Acknowledging the anniversary of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a bit surreal when looking back at its release. To date the title is to also put a firm date on when most people started their experience with lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. The two are inexplicably linked, for better or worse, and it’s one of the only video games I can think of with that sort of fate. Sure, other games came out in 2020 and were even responsible for helping people get through such an unprecedented time, but New Horizons is the only one that allowed people to connect and talk as if the world wasn’t falling apart around them.
The title, itself, isn’t a dramatic shakeup of what Animal Crossing is all about, but any discussion of it will never be removed from what was going on in the world in March of 2020. When people recount their earliest memories, it likely will be with a preceding story of how they were trapped in their homes and unable to do anything else. I know that for my mother and I, we played the game extensively for a few weeks together. We both love the series and since we couldn’t go anywhere else, we both discovered a lot of New Horizons’ secrets during that first month. It felt like the olden days of chatting on the school playground about in-game secrets, just that we could take our Switch’s outside and pretend we were actually visiting a resort island.
Our first exposure to the game wasn’t on release, however. Since I’ve had the extreme privilege to be in games media for some time now, I was at PAX East 2020 with my mother. While I was doing whatever coverage I needed for my job, my mom was taking in the sights and sounds of the expo hall. When I had a break, we met up and were able to traverse the extensive Animal Crossing booth Nintendo had set up that year. While some of its activities were childish, we bought into the entire gimmick. We have photos of the two of us sitting at a campfire, resting by the shoreline, and then one where I put a bug night over my mom’s head. She lost her marbles when we got a picture with the big Tom Nook.
She felt special being able to play the game early and getting to see how Nintendo was changing things. The demo on the show floor that year focused exclusively on the reworked opening to the game, which forces players to camp out on an island and build various pieces of equipment to start forming a home. That’s maybe the only departure this game takes from past installments and once your time through the “tutorial” is over, New Horizons returns to business as usual. You start welcoming villagers and unlocking stores and while there are roadblocks to doing this, the elongated intro showcases a massively differing design philosophy from something like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That put player freedom front and center. New Horizons seemingly wanted you to suffer a little before earning paradise.
And suffer you do as the early goings are kind of a pain in the ass. Unless you resort to fast-forwarding your console’s internal clock, it will take you a week to get your island back to “normal.” I appreciate that Nintendo wanted to change things up a little, but the hoops you have to jump through to return to what Animal Crossing is all about feel kind of arbitrary in retrospect. It’s also something that never crops up again once you’ve passed it unless you completely wipe your save and start over. I know a lot of the design choices here were influenced by Minecraft, a game that legendary creator Shigeru Miyamoto stated “we should have made” in an interview back in 2016. New Horizons was Nintendo’s shot at that and it doesn’t really work much. It’s fun, at first, to craft furniture and tools and all that, but once you establish your home and get things up to speed, the constant crafting feels like a stumbling block more than a feature.
You need to look no further than the various tools, which are now given an invisible health bar. Use your shovel too much and it will break on you, forcing you to either buy a new one or craft a different one. I suppose that mimics reality in that any shovel I buy now will only last me a decade or so before rusting and breaking, but in a game about living on a fantasy island, it feels obstructive. It’s also just plain annoying to have to find a crafting table and bring all of the parts with you just to make another one, not to mention you cannot bulk-craft a single thing in the game.
I think the biggest fault with New Horizons was something that the pandemic exacerbated. Nintendo had an extensive schedule of DLC updates planned for the game that would unlock different holidays and reintroduce new features. The idea was that periodically throughout 2020, we’d see the return of The Roost, get new features such as cooking and crops, and be able to explore small islands by talking to returning character Cap’n. It was a strategy similar to what Nintendo was doing in the Wii U era by including all kinds of content on disc and slowly unlocking it through title updates to keep interest in a game going (i.e. Splatoon). It left the game feeling anemic for so long and missing a lot of features that had been series staples for multiple entries.
The pandemic totally upended that and while some of those features would materialize in the first year, it would be roughly 18 months before we saw a proper expansion of sorts. That expansion then just dumped everything at once alongside a paid DLC. It was nice to have new stuff to dig into after so long, but unless you had been playing the game for the past year, all of these features were inaccessible for quite some time. Even if you had been playing, it was hard to figure out how to unlock certain things and when you did, you were done.
Still, those faults sort of mirror the reality that people around the globe had at home. During the pandemic, there was a period of maybe three months where I didn’t go anywhere apart from my backyard and it felt as if time had stopped. When I was finally able to go to a local store, I had to grab everything I needed right then and there and return home to ration that out. It’s bizarre to even think about, but life was simply different for a few years.
Anyway, five years isn’t really enough time to make a proper retrospective of what Animal Crossing: New Horizons means for the series. We can look at the sales numbers, which puts the game as the second highest-selling Switch title with over 47 million units sold, and know that Nintendo now has a legitimately massive franchise on its hands. Animal Crossing started as something niche and exploded to mega fame. Maybe that number is because of the pandemic, but then New Leaf on the 3DS also sold 13 million copies. The series isn’t a small fry anymore and you can bet that a sequel for the Switch 2 is in the works. Nintendo isn’t going to let that popularity die off, though it’s anyone’s guess how it will expand the gameplay from here.
For now, we still have our islands we can return to for some nostalgic joy. Due to everything that has happened since the pandemic started and “ended,” Animal Crossing: New Horizons does feel older than it actually is. Even if it was 100 years old, though, there is always a simple charm to these games that keeps them engaging.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
