To me New Horizons feels like that one episode of Spongebob where Squirdward moves to his perfect community and live a perfect life every single day, only to quickly grow tired of it because nothing interesting ever happens anymore to shake things up, as he puts it, it's perhaps "too much paradise"
100% accurate. i played new leaf for years. new horizon 9 months. i didnt even experience all the patches. it just was boring after awile. and the fact the side rooms in the house were too small to do diddly crap with.
I think point 3 is spot on. I have some friends who *really liked* New Horizons and I don't hold that against them, but when I explain "what I liked about older Animal Crossing games was that I was just another member of the town rather than a god building my dream town," they just don't get it. "Why wouldn't you want total control over how everything looks and is laid out and make it perfect." Well, because that's just a different experience. When a friend visits from out of town, its fun to show them everything you've learned about where you live - the best restaurants, recreational spots, etc. *That* is what I liked about the first 3 AC games, but now (and even with New Leaf to an extent) I feel like I'm less checking little towns other people are a part of and more like I'm having a theme park aggressively explained to me like a Funko Pop collector who's a little too proud of how much time or money they've put into their hobby.
I totally get both sides honestly. I really like New Horizons, but I grew up on New Leaf; I really wanted the ability to customize my town more, since I'm a big fan of sandboxes, and in the end that's what draws me back in to New Horizons. (Plus I never had any friends in my NL days, and I have lots of memories of the charm of my friend's islands on NH, so it's not like I'm particularly attached to that feeling 😭) But I really hate the villagers. I used to be a big defender of the NH ones since anybody talking about the WW ones just made them sound like they were just *mean*, and the comfort of my villagers being my friends was what I loved about them. But actually seeing them, I've realized they're exactly what I wanted-they're people. They have personalities and not just the idea of them. You befriend them and earn their trust. It's the exact reason I hate normal/jock villagers, and I love Lobo (my only cranky); I talk to him and he feels like a person. I love NH, and I love being able to furnish my town. But I wish there was a bit of a compromise; maybe the inability to make your villagers move. Maybe you can convince them, or maybe they want to live somewhere specific (like maybe this villager wants to live next to a river) but they shouldn't just bow at your feet. Also villager hunting. I know people are really attached to that one, but I feel like it does make it hard to get attached to obscure villagers the same way I used to in NL 😭 Maybe a compromise there too. I'm not sure how exactly.
@@_afancyhat_ It's interesting for me to hear opinions of NH from the perspective of players who've only played NL before it. I grew up playing the "original" on GameCube (though I do also now own Doubutsu no Mori on N64) and my favorite is probably City Folk because I feel like it used the internet to achieve everything the original *wanted* to, but couldn't (see: how hard it is to interact with other players and towns). While I played WW, I feel it didn't build off of the past games enough to warrant being it's own game aside from "it's portable now!" which is definitely an improvement, but ironically made sharing the town with siblings feel more cumbersome for me, which overall detracted from it. I played NL when it came out, but honestly felt that a lot of the problems I ended up having with NH were already starting to crack the appeal I found in the first couple titles, but weren't quite clear enough for me to be able to articulate *why* I never really wanted to play it. Like, the ordinances are a cool idea, but to me it always felt like they were more or less allowing the player to pick which mechanic was the most annoying and let them disable it, which goes against the whole "you're a villager living in a town" feel.
@@BryceDixonDev I totally get that! I wasn't old enough to have played the earlier consoles when I was younger, so it was only NL and later NH. I could definitely see it having been what pushed me to want more customization rather than less, though; I hadn't played any of the older games to feel it was too *much* control, but was given just enough that it felt a bit restrictive not to have more and thus wanted it-but ultimately circled back to wishing for the personality of earlier games now that it was completely removed. It's definitely super interesting, and thinking about it it's likely a massive factor in the community's divide.
Problem is though, the conversations tend to get repetitive. Like sure, there’s certain variations of the conversations that take place, but I don’t find them to be quite as interesting.
In addition to your points, the only other thing I liked was the updated sound effects/ambience, like the wind rustling in the trees and the rain stuff its so GOOD AUGH-
The lack of being able to place things outside since the original always felt weird. Just a little garden area would have been cool, rather than having to have a weird basement garden.
and the fact you can customize almost everything thanks to Cyrus (I know you are going to say that was a thing in NL but its different enough imo + not having to wait 30 mins every time) and being able to change more aspects about your villager like hair, nose, eyes etc without having to spend 3000 bells and only being limited once a day or worse, having to start over because you picked the wrong dialogue at the beginning of the game and Isabelle telling you which special villagers are visting the town and the extra bugs and fish to catch and the tool wheel and the wands and fences and the gyroids actually being in sync with the music and the lighting system indoors
my first AC game was Wild World. I would constantly speak to my villagers and they would always say new stuff, it was amazing. One day i noticed a repeated line of dialogue and i distinctly remember saying “ah-ha! so they’re not infinite!!”. Now enter New Horizons, where god forbid you have 2 villagers with the same personality type. They’re just mindless puppets strolling around. The whole focus of the game is just decorating, and villagers are yet another piece of furniture to make your place look superficially pretty.
Wild World has the deepest conversation trees of the whole series. It was the only game where what the villagers said didn't depend solely on their personality. The DS was the most limiting console of the whole series but that limitation pushed the devs to make the most interesting character interactions in the series to keep you coming back.
@@IPITYTHEFOOLZto this day nintendo is still obsessed with the squeaky clean sanitized image and its holding them back because the entire gaming landscape has changed drastically since the 90s. parents let their kids play graphic shooters and horror games nowadays, so whats the problem with small animal banter?
wild world was also the only animal crossing game where town npcs would vent some of their problems to you why have they not expanded on episodes is beyond me
There’s something intimate about the older games, for me new leaf, where I don’t feel like I have to make my town “look good” or compare with other people’s. There was something private and genuinely joyful about logging on and seeing your community. It felt like a second life. New horizons is great for creativity, but it has none of the soul and coziness of the old games. It’s just never going to compare in that respect.
Everything is so overly "realistic" in New Horizons and I miss all the quirky stuff in the old games. Like for example, now there's a chessboard item which is neat but it removed all the giant chess items. Having a giant king piece pretty much double the height of the player character was so silly. Or how the Gyroids now. They're all ~aesthetic~ & unintrusive now. But in the old games they used to be big & strange. I just miss that kind of energy the game had.
As someone obsessed with the gamecube original animal crossing weirdness and grew up with it as a kid, I think I actually do prefer New Horizon’s take on gyroids. They’re generally more creative and have more going on with their concept and model and design and animations. I would like if we had some creepier looking ones though, yeah
A lot of animal crossing players share this same sentiment, but my ideal animal crossing game would be somewhere between population growing, new leaf, and new horizons. the small-town charm and unique dialogue from population growing, the wealth of activities and interesting NPCs in new leaf, and the endless customization of new horizons. I don't think anyone wants this series to regress, but almost everyone, myself included, would love an animal crossing game that feels like a true expansion on those classic animal crossing experiences
Honestly, the biggest thing that struck me about New Leaf vs New Horizons was the tree. Remember? When you start your town in New Leaf, you plant a ceramonial tree in the town plaza that you get to watch grow. And when your town is a year old, you get a statue of that tree in celebration for you achievement of building and cultivating this community. Watching that tree grow was more rewarding than earning Nook Miles will ever be.
Seeing that tree grow over time was amazing. Add in the amazing StreetPass feature for New Leaf and it's no surprise I spent so much time playing that game and took my 3DS with me everywhere.
I also loved how once your tree had grown quite a bit, you could sit by it and you would get a history of your town since you moved there. I really hope they bring the town tree back in the next game, it was so special.
@@firetamer the streetpass feature was one of my favorites bc my family likes to travel, we would go on a few roadtrips and id play acnl in the car and i passed so many people. some people from other countries, even! it was really cool
@@kiwiparfaits I took my 3DS with streetpass on it round Disneyland Paris and got a veritable smorgasbord of nationalities across 3 days. Got a few foreign passes before, but I live in part of the UK that isn't exactly a tourist hotspot.
Man when you switched to Animal Crossing for the GCN and I heard that music, it felt like a warm blanket was delicately placed on my shoulders. What an era.
Man for real...I was SOOOO excited once I saw terraforming in the trailer. Then I played it and the game was soooo tedious and the villagers sooo boring.
same here. whats worse is that it was a disappointment that set in over time. i really wanted to like this game, but i noticed it felt a little hollow from the outset. the monotony of waiting for the game to give you features that you should have had from the start was the first thing to leave a bad taste in my mouth. the bland villagers were worse than New Leaf, and the tedious-as-sin terraforming is where i finally dropped it. they took a step back in everything but the graphics.
