I miss animal crossing
for some reason, youtube's been suggesting a bunch of animal crossing essays and after watching a few of them, I feel like I echo a common statement: it's kinda fallen off.
my first animal crossing game was, like many westerners, ACNL, the 3DS game. I loved it and played it for ages but the funnest part of the game was finding all these new little tiny details, these fun magical aspects that have no real purpose at all but to be a cool thing to notice. Like, when you cut down trees, sometimes, the stump will have a pretty pattern in it:
ACNH doesn't have this.
here's a youtube video from midway through ACNH's updating back a few years ago, that goes into some of the little things ACNH never implemented fully. this includes Gyroids, something I LOVED from ACNL, finding them was so cool and fun and they had so many weird silly ones that made fun noises, some were cute, some were genuinely frightening, but when ACNH finally implemented them, there were.... 4, and the rest were just palette swaps. How hugely underwhelming. You had to "grow" them like crops, too, which sucked. Where's the fun?
ACNH has a lot of really neat aspects to it, for sure, but so much seems like it was missing and it didn't feel as if it built on the previous game, because so much of what made the previous game fun was missing. These little things just feel so important to me and make you feel like, the whimsy of stumbling across them is half the fun.
I liked the minecraft stuff, growing crops was fun, being able to sculpt your island was definitely really cool, but... it eventually just became daily chores: finding bottles, selling corals, find the treasure rock, shake trees, check the market, water plants, water crops, check out what your villagers are crafting so you can get the recipe, and while that sounds like a lot, eventually the returns just didn't feel like it justified it. I think there was a point where I was getting the same recipe cards over and over and over when I realized that I was bored of it.
I've played HHD and it's fun but it's very simple and just a little dollhouse game. I do love it for that, though, so I have no issues with it. I've been playing some of Pocket Camp, the mobile game they just released, which is apparently a version of the original ACNH mobile game tie-in but with way less micro transactions, it's extreeeemely generous with the bells and rewards. However, any actual skill the game required- ie for catching bugs or fish- has totally been neutered. I get it, I guess, mobile games can't rely on dexterity or timing with touch screens.
but here's the thing, pocket camp actually came out BEFORE ACNH did, so everyone thought it was a little preview of what we could expect from ACNH and I remember excitedly discussing with my friends: omg, what if... we have a little camper and we go from world to world, brand new procedurally generated villages with new villagers and items to barter with and things to trade and sights to see?! From time to time you come across your beloved NPCs who've set up shop, if you're lucky and get to enjoy a new hairstyle or whatever. We could even have a bunch of fun new NPCs (not that the Dodo bros weren't super cute) to randomly encounter in these villages. And to prevent speedrunning through, you'd have to stay at least one night in each village, but you're pretty much free to stay as long as you want, moving on only when you want to, to the next one. We could upgrade our camper while we stay at a little roadside motel (ran by new NPCs of course), and then when we get it back maybe it's got a TARDIS-like second floor in it or a pop-out deck or so on until we get a huge party bus with like 3 rooms or something. And part of the nature of the game is learning to "let go" of a village we have enjoyed staying at...maybe, we can have like 5 or so villages that we "bookmark" to come back to in the future if we REEEEEALLLY love them a lot, but other than that, learning to "move on" could be an essential game mechanic. The next place you went might have mountains, the next might have forests, the next might be a desert, the next might be very rainy, etc. Some might have a spooky theme, some might have a western theme, and so on.
This is a game I'd love to play every day. I wish that game existed. Maybe some indie dev can make it, I'd love that. If I knew how to program, I'd do it myself, because as I dreamed of what ACNH was going to be, I feel like a whole game formed fully in my head, and when it came out, I was set up to be disappointed a little bit. A game like this would feel gigantic, especially after just having played BOTW. It turned out that ACNH felt extremely small.
anyway... when the next one comes out, I hope they do something where it doesn't devolve into chores again. Maybe one day. I'll definitely be playing it regardless.