the one thing that I wish was more palpable in animal crossing is the sense of the town changing without you
like it’d be cool to have some kind of tracking amongst the villagers themselves with how much they’ve spent and bought from people so when you bought things from nook’s cranny that villagers have sold there they would receive the money and use it to do things in their yards and stuff
i know this kind of thing is really difficult to do well but i like the idea of leaving for a few months and having the town be totally different when you come back - when the villagers ask you “where have you been?” after you’ve been gone, it feels like a guilt trip because it still feels like the whole town revolves around your maintenance of it as opposed to the villagers doing their own tiny things as time passes
so coming back to a changed town and having someone go “where’ve you been?” turns into something much more fun to me because it’s not a question of like, we’ve been waiting for you and you haven’t shown up, it’s a statement of “look at all this cool stuff you missed while you were gone”
I think the series consciously moved away from a sense of autonomy & surprise with villagers from the original in order to have it become the sort of dollhouse simulator it is now. They’ve repeatedly mentioned removing features like Resetti yelling at u or villagers moving out without warning because it was unexpectedly hostile for people. As some1 who has played (& enjoyed) every mainline Animal Crossing I don’t think you could make a game as accomodating as New Horizons and still have all the indifference to the player of the original.
Like Original → Wild World → New Leaf u can see the progression they’re going on in terms of curbing the series’ more hostile elements at the cost of a sense of surprise or mystery. I think that’s probably the right call considering the scale of “Nintendo” now and their audience aims, + City Folk exists as proof of what a dead-end trying to recreate the old games from scratch was. As far back as Wild World ppl were spending hours using ground tiles 2 trick the game into having the customization features they wanted, so they’re clearly satisfying the wishes of a big portion of the continuing player base too.
But I think “this is your world, and you can make it as cozy as you like” has to come at the cost of “you are entering a whole new social space & have to figure out the cues and environment and how to live with people who are totally unknown & independent of you”. And while I don’t like how conversation in New Horizons feels like pulling a doll’s talk-string, that villagers would never express open hostility if u rubbed them the wrong way, I understand the majority of ppl r not looking to play something that might roast them out of nowhere.
But, I love the original the most for that reason! There’s rly little like it & I love how mischievious the tone is, it really captures something of being a child kind of being looked down on by everyone but still experiencing all sorts of surprises and experiences you can’t immediately contextualize. I wouldn’t say give it a shot if u like New Horizons but I would say give it a shot if it sounds interesting (although also, the overlap between games does sort of kill the desire to play more than one at once).
Some1 should hack the original so it’s better w/ gender & race and I would be happy that my ideal Animal Crossing exists (or we live in fantasy land & Nintendo localizes the Gamecube re-release w/ that stuff fixed/gba-ereader integration replaced and sells it on the Switch Eshop for $20 )
It’s seriously absurd that as recently as new leaf they were so disinterested in any sort of people of color playing that u had to grind tanning to have a darker skin tone.
Would have filled out my lists but was really disappointed that the gold tools weren’t infinite use though i get they wanted to keep you reliant on crafting.
Having a full aquarium would have been cool but uh, everyone’s would end up looking the same in the end so that lost appeal for me.
I really miss gyroids and not having a medieval japanese house skin
now that i’ve gotten around to bridging/ramping my entire island, i’m also redecorating everything because my house is a mess of items. have to wait until tomorrow for my matching arcade stools to come in, so my basement is a bit off right now. i would put in more cabinets, but those cost like 64 grand and i have other things to spend that money on.
Julie moved some boxes and uncovered my long-missing 3DS, so I finally got to revisit my ACNL town 3.5 years after I last played it. My biggest surprise was just how much less “progression” I’d made compared to in New Horizons: I didn’t have all the upgrades for my house, Katrina’s shop on main street wasn’t unlocked yet, the only museum exhibit I’d finished was for fossils, I was missing a bunch of K.K. songs, I’d barely started paying off the Reset Center project…
I know that part of it is that New Horizons did streamline town improvements by getting rid of a bunch of stuff and rolling as much as possible into landscaping or placeable items, but it’s still weird to think about just how much time I spent in New Leaf and how comparatively little I had to show for it. I’m back for one day and put in a little bit of dedicated work to drop 400,000 bells on my house and the project, and the otter scoutmaster shows up to give me badges for HHA Points, fish-catching, island medals, and villager tasks. Just feels different after all this time away.
I think there are aspects that won’t translate based on the disclaimers that appeared in the video; for example, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to change the size/shape of the rooms of your own house. However, you should definitely be able to use partitions, columns, and counters, among other features. The really exciting part is that progressing in the design job will give you the ability to renovate your island residents’ houses. If I’d known this was coming, I’d have never let Hamlet move away, but I was hoping to replace his “original resident” house with the one he gets when you invite him to live on your island after it’s founded. Ah well.
Yes, all my boxes are checked with these. Happy that all the gyroids look totally new. They were phoning it in by including the same batch from 2002 over and over.
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