Dawg its just... So boring I swear the hype ia from glazers of some sort that only like the game for aesthetics, or from what i remember, just the villagers, even though the villagers really really suck and are boring, i swear theyre ai 🪦🪦. Also while writing this now, i cant believe people hyped over a cat with heterochromia and glasses and a suit, like thinking about it.. that design in itself probably shows how bad the game is.
the only reason i spent my hard earned $200 on a switch lite WAS acnh. i was so hyped for it and telling everyone they should get a switch for it too. funnily enough, i ended up using my switch for every game one could think of EXCEPT nh. if i could get my $60 back, i would in a heartbeat. but i learned not to get overly hyped for the next ac game at least
13:56 You think that's bad? I've had that happen three times in a row within the same MINUTE. Dude spouted the same dialogue he's said countless times before, so in search of something new or even just something different I spoke to him again immediately after the conversation ended, to which he simply repeated the exact same dialogue he JUST said word for word. I rolled my eyes and spoke to him again right after that, and he.. Repeated it. Again. I felt a sudden sting of utter disappointment, defeated. I walked away that time and came to the saddening conclusion that there's no reason to bother talking to villagers anymore, so days went by where I simply ignored them. It felt wrong feeling this way about them, I mean the villagers are THE reason for playing an Animal Crossing game. Yet everytime I played it I felt more resentment towards them knowing that there's no point talking with them at all, just a bunch of empty husks repeating themselves ad nauseam. No thoughts, no meaningful interactions. I should not have felt this way about ANIMAL CROSSING I mean c'mon. So it didn't take long before I stopped playing altogether.
I remember on the gamecube my villager got mad at me and was hostile at me at first and i was sad by it, but then the villager got nicer and i really felt like i had a connection with that villager. Starting them off worshiping the ground you walk on and never being mad at you made them feel lobomized. It feels so worthless to build a bond when you're already at the top.
That happened to me and I was terrified of him for so long… thought he’d fight me or something. Eventually I decided to be brave and stop avoiding him and he gave me a wallpaper- I was so damn excited and proud. It was silly but to a little kid that was a very exciting arc
@@alejandropulidorodriguez9723 wait that’s a really good point! I didn’t analyze it much outside of it being a funny half remembered memory, but you’re totally right. Animal crossing characters with edge can definitely teach you to build confidence in yourself because you have to confront everyone even if they don’t immediately love you
One thing I do think this game did really well was the museum. It looks beautiful and all the fish look really fresh with the hd graphics. That has been my favorite part of this game and I feel is a core part the series that is left in this game untainted.
describing the villagers as decorations and not actual neighbors living with you in a community is SUCH a good way of explaining it. and it makes me so sad, as someone who has played since i was a child (gamecube ac was one of my favorite games as a kid) i have a LOT of hours in acnh (mainly from 2020) but much of my time has been spent trying to design it, rather than enjoying it/my villagers. i hope that the next animal crossing game will return the focus to the villagers and community. actually having to build a relationship with your neighbors is so much more rewarding, and keeps you coming back. like with the gamecube one, i would run upstairs after school and spend hours talking to my villagers, sending them letters, and running around town doing activities. i want that feeling back!
Another video went over this, because of all the decoration stuff you couldn't have the villagers disagree with you. So like you could just move peoples houses wherever you wanted or do whatever. Honestly it would've been cool if your villagers didn't want to be moved, or at least you had to become good friends with them before you could move their house. Ngl though I did love NH and it's pretty much my 2nd most played game on switch. Even then I would've definitely prefered a bit more life sim stuff over the decoration. As I'm gonna be honest the island decoration stuff just gets tedious for me and really it feels like the endgame for it once you've done everything else. HHP was fun at the start it just felt like a slog near the end. I was getting tired of island decoration so you know what would be good, more decoration! I would like to try new leaf but it's so difficult to emulate and I honestly don't want to spend hours looking at a tiny screen for ants.
Even as a complete newcomer to the series (and an adult) I was just confused by the villagers, I just could not get my head around the fact they weren't programmed to be interesting. I'd heard so much about Animal Crossing and how much people loved them, and there was just nothing there.
right? ^ its like these people's main arguments on why NH "sucks" is because their experiences with older AC games were better, of course it would be, you were a child. all games were magical when we were kids, its not an objective reasoning at all. most people would find anything they play now or the games they enjoy more lackluster because we've grown so accustomed to it all. all this trash take is just peak nostalgia glasses, nothing more. ACNH delivered on what it had in mind and it was successful with it, and its a solid addition to the franchise. you cant be serious acting like it sucked when it had the whole world in a chokehold when it came out, and no its not because of that damn pandemic, but because it was genuinely good. people just got burnout, and also some people found it boring, which is normal because not everyone likes the same sh*t.
@@princesszelda8577 when did i ever say new horizons sucks? i have over 2,000 hours in it. please don't put words in my mouth. people are allowed to dislike parts of the games they like. to me, the villagers in new horizons are much weaker than previous games. and that includes new leaf, which i played as a teen, not that long ago. also, i haven't played that many games in my life as a kid or as an adult because of financial reasons. so again, please stop making assumptions about me based on one (1) Not That Serious comment i left on a youtube video. which was also critiquing the game. that's why i left my comment. god you guys have nothing better to do. sorry i expressed an opinion about a game on the internet! guess i'll die also sorry. leaving this reply is just so insane to me i reread my original comment and it's just. not even negative?? yall are weird. "this trash take isnt objective" yeah and? i was talking about my own Subjective opinion based on my own experiences lol. lmao even. have a good day
I haven’t played OG Animal Crossing in a long time. But I remember my villagers would get angry, sad, or gleefully happy. In New Horizons, they all just seem chill happy all the time. That’s no fun.
@@rathalos4783 I disagree, with how you build up the island and well....make a life for you and the other villagers it is a life simulation too. The villagers themselves though feel lacking in persoality though.
@@Jdudec367 Idk being in charge of terraforming feels bigger, busier, and ambitious. Just having the possibility to overhaul your island gave a lot of idealism and anxiety. On the other hand, the life simulation part comes really short compared to New Leaf.
New Horizons was too focused on single player and decorating. The villagers had never been more repetitive and one dimensional. I felt like there was more to see and do in the GameCube version. It took months to get features new leaf had at launch, and many features it just never got. It finally gave us a outside only vendor area somewhat similar to main street. But it was off island, behind a longer loading screen and you could only go there by yourself
I find it so ironic that the game that lets you have 8 players on one island also decided it was a good idea to get rid of Tortimer Island's minigames, and games with villagers in general
For a comparison of just how much fun stuff AC had on Gamecube, vs NH, I recommend BrianMp16's video, highlighting his journey to acquire 100% items through legit play. There were SO many unique things you could get just by participating in the game and talking to villagers. No crafting grind, no paid DLC, just playing the game.
@@Duskool I forgot it was bumped up to 8 players, although me and my friends would only have up to 4 of us altogether on one of our islands and that already started feeling crowded. Not sure what 8 people are supposed to do together, especially without minigames or.. SOMETHING. I mean c'mon, most people are nowhere near as interesting as they want to believe, and bumbling around in each other's town with nothing to do is definitely not worth the horrid online experience either, if there's not even anything to do we'd be better off avoiding the whole damn thing and simply continue talking on Messenger or whatever.
You reminded me of just how hard Wild World pushed its online features by having so much content that promoted interacting with other players. New Horizons would have been the perfect time to revisit that scale of online interaction but everything regarding other players feels like an afterthought. Even Pocket Camp feels more social by having a player market.
The amount of control they give you in New Horizons is why it attracted the batshit crazy control freaks from games like the Sims that create Ethnostates. One of my most cherished memories of OG Animal Crossing is that I tried everything to get Opal to move out of town: Pushing her into pit traps, Smacking her on the head, failing her quests...etc but she never moved out. Meanwhile, my favorite neighbor camofrog moved out. 😭
I used to play the OG game on gamecube with my mum. She passed away a few years ago, and sometimes I feel like going back to our town and meeting up with her character again. But it feels.... really hard.
Everyone one talking about animal crossing this or that but no one paused and read the letter at 1:33 because there is not a single comment on it and that letter gave me psychic damage I need to go to bed to heal
the furniture sets being missing ruins it the most for me. i hate having "normal" furniture. i dont want a realistic looking house, i want my animal crossing furniture sets! the ones i love! and cant wait to collect from nooks! nooks in new horizons is useless, everyday its boring furniture that i dont want
it immediately made no sense to me that they got rid of staples like rococo and lovely and rustic sets. it was so fun seeing it all come together but now nothing really matches anymore
@@fbs927 the lovely furniture was the first one i fell in love with in wild world ;-; then in new leaf my fav was the sleek and rocooco set! i loved the customisation colours you could do on the rococo!!
