In addition to what’s on display here, they have a wider selection of outfits in the changing area:

This is a shop that I don’t really visit that often, I don’t need to. The MVP tee, pilot shades, sweatpants and baseball cap are stylish enough for me already that I don’t really need anything else. But it’s nice to have there, just in case I find something good! We’ve talked a lot about the various features of the island, but very little in the way of actual objectives. What’s the goal here? Well, the goal is expansion, and expansion makes your island a more attractive place to settle down in. You expand by providing the materials necessary for construction to begin, and once those materials are acquired, construction begins. A day later, the building is finished and the player has the option to participate in a ceremony commemorating the completion of the building.

Commemorating the Resident Services Building.

Resident Services building circa July 1st, 2020

The Resident Services building is where most of the work on the island gets done. You can talk to Tom Nook to upgrade the island’s infrastructure by placing bridges or inclines, set aside land for future neighbors, and upgrade or relocate your own home, though to do any of these things will set you back a ton of bells. You talk to Isabelle if you want to file a complaint against your neighbor, which I have done against one of my own. Her name was Midge, she was a hummingbird, and instead of spending her time outside like all my other good neighbors, she was content to just stay inside and work on DIY projects which…fair. We humans in actual reality are in quarantine and need as many projects as we can to save ourselves from boredom. But in Animal Crossing, I like to be social! Sure, working on DIY is nice, but I like to get out and talk to my neighbors. So, I talked to Isabelle about it and within a few days, she moved. Of course, characters can just up and decide to leave one day and you can either talk them out of it, or encourage them to go. I did the latter with Knox as I didn’t feel any sort of attachment to him as opposed to Buck or Drake, so I let him go to find his own way. Anyway, in addition to complaints, Isabelle also handles the changing of the island’s flag and theme song, and island evaluations, which is a star rating out of 5, based on feedback from residents about the island and what can be done to improve. This caused a noted amount of frustration, as no matter what I did I couldn’t seem to move the island’s star rating up past 2. And then Isabelle would change what she thought the priority was, seemingly on a whim. She’d go back and forth between flowers and trees, and then scenery. At that point I was frustrated, I set the system’s clock forward to match the time it took for trees to grow and then I would craft decor for the island like crazy and be planting flowers. I was improving like a man possessed, until I finally got to three stars. What happened once I got to three stars? Read on to find out! Other than frustrating me to no end, Isabelle also handles the daily announcements on the island as soon as you boot up the game every day.

I think it’s a nice touch. It serves as a way to not only remind the player of how much time has passed in the game, but to make the island feel like a real place. There are other tiny touches like that all over this game. Characters have their own routines, sometimes they visit each other’s houses and talk to each other as they’re out and about. I even found my buddy Buck in the museum the other day:

It’s things like this that are part of the appeal of this game and this franchise really. You really feel like this community is yours, and it has earned its reputation because of the improvements you have made! It’s a cool feeling! You don’t get there without putting the work in, day in and day out, which really allows you to take ownership of said improvements! It’s a cool sort of feedback loop, even when you cheat and set your clock ahead sometimes like I did! But I digress…

After all the buildings have been set up and an appropriate amount of residents have moved in, it is then your job to decorate the Island’s scenery with infrastructure such as bridges:

Or flowers and trees:

Pictured: Just the flowers. Also note the lawn chair and cooler

After consulting with Isabelle, and finding out what needs to be improved, you can purchase flowers and saplings from Nook’s Cranny, or craft decorations to be used outdoors or in your own home by using a crafting bench:

You can also use the crafting bench to craft tools, which break after prolonged usage no matter what quality. Even gold tools, which appear after getting your island up to a 5 star rating, break, though they are more durable than the iron tools you usually use.
Once that’s done, and your island is up to a three star rating, everyone’s favorite guitar playing drifter dog, KK Slider comes to visit and perform a concert on the island, something which Tom Nook said would give the island more exposure.

I’ve always imagined him as similar to the Stranger, Sam Elliot’s character in The Big Lebowski. Both have similar manners of speaking and both drift in and out as they please, playing and hanging out wherever the winds take them, like the tumbling tumbleweeds of the American frontier. Or maybe KK’s existence is just a function of the game developers and your system’s clock! Who can say?

And that’s the ultimate goal of the game, and after that, you’re granted the ability to change anything about your island’s landscape through an app on your smartphone, basically gifting you the keys to the kingdom. Also KK Slider comes by every Saturday evening to play a set for the island residents, something which, as a former avid concert goer before the pandemic, I always make sure not to miss! You can be done with the game here if you want, most people aren’t. Most people get the island designer and just go absolutely insane. The island designer features different terrain options that you can purchase with Nook Miles, and you can also purchase the ability to put in cliffs and water features. It’s some pretty neat stuff! And it will keep getting neater, as Nintendo has plans to continuously roll out content throughout the year, the summer update is rolling out here in a few days as I’m typing this. Maybe I’ll keep this going, or review each update as it’s rolled out? Who knows?

Overall, Animal Crossing New Horizons is a very good game that defied my expectations. It’s a game that is about community, in a time where community seems like the farthest thing away from feasible right now. It’s a game where patience is paramount and it is imperative if you want to progress. It’s a game that isn’t for everyone, but if you’re willing to stick with it, it will reward you with one of the greatest experience the Switch has offered thus far in its life cycle! It’s also a game that isn’t done yet, as we still have to experience different real-life holidays in the game and different seasons, and it’s a game that will continue to stay fun and fresh as long as Nintendo is willing to roll out content!

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