Animal Crossing lost a bit of its soul when it turned the player into a god

Almost six years after the launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Nintendo will be releasing a substantial free 3.0 update to the game on January 15, alongside a $5 Switch 2 upgrade. Considering the last and “final” update was in Autumn 2021, this was certainly unexpected news. As a fan of the series who started with New Horizons, and have spent almost 2000 hours playing it, I’m eager to move on; it might’ve been my first, but after going back to the earlier Animal Crossings, New Horizons’ emphasis on player control over community loses sight of what these games do best. 

When the series started on the Nintendo 64 in Japan, the core theme was communication. Every day you would go from screen to screen in your little community, checking in with your neighboring villagers. The post office, which lives on in New Horizons through the postcard stand, was at the heart of the game. You would go there to pay off your loans, which was the closest the game got to an official goal, but also to mail letters to your friends. And although the responses to the letters you sent out to your neighbors were never deep, thoughtful, or personal, the animals would never stop asking you to write more—hammering home the importance of communication. 

That was originally the heart of Animal Crossing. After selling your shells, posting your fossils for inspection, and maybe buying a thing or two, all that was left to do was to run errands for your neighbors. Some would gossip about their boyfriends with you, some would snap at you if you got too casual too fast, and others would just try to keep you out of their hair. If you were lucky, you would find a ball you could kick from screen to screen. But conversation was the key.

The town was a fraction of the size of later entries, and villager dialogue repeated before too long, so you were encouraged to seek out other real-life players. With the GameCube port, players could swap memory cards of their towns to visit each other and exchange fruits. (It took actual effort to get all the different kinds of fruit in the original.) Now-dead online multiplayer was a key feature for the DS and Wii entries, with the WiiSpeak gadget being a rudimentary version of GameChat that left all your background noise in. Although these were different games with different dialogue, new items to collect, and even a shopping area to visit in City Folk’s city, these follow-ups preserved that focus on communication.

They also felt overly familiar for fans of the original. For many, the series quickly got stuck in a rut, with 2008’s City Folk a particular low point.

Change was needed, and when New Leaf arrived for the 3DS in 2012, the series broke new ground for the first time in years, at the cost of a little of its heart. Before now, the games started with you moving into an unfamiliar town and making friends with the locals, but here you arrived and were immediately given the role of mayor. You still needed to prove yourself to people, but everyone trusted you a lot more, coming up to you with ideas for improving the town. Although more embedded in the community than ever, you were also more distant, above the common people in many ways. You even had a personal assistant, Isabelle, a mayoral secretary who was at your beck and call 24/7. (The pelicans in the post office did 12-hour shifts but at least you knew they got some time off.) In New Leaf, you’re no longer part of this world, but above it.

Other than a New Leaf update and a spinoff, the series went quiet again until New Horizons arrived for the Switch in 2020. It took the customization introduced on the 3DS to new extremes. Players are able to place practically any item almost anywhere on the island, not just inside of their homes. New Leaf had let you place landmarks and lampposts but now you could shape the whole island in your image. Sites like Nookazon popped up, where players could spend in-game or real money to acquire their favorite villagers and alternate versions of items to get their island just right. Videos of players whipping their less favorite villagers with nets, believing it would make them ask to leave faster, appeared all over the internet. Micro-managing your neighborhood, redirecting the flow of the river, checking in every day to get as many Nook Miles as possible… Remember when Animal Crossing was about talking to your neighbors?

Although the online aspect of community was healthier (depending on your definition) than ever, the core of the series had been forgotten. Villager dialogue was blander than ever, many buildings were reduced to visitors, the shop stops at a single upgrade instead of growing as you play, and players could go days without talking to their neighbors without missing anything. All that there was to do was craft and carve the land up to your liking. No minigames to play, no UFOs to shoot down, not even any random balls to kick around. More than ever, Animal Crossing had become a dollhouse simulator. And people loved it.

With 48.19 million copies sold so far, it’s no wonder that Nintendo is focusing on that install base with this update rather than pushing out an entirely new entry. All the same, it’s been almost six years of the same dialogue, the same hourly music, the same postcards washing up on the shore. The pandemic messed up the rollout of updates, with most adding one or two things until the big 2.0 update and Happy Home Paradise expansion in 2021, but there is a world in which Nintendo publishes regular updates and content expansions for New Horizons like EA does with The Sims 4. And I’d get all of them, don’t get me wrong.

Without that the in-game routine has calcified. Check the post and the hot items at the shop, get a fortune reading from Katrina on Harv’s Island, quit and reopen the game to save loading time, shake all the trees, dig up all the fossils, get a coffee from The Roost, go to a mystery island with Kapp’n. New Horizons additions like cooking are so superfluous to the core experience that I frequently forget about them.

Despite this, I always end up returning to New Horizons for a month or two every year, until the litany of chores and shallow interactions wear me down again. And when playing recently, I’ve not been able to stop thinking about what could come next. So far on the Switch 2 we have an open world Mario Kart, a musical Donkey Kong, and an insult to the disabled community. What could a new Animal Crossing look like? What new directions could it go in on the Switch 2? With this new update, though, full of new licensed collaborations, mouse support, and more, it’s getting harder to imagine a new entry arriving this decade.

The most significant part of the 3.0 update is the hotel on the pier run by Kapp’n’s family, returning from the minigame island in New Leaf. This time, they’re running a hotel where you need to design rooms based on a theme, and—oh wait, this is just like the Happy Home Paradise expansion, but free. It will be interesting to have tourists wandering the island alongside the usual villagers, but this isn’t too inspiring.

Also coming in January are the Slumber Islands, empty islands you can customize top to bottom without having to uproot your entire island. Most interesting about this is the ability to reshape the island alongside other players, so long as everyone is paying for Nintendo Switch Online. For players who want to realize a concept without tearing their actual island apart for weeks, these Slumber Islands will be a welcome edition. But I’m tired of being the all-powerful Resident Representative.

You may argue that with as much time in the game as I have, maybe I’m just done with the game. And maybe I am, but Nintendo isn’t. The Switch 2 enhancements adding mouse controls when decorating your house and bringing back the megaphone using the console’s built-in microphone are welcome additions, but it’s time to see something new at this point. New villager personality types, new hourly music, new seasonal events—anything.

More vitally, it’s time for Animal Crossing to return to something old: the focus on community and communication. With the new update, though, and the increasingly lengthy gaps between new Animal Crossing games, that’s not likely to happen any time soon—even if it’s a direction Nintendo would consider pursuing after the smash success of New Horizons. While it’s likely the next game will only go further down the path of total player control above all else, this upcoming update signifies that we won’t be moving on from island life anytime soon.

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Catherine Masters is a games intern for The A.V. Club.

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