One of the only things that kept me playing NH was collecting one of each type of flower. In hindsight, it was one of the few things that players can't have total control over. You have to learn these super obscure breeding mechanics, water your flowers each day, and hope that the flower you want shows up. Slowly I collected them over the course of months (I think) until finally I got the last flower, a blue rose. It felt awesome. I don't know how to explain it, but this optional, somewhat hidden, and surpisingly deep gameplay mechanic made me happy and I wish the game had more elements like that. Hopefully the next game is more like the old ones.
Now I wish I bothered with the flower breeding in NH more. I liked it a lot in NL but never bothered in NH, likely due to the much more expansive options in decorating your island.
15:15 there’s something about an evening stroll through an abandoned new leaf town that gives the game its soul. That poignant reminder that life moves on without you. It’s completely absent in NH.
I agree about the control thing. Like, in New Leaf, once when I was a kid I didn't play for a few days. I don't remember why, maybe I wanted to play something else, or more likely my toxic mother didn't let me play at all. And when I finally came back, I recieved a letter. Flip left. The thing is, I liked Flip a lot. He was one of my favorite neighbours. And since I was a kid, it made me cry that he left Something my video game-hating mother couldn't understand. I know you can prevent your villagers from leaving in New Leaf but since I wasn't playing for a few days as I said, I couldn't prevent it. But this experience is the entire reason I still remember the guy to this day. Apparently villagers can't move out without your permission in New Horizons. Well to be fair, it is a good thing in several aspects, but also I wouldn't remember Flip as much if he didn't leave back then. The emotional impact wouldn't be as strong.
Hear me out... Imagine in new horizons you could start out as just a regular resident and then later down the line had the OPTION to become the resident representative and depending on if you chose to take that opportunity some players would have more or less limitations. As for the villagers there could be a system in which when your friendship level is low/average the villagers could move on their own while if it was high they'd ask for your advice, which would give you a reason to come back to the game and talk to your villagers in order to keep them on the island. I feel like that would both satisfy older players who are there for the life sim experience and the players who are looking for creative freedom to turn their island into whatever they want it to be.
I agree. I think the next game in the series should try and find a compromise between life sim and sandbox. Something I didn't touch on in the video is that NH completely lacks the feeling that your Island is developing over time that the older games had, and I think the higher level of control and sandbox elements could work as far-flung endgame rewards.
@@JohnSexDD I didn't play the other games so I can't really compare but for me New Horizons just progresses way too fast in general, with time travelling you can speedrun getting up to 3 stars in just a couple hours and after that there's not much left to do aside from filling your museum and decorating your island. I wish that part of the game wasn't so gameplay focused and for example expanded more on the lore of the special characters rather than turning them into tutorial text boxes. Also wish there were more ways to interact with your villagers instead of just hearing the same line of dialouge everyday and occasionally finding a lost item or earning a reaction. It does seriously feel like a sandbox game with extra steps.
I had the same thought as I was watching this video. If being elected "mayor" or "resident representative" was something you had to work towards over time by bonding with the villagers, rather than something that just got handed to you, that would let them give villager relationships a little more focus and depth. (Also bring back letting me just ask for errands to run, I kinda loved these dorks just randomly lending each other's stuff to a long chain of friends.)
I hope Nintendo really takes these points into account while drafting the next major Animal Crossing game. I started with the Gamecube edition and hadn't played another title until New horizons. I played New Horizons a ton for nostalgic reasons, but it's really like they took the "soul" out of it. I always liken the original animal crossing to the blues. It relateably highlights the tough times while reminding you that life's still a good time!
man you reminded my how much i miss just swearing in youtube videos. no stupid sound effects. or baby words. just a normal person swearing and saying whats on their mind
if only youtube didn't get so soft with the creators and adsense and actually allowed most of them to speak normally. i hate that you can't even say dead or death or make any mention of it without saying that "unaliving" thing. its so stupid and completely takes you out of the moment. thanks youtube for caring about money and ThE ChiLdREn 🥴
@lilaclunablossom You don't gotta be 14 to enjoy a bit of profanity. Content has gotten so forcefully sanitized to the point that it just doesn't feel genuin anymore. People having to work around their vocabulary just so they can get some money out of their work has gotten so bad to a point where the fun of honest commentary is just gone. The differences between listening to a TH-cam video essay, or literally anything on mainstream TV nowadays is barely present anymore. Let people swear! Off-hand comments out of nowhere are waaaay more fun and human than playing a 5+ year old Vine clip instead, or talking like TH-cam's got your nutsack gripped at every second.
New Horizons reminds me of the Berenstain Bears story "Too Much Birthday." It's fun to customize your clothes and decorate your house and choose the layout of your house..... but when you can customize everything and change the layout of the entire island and choose who gets to live on your island and choose your exact face and hairstyle... then it's not fun anymore. Limitations are what inspire creativity. Endless horizons bring stress and boredom in games. Also, I just want my tools to not break. I'm supposed to be relaxing, not counting the exact amount of times I've used my tools so I can be prepared for when they break. It's just a mechanic that does not work at all in AC and imo it barely works in Zelda.
The absolute worst is the Lazy personality types. In the GameCube games they're absolutely charming, to the point that Cube was one of my favorite villagers. I don't remember much about New Leaf, but they were still fun to hang around with. In New Horizons, it seems like 70% of the time, they're talking about the bugs in their walls. Like, what the heck. It got bad to the point that I only keep one Lazy villager just for the unique items they can give.
Insane enough, I met my husband through NH! I poured thousands of hours into my island during quarantine, and it's how I meet the most important friends I still have to this day. For all of it's weird, quicky, boring faults, this game will always have a special place in my heart. I haven't played in years at this point and I'm not sure I ever really will, but my husband and I plan on growing turnips in our old age
In New Leaf, years and years ago, as a child, I walked in on my at the time favorite Villager, Frank, and Curt talking. I hadn't known this could happen, but Frank was planning on moving out and a little cutscene played where he was asking Curt (I was very attached to the two, so I guess I got them to like me a bunch) to take care of my character when he was gone. It was so incredibly sweet and this kind of thing is missing from New Horizons. I wish there were more of that!
Animal Crossing: New Horizons, because of the hardware, is the most graphically beautiful Animal Crossing to date, but there are so many things you say here I can't help but agree with. I say that as someone who played far more ACNH than you with a higher tolerance for when I got bored of it. First thing I noticed was how your villagers are basically glorified decorations who only ever gargle your balls. It gets extremely boring very quick. None of them are allowed to leave on their own and move on, so I can control who stays. I have zero repercussions for ignoring them, and would only ever talk with them for Nook Miles. They'd never get mad at me for more than a second, and then go right back to deepthroating me. I actually enjoyed the terraforming, but by the time I got it, I fell in love with my island the way it was so much that I barely touched it apart from making paths and tweaking the odd thing here and there. I loved all the clothing options available, as well as the wand. I didn't mind customizing furniture myself, but would have liked that function tied to an NPC. As for changing your hair and whatnot, I wouldn't mind going back to an NPC for that, but I just would like the ability to fix my hair like in ACNH if I had to take a long break from the game. For all that I loved about ACNH, I was given far too much control and as you said, it felt more like a sandbox than a home. I rarely find myself returning, and that makes me sad.
Just earlier today, before I found this video, it had occurred to me that the villagers *depress* me real bad. All the attachment I got for them comes from the previous games and now they're these hollow shells. And trying to talk to them simulates trying to socialise with people I don't feel connected to and this leaves me, like, *genuinely* depressed and alienated. I guess I'll get my old New Leaf out again...
That's a general thing with Japanese entertainment I noticed. Everyone is so damn nice in kids media now. The og Pokemon is the most popular example of this shift.
It's really depressing to see. It's setting up kids to not know how to handle conflict because not everyone is going to be nice to you and kids need to learn how to deal with that.
its so watered down nowadays that people are able to be offended by the smallest of things (like opinions,) and now censorship is extremely heavy nowadays. we can't say anything without either people getting offended or the "bleep!" noise getting overlayed. ON EVERYTHING.
the direction of animal crossing games makes me feel conflicted. because on one hand, i love new horizons and the customisation and freedom it offers, but it is missing the charm of the older games. it doesnt feel like a little virtual world i can escape to with villagers that actually feel like people, when wild world and new leaf have always been that for me. and i feel like that small town charm will never come back because now theyve given us all this freedom they cant really take it back (i do hope villager dialogue is improved at least). idk its bittersweet, new leaf is truly a perfect balance i wish theyd go back to that
As a person who played new horizons as their first animal crossing game, it was like night and day when I first picked up New Leaf for my 3DS. It felt like a genuine simulation experience, whereas New Horizons feels like a design contest where you can manipulate the game, island, and villagers to do as you please. The game no longer fits the narrative of a life sim if you’re given too much independence with it. Playing New Leaf was like a cultural reset. It felt like a living breathing town that moves and grows even when you aren’t present. You can leave New Horizons and come back years later to have it still be exactly the same, like you’re jumping into a photograph each time you play. I do find myself enjoying certain aspects of New Horizons, such as the DLC which builds off of Happy Home Designer. I love the ideas Nintendo had with the customization aspects of New Horizons, but I truly hadn’t played an animal crossing game until I played New Leaf. While I love decorating and designing spaces in New Horizons, I’ll be visiting New Leaf or Wild World for the genuine life sim experience.
except... no? in new leaf if you stop playing and pick it up after a while things will be there where you left it. outside of weeds and the unique villager dialogue... and also can you imagine how anooying would it be if you disappeared and when you get back to the game again, you find some stuff moved around? that would be so annoying ngl
The hourly music in ACNH compared to ACNL is what kills me every single time I play. I have radios placed outside just to hear kk near the shops instead. NH music sounds so goofy imo 😭
Great video. I came in ready to be a NH defender, but actually agree with all your points. I have ONLY played the original gamecube version before NH, a childhood experience I treasure dearly. I've put 2000 hours into NH with a perfectly customized terraformed desert castle botanical garden crumbling temple theme. It took so long. So tedious. So frustrating. Its a poorly optimized and clunky experience, even though I'm obsessed with it. The villagers are just set pieces, even if I love their designs, and relationships between them are largely my imagination. I hate how much the villagers love me... I hate how sanitized the experience is.
The funniest thing about the self-made mini games in NH it's that it feels like we've regressed back to Wild World and City Folk times, where (due to hardware limitations in the case of the ds ig) we had to improvise games to have something to do to pass the time with friends. But the fact the mini games were absent in new horizons when they were present in new leaf was weird and one of the things I truly dislike about this game
I haven't had the desire to play NH since I dropped it 4-5 months after it released, even though I really wanted to turn my island into a Japanese suburb. Late last year though I booted up NL for shits and giggles and nearly cried just walking around. I don't even think I talked to anyone. Maybe it was just nostalgia from when I was a kid, but even though I didn't really use the ordinance feature to customize the town, I had made that place my home. I'm scared to think how I'd feel going back to WW. My memories of that game are even vaguer, playing in the wee hours of the morning before school when everyone was asleep and all the shops were closed. I played both WW and NH at points in my life when I had all the time in the world, but I know I only enjoyed one enough to still think back on it so fondly.
Yeah, my revisit to NL in 2020 was supposed to be a single shits and giggles visit as well... Then I got sucked in and played it right up til NH's launch. Magical game.
I really get sad when I think about how badly Nintendo dropped the ball on new horizons. :( I usually get sucked into a new animal crossing for at least 2 years but new horizons struggled to keep my interest after 6 months. :/ like he says in the video, they don’t have any content that we’ve learned to love and are used to. I wish we could have a hybrid between nl and nh, that would be the perfect animal crossing.
@@SlLLYN I was referring to Wild World, the second game in the Animal Crossing series that came out on the DS in 2005. You can play it on your 3DS though since it's backwards compatible.
The older games felt like a real place, at least as much of a real place as you can simulate on a gamecube. New Horizons feels like a dollhouse. There are certainly other issues, some of those issues exist beyond the game (wikis, metagaming), but the difference is design is quite striking once you notice it.
The real problem is that Nintendo released it with several features from older games not present at launch, and only added them back in a few updates before dropping the game entirely, while a lot of those features are still missing or very poorly integrated. The thing that baffled me most was that this game was centered around being ON AN ISLAND and at launch they didn’t have diving or swimming… ON AN ISLAND. But New Leaf had that feature day one. But the fact they only thought to include it after launch in an update says it all. I know launching RIGHT at the start of the Pandemic also didn’t help things, it certainly boosted the sales numbers, but also led to Nintendo caring less because New Horizons was becoming a ‘fad’ during the pandemic. Then after 1-2 years Nintendo just dropped it entirely. While New Leaf was alive for basically the 3DS whole life span, continuously updating it and even making a HUGE update with the Amiibo content that added so much to an already great game. TLDR; New Horizons is mid, New Leaf has a lot more going for it
I'm glad to see someone else upset that the whole island theme was never reiterated upon. Although New Horizons has tons of flaws, this is the one negative aspect of the game I never see anyone else bring up. After a couple weeks I completely forgot that I was even on an island to begin with, and I don't mean that in a good way. Nintendo just...didn't include anything to make the island setting worthwhile. Aside from having beaches surround every side of your town, there's almost zero difference between past town setting from previous games
I disagree that a lot of those features are poorly integrated really. Yeah that is weird that diving and swimming wasn't a thing day 1. I dunno....New Horizons has a lot going for it too and has stuff that New Leaf doesn't have.
The reason why they went with that drip-feed approach? Look at the development team's previous game: Splatoon 2. They tried capturing the same success as that game and it's predecessor, not knowing that the live-service system works well for online shooters... but not so much for life simulators.
Going into new horizons I thought for sure visiting other islands was going to be a big part of it. I was 100% confident at least tortimers island would be there. It would have been so fun to play the mini games with friends during lockdowns rather than just aimlessly wandering around each others islands for a few minutes before leaving
The original will never be topped. I know that sounds like just looking back at past with rose tinted glasses but no new iteration just has the same feeling. The characters and their houses are locked. Making their personalities shine through and the towns folk (minus the last one who will leave) eternal. It just is the better feel.
Personally, the fact that villagers could just leave without letting you know, or being aware they could leave after not playing for a week, stressed me out so much that I didn't *want* to play. New Horizons fixed this anxiety, which I appreciated greatly. That being said, I really miss them being jerks. XD And I *really* miss the Sweets furniture set and all the extra fruits New Leaf introduced. I hope the next release brings 'em back.
The problem with the newer AC games is that all their different mechanics are at odds with each other whereas the early pre-CF games' mechanics mostly complemented one another. We shouldn't be able to manage so much of the infrastructure in New Leaf if it can be easily ruined by villagers randomly moving wherever they want and devastating the aesthetics you worked so hard to create. When you can't control anything at all then it doesn't really matter where the villagers plop their house. The focus should really be put into fleshing out villager personalities, adding more variety to the dialogues and continuous improvement of customization options without making cuts of older features but also keeping it reasonable and not allowing us to become literally God. The overall tone used to be so good when we couldn't overdevelop or urbanize our towns, just a cozy and slightly melancholic FOREST community. Yes, forest. The game's Japanese title, Animal Forest, which it's anything but at this point and the series really forgot its roots now despite this title still serving as a reminder of what they used to be.
I have a really cool idea that I think could fix a ton with the Villagers. They should add an affinity chart system. Similar to Xenoblade Chronicles 1, the villagers will interact with each other. When you talk to then they might tell you about something that happened, which is then followed up by a notification saying affinity has changed. This system would allow your villagers to have spice again and also add a mechanic where you can be a mediator. Sometimes you'll have to do tasks or talk to people in order to mediate. Sometimes both villagers could give you bias sides to the story and you have to ask around with other villagers to get the full story. This system can effect not just the villagers but even yourself, as sometimes the villager will be mad at a villagers who you're best friends with and make you an enemy as well.
The thing that makes me the most mad is that they won’t change any of this in the next game, because if they do the New Horizons fans will get mad that they can’t have their trophy display of their nice everlasting villagers
I think the minimal instruments that were generally ripped from a soundbank ontop of a well-composed soundtrack makes the original Animal Crossing's OST standout among the other titles. It, whether intentionally or not, gave the game more of a fantasy feeling than the other ones. New Horizon's OST is great on its own but ive never considered the series' soundtrack to be largely centered around acoustic guitars and live-recorded instruments. I haven't touched New Horizons for almost 3 years now and I genuinely cannot think of anything memorable, it all felt same-y and the melodic structure didn't feel so "dynamic". Of course the series has to evolve overtime and can't stick to its old roots, but I think New Horizon's dull gameplay didn't mesh well with the new soundtrack.
..until you play other games and realize the newer games are better and theres virtually nothing to do in the older games, especially GCN animal crossing
Before I started playing Wild World, I never understood why people would ever play the older AC games. That was mainly because the main things I loved about New Leaf was building onto and disigning my town, a playstyle which New Horizons catered to with infinitely more options as far as town building and customization goes. That being said, I feel like the newer animal crossing games slowly skimped on the life sim aspect of the game. New Leaf made villagers a bit less interesting by making them always nice and rarely opinionated (and New Horizons made sure to make them even more bland, villagers with the Normal personality in NH have traits interesting as watching paint dry), though this is good for kids and people who just want their villagers to just be dolls essentially, the sass of villagers in the older games added some spice to it! And it made it feel so much more genuine when a villager would give you a compliment that wasn't back-handed. I've only really just started playing it for real, but so far Wild World villagers seem to actually get closer to you the more you interact with them. They're indifferent and even rude when they're first acquainted with you, but it seems that you grown on them overtime. Also, there were way more frequent events in the older games, not just for holidays, and that added a lot more flair and fun to the life sim aspect of the older games that the newer games just lack. I still love New Leaf and even New Horizons, but I definitely see why it's not everyone's cup of tea now.
I really missed having conflict among the neighbors and having to pick sides - was definitely why I played City Folk for half a year or so. The feud between Becky the chicken and Wendy the sheep was legendary, as it caused my original bestie Melba to move & every new villager who came in was subsequently sucked into orbit. Will never forget how disappointing it was to get Becky in New Horizons and see her just be a complete suck-up whose snootiness just comes down to being interested in fashion.
This is a feeling I've had for a while, and while I am seeing more people share it, I don't see a lot of them go back to the first game, usually just New Leaf. The most desire I feel to play any AC game is for the original. My life has become busy and the games I want to play that actually end keep growing, so the prospect of putting time back into it is daunting, but there's no other game I'd choose if I ever finally said 'I need to add a life sim game to my schedule.' I still occasionally listen to the original's soundtrack at the appropriate hours of day from time to time, and I only recently stopped almost obsessively listening to it's special rain music whenever it rained.
I had only gotten the chance to play the first game a few years ago, and I love it so much. It’s a game I remember my parents and grandmother playing, and although I play NL more for the content, there’s something about the original that I feel like was never captured in the other games. I play GC for a short amount of time compared to DS, Wii, and NL, but it holds such a special place in my heart that I can’t choose between it and NL as my favorite
@@marvelous9718 I absolutely love NL as well for the streamlined experience, it feels like with every AC that comes out it's harder to go back to each one besides the first one. Even NH has some really good features, despite the fact I despised talking to any of my villagers after about a month. I've long kind of held the idea that multiplayer/online features was the beginning of the end of the original feeling. WW still felt rural and cozy, but with the spirit of the game being rooted in 'making it on your own', adding communication with fellow human villagers kind of stuck out like a sore thumb. I don't think the answer would have been to not do multiplayer or anything, I don't really think there is an easy answer here. I still find enjoyment in each new entry, NH was just so bare for all the reasons listed in the video and more. I easily played it daily for a year and a half, the rest of the time was a little forced because I wanted to break my record and hit 2 years 🤷
@@Shades14236 I feel the same way. Even in NL you could see things like the villagers’ personalities/conversations getting watered down. And even NH was able to bring some good additions to the table. We can’t expect the series to stay the same over 20+ years, but you can still feel a huge gap between how the original game was and how it is now. I’d say I do go back to NL for the content, but I go back to GC for the atmosphere, which is what got me attached to the series in the first place. I really wanted to like NH and didn’t want to seem like a “the older one’s were better” kinda person, but I think NH really derailed both from the content and atmosphere found in the older games.
Oh gosh I’m the EXACT same way, I still often listen to the Gamecube’s rain music during actual rain. I find myself humming the hourly tunes embedded into my brain. I can never say the same about NH
19:16 Shoutouts to this specific bit of B-roll footage. In New Leaf if you did that they would've reacted. But there it's like the locust never existed to her. Completely out of sight out of mind.
Thank you - you've finally put into words what I've been feeling. Any time I've tried to voice my opinions on how ACNH coopted the gameplay I loved, I get told I'm just hating on people "playing the way they want." But I mean, what fun is a game with no rules? No limits? And sure, those players get a game THEY want to play, but they already had the Sims and other design games. There is NO replacement for the quirky charm older AC games had. It's all gone now. :( I am a long-time fan of the AC series - old enough to have pre-ordered the first Game Cube game way back in 2001. Was hooked immediately, played it for YEARS (and still have my original save; I should check to see if my BFF Quetzal is still living in the town.) I enjoyed ACNH but it never had that emotional pull that the older games had. Interactions used to mean something, you had to actually WORK for your furniture and clothing items, and paying off your house was a way bigger deal. You were just livin' life ALONGSIDE your friends, all scraping by but loving the simple life. Sure, it hurt when your bestie moved away, but it came with the blessing of meeting a new character. A totally RANDOM character. Now most people playing ACNH have all of the same 20 or so villagers, hand-picked for a theme or aesthetics. You can time travel around and get whatever event items you want, put houses and buildings anywhere. It's completely different to the type of game I fell in love with.
i really resonated with this video as someone who spent a lot of time playing every game in the series during my childhood and it really makes me miss the old vibes, i hope we get a new game that's more of a life sim and less a creative tool, though i do like a lot of the creative ideas and understand why people may like NH
First thing I noticed was, that the villagers have no personality anymore. You don´t get quest from them or want to befriend with them to get a framed picture.
the fact that the first installment of the series is still looked upon so fondly and is touted as having features that the sequels didn’t live up to is kind of cool, though. I’ve been playing games in this franchise since ACGC and I can definitely say that the older games have a charm to them that i don’t think can ever be replicated
I am SO glad you tried out the gamecube animal crossing! It's gotta be my favorite nintendo game and its such a comfort. I agree with what you have to say about animal crossing NH, I was excited for it. I didn't have a switch and I am SO glad I decided to borrow my friends switch instead of buying my own for the game. I was easily bored, and it felt like minecraft. That's thing though, I don't want to play minecraft, I want to play animal crossing. Also, where did my villagers go? I don't feel like any of them are trying to be friends with me, but are just fake nice to me. I'm glad I didn't buy a switch for the game, but I would 10000% buy a switch if they remastered the old animal crossing or even implemented some new parts into it while keeping the base of it.
Ohhh my gosh I agree with you so much. I also was incredibly excited for New Horizons, preordered it digitally because "I've loved every other AC game !", now really regretting that because if I bought it physically at least I could resell it or hell even give it away for free honestly. Because of NH I never let myself get excited for or preorder games again, lol. It feels soulless. What used to be a game about living with animals that could help with loneliness is now just a soulless doll house. You're absolutely right that they're just decorations now. Making your island look good is all New Horizons is good for, but that's not what AC should be about imo. Tho for me I'm like "why would I care about making my island look good when I don't care about anyone living on it?" It's a really shallow game to me. I don't know why the devs decided the animals and their personalities weren't important anymore but it makes me sad. I agree with what you said you like about the game, but I think it's telling that all of those things are just decorating AND THEY DON'T EVEN DO IT WELL! The old Animal Crossings genuinely helped me through lonely times and also helped me learn English - I could never say that about New Horizons. If anything NH makes me feel lonely lmao.
I was thinking about the loneliness angle earlier and honestly I think the dead of night in NL with one sisterly villager being up with you felt less lonely than the middle of the day in New Horizons. It sounds over-dramatic, but the villagers in NH seriously feel like soulless mascots. I'm glad you connected with the video!
I wouldn't say a "soulles dollhouse" but the villagers are lacking Charm in NH. I mean it's also good for progression your house and everything too. I wouldn't say shallow but it ls lacking in key important areas. I mean it's not just deocartion, it does island progession well in general.
This is so relatable!! I got a new Wii to be able to play the GameCube Animal Crossing recently, but I also used home brew to move my City Folk save file over to the new Wii (something you can’t do natively, sadly). I found myself being sucked into City Folk despite having last touched the game 12 YEAR AGO. It’s so nostalgic, and it reminded me what Animal Crossing was actually ABOUT!!
Next animal crossing, have it take place in a village/town, not a deserted island. Completely rewrite all the characters. Remove crafting, speed up terraforming and pathing. Remove some control. Done easy, that’s all they really need
as a lifelong animal crossing fan starting from the gamecube and onwards- this is 100% valid and most of us feel the exact same way. it was the feeling of being lost in a new, unforgiving yet heartwarming world
it's so strange to me that they automated what used to be interactions with the villagers.... only to make you painstakingly remove and add each wall by hand
This video is another example of smaller creators making higher quality videos than their larger counterparts. I remember the acute disappointment I felt in NH when my villagers started saying the same things over and over again when I haven't even played for a significant time, where on GameCube even after 8 whole damn months, they still found new ways to call me a dumb bitch.
You hit the nail on the head with the game giving you too much power. Previously Animal Crossing games would introduce me to new villagers that would end up becoming favorites. But with New Horizons I'm able to pick and choose who I want to live there, where I want them to live, and stop them from ever going. Like, obviously I'm going to put in my favorites if you give me the power to do that and if I can stop them from leaving, sure, I'm going to. But making you this all powerful god makes the series feel like it's missing something. Each game has given you more and more power which I had been getting more and more wary of but now it's granted you far too much.
I was so excited for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. After Seven long years since the release of the last game, I was hyped on launch day. But I also didn’t play it for long, for many of the reasons you listed. What I find especially sad is that ACNH has had a bit of a ‚Botw Syndrome‘ issue, where a game explodes in popularity, and suddenly every game in the genre uses similar game mechanics and ideas without actually improving on them. For example: Fantasy life was a great life sim/rpg experience for the 3Ds, with charming music, great art and area design, and tons of things to do. The recently(ish) announced sequel, Fantasy Life i: the girl who steals time, focuses less on the unique contrasting area design, and instead has you *on* *an* *island* *that* *you* *can* *decorate* *to* *your* *liking.* The parts of the first game I loved are now so unimportant that they were barely even shown in advertising. The plastic-like artstyle has the same issues ACNHs has for me: it looks corporate and soulless, and doesn’t have any of the charm the previous game had. I hope that the game was just poorly advertised and the island builder is actually only a small part of it, but it kinda looks like they went „Animal crossing new horizons sold well!!! Let’s just do that again!!!“ even though the original Fantasy Life had so much going for it. So yeah, not only was ACNH a disappointment for me, it also might’ve been bad for the industry (to me, specifically) as many games I would’ve like instead copy a successful game that *I* don’t enjoy.
I finally see someone saying this! I really really hope the upcoming Fantasy Life offers at least a bit of the unique experience I had with the original ❤️
There will likely be a divide amongst AC players now: those who enjoy the pre NH games more, and those that started with NH and think that's the standard. Perhaps a compromise between the two is still possible though. I'd forgive NH a lot more if it just had decent villager interactions and far less repetitive dialogues.
I think you make a solid point about new horizons really becoming entirely about customization. I've played over 800 hours in new horizons and I love the dlc, but when I think about why I loved new leaf it was also entirely focused on the decoration aspect. I loved happy home designer for the DS too. New horizons catered to people like me who just loved animal crossing for the interior and exterior decoration but in that process it did lose a lot of it's actual atmosphere and story.
I grew up with the GameCube Animal Crossing, so honestly my number one wish is that they’ll release some sort of remaster or remake of it in the future. I’m not holding my breath, but it’s also true that it’s over 20 years old and it’s never seen an official rerelease of any capacity, so they could potentially market it as being a blast from the past while people wait for the next mainline entry.
I’d love that! The GC version is one I played the least of, strangely, but it’s still a more interesting experience than New Horizons was. I did play NH for quite a while, but gradually lost interest because there wasn’t really much to do. Also just really didn’t like the events held on the other island.
Nana enjoyers!! She was one of my favorites in my New Leaf town as well. Her house was super cute and she rounded out my town well since I had some lazy and grumpy villagers. But now villagers are so one note that having different personalities doesn’t even feel like a difference.
animal crossing games have always built on the previous, its such a bummer that so much stuff is missing. so much flavour was lost in a game thats all about vibes lol. the multiplayer island and barista job deserved to become series mainstays, the shopping street/city couldve easily been implemented (we eventually got that campsite area but cmon), having to engage with your neighbours to convince them to stay, all the town events they couldve brought back (wild world had some minor ones that i loved, like the garden competition and la-di-day), hell i was praying we would get pocket camp items including flowers and bugs. they couldve made the ultimate animal crossing and instead they stripped it back way too much. instead of bringing it back to basics they stripped everything except what those tumblr girlies with hacked copies of acnl wouldve wanted to make their ~aesthetic~ towns. i really really hope the next game in the series perfects what was added in new horizons while bringing back what previous games also perfected
Honestly, the only things that I feel were really wrong with NH is that A.) If you have a villager of a certain personality type, you basically have ALL villagers of that personality type. They all use the same lines, just with different character models saying them, and B.) For all the leaps and bounds in what you can do to customize your town/island/whatever itself, there's very little customization for your house. Instead of three floors with five rooms each (center room and a room in each direction), you get one floor with five rooms, a single room basement, and a single room upper floor. So instead of 15 rooms to customize for your house, you only have 7 in NH, around only HALF of what you could have before. Though, I can see where some of the smaller, finer details might also bother people. For example, the fact that aside from the Mario themed items, there are none of the Nintendo IP items like we saw in NL. I feel as if NH took two steps forward with all the advancements in island customization, the crafting system, adding cooking as a thing, being able to move entire trees around, and the mystery islands you could fly and sail to... but then took one and a half steps backwards with villager individuality, home customization and fun little details.
There was only one instance I found something resembling unique dialogue for a specific villager. I had Zucker, and I happened to find him in the aquarium part of the Museum and he started to have an existential crisis. Since he's the only Lazy octopus character, I believe this is unique dialogue. The sad part is, this is the ONLY time I saw anything like this. Older games had stuff like that all the time.
Your story of not getting excited about new releases was something I learned with Spore. And not hyping myself for a game has helped me enjoy games better now.
Finally someone who said it, Animal Crossing has been my favorite franchise since I was a child, New Horizons never clicked for me and I have it abandoned for several months, you stated all of the reasons I've been telling my friends of why I do not like it. It's a widely loved game and I'm sad I can't be part of that crowd, because I do not enjoy it.
Back at I don't know what year I managed to homebrew my wii and started to get Japanese games into it so I could experience those exclusive games including gamecube games. I got them and went at it. After I got bored and confused cuz I couldn't read Japanese I decided to boot AC once more and... the save was gone. It got deleted. The reason: Whenever you play another region game the GC card must be formated and I did just that without realizing it. I was shocked and destroyed. It wasn't just my town. Some of my family had their house there. All of our combined experiences GONE. I was shocked and extremelly sad. I tried to look for a backup save. Something. Nothing came up. We lost everything... but... Nowadays... I realized. It wasn't so bad. We didn't lose something: Our memories. We would remember what we did and it turned into a precious memory. We kinda considered creating a new town but... it wouldn't be the same. We weren't the same people anymore. With the same free time and what not. and you know what? That's life. Sure, it's a videogame but life is like that. You lose things out of nowhere. You visit places and meet people that you will never see again. Make new friends and even forget old ones. It's not evil. It's just life. In a weird way I'm kinda glad it happened cuz it's now such a special memory altough I admit that I'd love tho visit that place again. It would definetively unlock memories that are resting within my brain. Unfortunately I can't say that for new horizons. I've done it and it will happen again. If I go back it will be as if nothing ever happened and that's... that's rough. You don't feel happy to be there again, you don't miss anything or anyone and yes the flat characters mean that I have no special funny memories or stories about them. I guess not a lot of people got this experience btw. Playing the same town with friends or familly and I can tell you. It really sucks now. You could interact and mess with others. You can't really mess with others now besides moving their stuff that's outside but a lot of things are limited to the first player that stepped on the island. They can only do things like moving houses and build bridges. You can't even transfer money or something to other players. We had to bury bell bags. On GC and Wii it was very primitive and limited but man it was so fun being able to put things up for sale. Even overpricing them cuz you knew somebody else wanted them. The gyroid trafficking was REAL. Our favorite joke was adding traps around the exit of the house cuz most of the times you'd fall on them. Maybe you forgot your shovel or didn't see it. It was so good. They are way easier to avoid on New horizons. So yeah. New horizons is amazing but man it doesn't have the same spark and I think is not my nostalgia. It's really not the same. Not a bad game... it's just not the same...
I always thought the island was too small. It still blows my mind that you could have fifteen villagers in the Gamecube game, plus the shops and museum and service buildings, and they've never equaled that since. I think they could make a game that serves both the "life sim" and "sandbox" audiences, and I think it wouldn't have taken that much extra work for this to have been that game. (Also the outro music made me smile, KK Love Song was the first KK Slider song I ever got and I always make sure to get it first in every new game)
I relate deeply. I had so many friends who never played until New Horizons, so it was hard to make them understand the appeal of NOT having so much control. More than anything, the characters having nothing close to the personalities they used to.... Feeling like I really had to earn their friendship. Villagers getting mad at you, depressed by you, making each other angry or sad or putting one another in way better moods so they'd skip around, it added so much complexity to the relationships they had not only with you but one another.
you put my exact thoughts into words!! i wish there was a way to toggle the moving out feature for certain villagers so you could still have that level of surprise if you wanted it but keep your besties- although in new leaf the game just seemed to know who i was invested in any way and they always stayed. i also hate how the last villager to move in in new horizons can’t stay… it makes it so you feel like you have to villager hunt and can’t let randomization do its thing which takes the fun of it. i also really miss the feeling of building relationships over time. ofc you want some friendly characters, but those relationships should deepen over time. my favorite relationships in new leaf were with the snootys and crankys who were rude to me at first, but over the course of a few years truly seemed to enjoy my presence. it felt so much more realistic and rewarding, and i wish they would bring it back!!
this is probably just a big preference thing, but i find NH soundtrack to be somehow really soulless mall music. New leaf's music was way more unique and stood out more. You can notice this instantly when looking up animal crossing soundtrack compilations / nintendo music compilations, and NONE of the songs are from NH, only the earlier games
Someone made an entire, genuinely quality, hour-plus long animation that actually expands upon some of your complaints about how much controll you have in New Horizons, making the player character out to be essentially a god that controlls everything. So this is definitely not an uncommon sentiment.
You basically summed up all my feelings about New Horizons. When the game first came out, I only ever saw positive things about it. As a longtime player of New Leaf, I was really excited and I waited years until my mom could afford to get me a Nintendo Switch. (Yeah, I bought an entire console for one game. I won't make that mistake again.) When I actually played it for the first time, I found myself getting more and more bored, until I eventually never opened the game again. I tried joining online communities like a New Horizon forum to get reinvested, but all the things they described doing (island hopping for the perfect villager, terraforming, etc) were so different from what I want in an Animal Crossing game. I want to revisit the game at some point, but I'll probably avoid the villagers for the most part since they just make me kind of sad.
I remember revisiting New Leaf for a „last time“ because I wanted to complete my museum and have every golden house feature. Safe to say, the house worked, the museum misses only 1 Art piece to this day. I was so hyped for New Horizons, at that time, I‘ve been playing the series for 14 years. I remember I got the game 4-3 days early and I wanted to see the terraforming feature before release. I did just that, on release day, I had the terraforming and then I did so much terraforming and decoration that I was hooked for another few hours until I found the terraforming so mind-numbingly boring that I wanted to do something different, so I asked around in the town in hopes of getting new quests etc. But then realisation struck. That was the entire game. No need to grind for money, no need to grind for anything, I‘ve already seen everything. If you play the game the intended way, it takes you around 2-3 weeks to have seen everything there is to it. You can make so much money so fast, there’s so many stuff just made easy and accessible just like that, that there’s next to no quest in getting there. All the old games cold have me hooked for weeks and play on for months and even years without restarting anything because the grind is real. But that was all NH had to offer and I was just too greedy to enjoy taking it slow. I realised there were a lot of things missing, that I actually enjoyed. The villagers felt more like robots than they already did in NL. I found that I like the music less in NL than the previous games and here I liked it even less. The items nearly all looked like regular everyday items. The weird part was missing, everything was just made like it could be fun for the general public. Obviously, they listened to some feedback when they made the game, but they (imo) erased a lot of the DNA of the series, which made me not like the game at all. I restarted it this year and this time I took things slow, accepted that this game looks out for a different animal crossing experience. Since I knew the game already, I was prepared for a lot of stuff and it was actually pretty fun. I set myself some goals and challenges so I wouldn‘t get bored by not knowing what I could do because I always had something to do. I‘d still replay NL a million times over NH.
I feel the exact fucking same. New Horizons just felt so lifeless with the dialogue, material farming, and level of control you have. You've nailed it right on the head. I actually returned to AC1, mostly because it's easy to emulate, but also it's way more accessible to my kid compared to New Horizons. Sure there are less items and customizations, but what there is is personality. Edit: Honestly, New Horizons should've been called... Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer 2 - The Building Material Farming Chore - The Game
The crafting, material farming, and tool durability were such bizarre and pointless additions that felt like they were simply lifted from popular survival games. I wouldn't be surprised if they had to hold back on putting in a stamina meter or an enchanting system 😒
@@Starpotion Sadly I think all of these new features will make it into future games. What I’m hoping for is different play modes. They should give us the option of playing god, mayor, or just playing villager.
I actually really love New Horizons (playing it while watching thia video), but the three things that make it feel incomplete to me are the lack of shop upgrades, lack of Nintendo crossover content (especially the villagers NL added) and the lack of minigames.
Honestly I think the fact that nothing happens while you're gone is one of the biggest things for me. The only reason I'll revisit an animal crossing game is to see how things have changed while I was gone, to see what I've missed. In new horizons, the answer is absolutely fuck all. And my dumb ass heard they were gonna do updates for a whole year and genuinely believed they would add everything by the end. It was only after the last update that I realised how... lacking it felt. Also none of the updates coaxed me back to the game, I am very much in the "played it for less than 6 months" camp. I'm also still annoyed that you need to pay for an online subscription in order to share patterns. Sadly I don't have an earlier game to go back to since I was never huge into animal crossing as a kid, I mostly just watched my mum lmao. The only one I even still own is New Leaf, mainly because it's downloaded, which I only played a bit of. I'm pretty sure I even inherited the mayorship from my mum, so it's barely even *my* town. Maybe I should try the original again as well...
A couple of things i really love about nh are the museum, its incredible, they visiting villagers like cj, flick and daisy sue, and the landscapes. The fact that your town can be on 3 different levels now makes some areas incredibly gorgeous even without player intervention
I could not agree more! In fact, about a month ago I felt the pull of New Horizons as well. I started it up, feeling like there was some catching up to do. There were some villagers that I wanted, and I hadn’t decorated all that much in the past.. 3 or 4 years I’d spent not playing it For two weeks.. stuff was pretty good, I hadn’t checked out the free update content. I got the Roost, I paid for all Harv’s campsite shops (and didn’t get a thank you for it), I grew some Gold Roses, made a couple landmarks and raised my island to 5 stars! Even redid some of the rooms in my house and paid off all the debts with my saved up Bells In doing so, it very quickly stagnated. My daily Animal Crossing routine had… water flowers, hand out gifts, sell fossils… now what? Once a week, I guess I could check Harv’s NPCs for unique furniture. Maybe grind for some Nook Milestones. But I’d also adopted habits that other players had, like now I understand why people buy shovels in bulk instead of craft them. I could never find the DIY recipes I wanted, so I traded with others and went to treasure islands. With such a slow, slow passing of time each day, and nothing to do in them, I wanted to expedite every process I had, because I was so… bored with myself ‘S been about another month now, since I felt the pull again. It took two weeks to experience everything, and I’m desperately grasping for more to do in that game. But… I’ve done everything, and I don’t want to log in every day for one more piece of something I could *maybe* do It eventually just stagnated to the point where all I wanted was to play New Leaf. Buuuuut my 3DS is broken, so,
it’s a great decorating game. but that’s all. personally i never put it down for more than a couple weeks, i have over 4000 hours in acnh & still play it regularly 😭 & mind u no one has visited my island except my ex boyfriend, & that was like 3 years ago. so i obviously love the game, but only for what is it. i love to decorate. but as someone who has poured so much time into it, i’d do anything for the villagers to be more engaging, have more personality, tasks for u to do, SOMETHING. ur right they have basically just fallen under another category of decoration and the game really suffers bc of it. always makes me sad to hear about ppl who only played for a couple months & didn’t touch it again but i understand
On the one hand, this is a masterfully crafted video, and as someone who only got into the series via New Horizons you've made me really want to visit the older games and see which one I like the best... but on the other hand I wish I didn't watch this while in the middle of playing New Horizons. Like, your point about missing furniture was the only one I initially dismissed, but then you elaborated and I was like, "wow, he _is_ right, why is so much stuff missing". And the comments have pointed out a ton of stuff, too, like how all the furniture looks so realistic, as if this isn't a game with giant-headed anthropomorphic animals where you can get rich by smacking rocks with a shovel and where fruit trees grow in 3 days. I've gotten back into Pocket Camp recently, on a whim, and this video made me realise, I enjoy decorating my little cabin in that app _way_ more than my island. Mostly because, like, the villagers **fucking interact with the stuff I set out** and so many items added have unique animations and properties. I recently got items from some Cinderella-ball event I missed, and villagers *_actually dance_* on the stage and dance floor items. The last time I'd played before quitting the game was shortly after the second anniversary, so my cabin's ground floor was still decorated with the *_fully functional orchestral instruments_* and food displays that my villagers would constantly play on and eat at. You were bang on with the complaints about the villagers, too. I'm typically very easy to please when it comes to characters, because I naturally make up stories and characterisations for them, but even I can't stand how samey the NH villager dialogues are. Every jock names their abs with the exact same names. Every cranky villager invites you to get a drink - but a completely random drink every time, instead of each one having a specific favourite, so you can't even infer anything about their likes and dislikes. I've been looking at Nookipedia a lot recently, and reading the villager pages I realised that the difference can actually be distilled pretty concisely by the villager information section; the "In New Leaf" section lists their favourite drink at The Roost, how many siblings they have, their likes _and their dislikes_ as well... while the New Horizons section lists the stuff they wear and hold. All visuals, but no personality. Glorified dolls, just like you've said. And this is coming from someone who actively ships their island's villagers! I think the moment that really broke the magic for me was playing Happy Home Paradise, seeing Gaston (a villager I previously had on my island) at the beach and deciding to make a home for him... and him not only not mentioning having known me, but rolling the one dialogue option where he says he's _never seen me in his life_ before.
anyway. This comment got away from me at some point. Basically the only reason I haven't reset my island is because it's how I asked my boyfriend out, and because I'm hopelessly sentimental, and even that second reason is beginning to wane the longer I spend on my revisit of it. Your point about the added convenience being a bad thing for the series is something I've been thinking a _lot_ about a _lot_ of modern games. Pokémon is the example that comes to mind for me. Like how the newer games have more TMs instead of Move Tutors, so you don't have to go to a specific person to learn moves any more!... so moves that _used_ to be special, like the Pledge moves and the starter's elemental Hyper Beams, aren't any more. And there are fewer NPCs in the game, which means less worldbuilding since there's no reason to dedicate time to unique NPC interactions, which in turn means there's no reason for a player to bother going anywhere they don't have immediate business. Hell, NPCs don't even give you items any more, so there isn't even a reason to talk to the few randos that _are_ still around. It's the exact same problem as New Horizons, and Deep Cut from Splatoon 3, and just _so much_ of the modern game industry, and honestly a lot of modern entertainment in general. So much of the effort goes into making these worlds _look_ gorgeous, and doing the kinds of things that get content creators in a tizzy to make hurried analysis videos of surface-level details... but then once you look past that surface, it's incredibly shallow, and you can tell they didn't care about making an experience that sticks with the player. Just as long as the bigwigs in charge get their money, who cares if the player base completely forgets about the game? There is still hope for Animal Crossing, I do believe. For one, the game devs are actually the same devs behind Splatoon, and they've in fact made strides in remedying the aforementioned Deep Cut problem. Because news in Splatoon 3 is skippable, they initially didn't put any effort into the broadcast, but since that broadcast is where you got most of the character for the previous idols, you ended up missing a lot of the finer details and only getting the broad strokes. But as time has gone by, they've fleshed out the characters a lot, adding in more personality beyond their base archetypes and successfully expanding on points they initially looked like they were going to brush off. So, hopefully, the next Animal Crossing game will follow in much the same way. Though hopefully they'll also avoid taking the same content model as Splatoon again, since with Splatoon playing the same game modes over and over is much the point, while that kind of repetition is anathema to the AC experience in such large quantities.
Coming back to this video again because, by some miracle playing New Leaf and internalising this video have made me love New Horizons all over again, and made me learn to take it slow. Is it perfect? No, and the simplified villager dialogue still hits me, especially after playing New Leaf for a week. But damn if it isn't still amazing. As I write this, I'm walking around the museum for the first time in months, maybe even years, for a reason other than checking if I've already got the art Redd has in stock. It was the museum in New Leaf that made me realise how much I missed this place; it's one of the times that New Horizons being much grander _really_ works to its favour, because this genuinely feels like a place I would spend hours wandering around and getting lost in were it real. The music being much slower and having more variations, the gorgeous, elaborate exhibits that you can feel the love oozing out of, things like the butterfly house in the Bug wing or the asteroid and the Hall of Species in the Fossil wing that just make the place as cozy as the island first was. Plus, it's wonderful to have a tangible, permanent reminder of the work I've done. Which isn't to say the non-permanent stuff has lost its appeal. Being so in control of the island definitely does have plenty of downsides, your video still hits home and true, but on the other hand... leaving the game for so long, and then coming back to it, it does feel genuinely good to see the effects I've had, and the home I've made for myself. Because that truly is what my island is, it's a home to me, one I know will always be there to welcome me, one that holds so many of my memories and was there in a formative part of my life. I don't know where Nintendo will take the next Animal Crossing game. My personal hope is that they pull a TTYD port and make a game in the style of New Leaf but with the QoL and visual polish of New Horizons. But I think, after all this, I'll be ready to take life as it comes, whichever way it goes.
the combination of serious documentary thoughts and hilarious yelling gameplay is everything i needed xD thank you for an amazing video. i have been waiting for someone to make something like this for forever, thank you for putting into a video what we've all experienced
thank you! i couldn’t exactly pinpoint why i felt so bored with new horizons, and everyone else seemed to get so much hate for simply not liking the game. i have TRIED to get into it properly, and i haven’t gone back to it since 2022. Thing is, i’ve been playing all the other series games (minus city folk), and i can actually enjoy them as i’m not clouded by nostalgia as new leaf was my first game. in new leaf, i was obsessed with making my island look nice, but it wasn’t the ONLY part of the game as there was actually variety. even with the first game, i found it so charming, and it didn’t matter if your island looked a but rough and ready yknow. the villagers were the heart of the original game, and i think since new leaf, they’ve started taking a step back
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
To me New Horizons feels like that one episode of Spongebob where Squirdward moves to his perfect community and live a perfect life every single day, only to quickly grow tired of it because nothing interesting ever happens anymore to shake things up, as he puts it, it's perhaps "too much paradise"
"How could you POSSIBLY have fun with a PITFALL SEED"
real
100% accurate. i played new leaf for years. new horizon 9 months. i didnt even experience all the patches. it just was boring after awile. and the fact the side rooms in the house were too small to do diddly crap with.
sounds like the difference between old sims and new sims
@@darkfield1952 Exactly. Old sims and old AC are amazing in comparison to the current games.
I think point 3 is spot on.
I have some friends who *really liked* New Horizons and I don't hold that against them, but when I explain "what I liked about older Animal Crossing games was that I was just another member of the town rather than a god building my dream town," they just don't get it. "Why wouldn't you want total control over how everything looks and is laid out and make it perfect." Well, because that's just a different experience.
When a friend visits from out of town, its fun to show them everything you've learned about where you live - the best restaurants, recreational spots, etc. *That* is what I liked about the first 3 AC games, but now (and even with New Leaf to an extent) I feel like I'm less checking little towns other people are a part of and more like I'm having a theme park aggressively explained to me like a Funko Pop collector who's a little too proud of how much time or money they've put into their hobby.
I totally get both sides honestly. I really like New Horizons, but I grew up on New Leaf; I really wanted the ability to customize my town more, since I'm a big fan of sandboxes, and in the end that's what draws me back in to New Horizons. (Plus I never had any friends in my NL days, and I have lots of memories of the charm of my friend's islands on NH, so it's not like I'm particularly attached to that feeling 😭)
But I really hate the villagers. I used to be a big defender of the NH ones since anybody talking about the WW ones just made them sound like they were just *mean*, and the comfort of my villagers being my friends was what I loved about them. But actually seeing them, I've realized they're exactly what I wanted-they're people. They have personalities and not just the idea of them. You befriend them and earn their trust. It's the exact reason I hate normal/jock villagers, and I love Lobo (my only cranky); I talk to him and he feels like a person.
I love NH, and I love being able to furnish my town. But I wish there was a bit of a compromise; maybe the inability to make your villagers move. Maybe you can convince them, or maybe they want to live somewhere specific (like maybe this villager wants to live next to a river) but they shouldn't just bow at your feet.
Also villager hunting. I know people are really attached to that one, but I feel like it does make it hard to get attached to obscure villagers the same way I used to in NL 😭 Maybe a compromise there too. I'm not sure how exactly.
@@_afancyhat_ It's interesting for me to hear opinions of NH from the perspective of players who've only played NL before it. I grew up playing the "original" on GameCube (though I do also now own Doubutsu no Mori on N64) and my favorite is probably City Folk because I feel like it used the internet to achieve everything the original *wanted* to, but couldn't (see: how hard it is to interact with other players and towns).
While I played WW, I feel it didn't build off of the past games enough to warrant being it's own game aside from "it's portable now!" which is definitely an improvement, but ironically made sharing the town with siblings feel more cumbersome for me, which overall detracted from it.
I played NL when it came out, but honestly felt that a lot of the problems I ended up having with NH were already starting to crack the appeal I found in the first couple titles, but weren't quite clear enough for me to be able to articulate *why* I never really wanted to play it. Like, the ordinances are a cool idea, but to me it always felt like they were more or less allowing the player to pick which mechanic was the most annoying and let them disable it, which goes against the whole "you're a villager living in a town" feel.
@@BryceDixonDev I totally get that! I wasn't old enough to have played the earlier consoles when I was younger, so it was only NL and later NH. I could definitely see it having been what pushed me to want more customization rather than less, though; I hadn't played any of the older games to feel it was too *much* control, but was given just enough that it felt a bit restrictive not to have more and thus wanted it-but ultimately circled back to wishing for the personality of earlier games now that it was completely removed. It's definitely super interesting, and thinking about it it's likely a massive factor in the community's divide.
Yeah that's why I just don't care for making paths or terraforming, for one it's slow and two it just isn't animal crossing
yeah and obsession of aesthetics is kinda depressing. I think it would cool if your house or interior can be customized but not the town itself.
Funny enough, the only true personality the villagers have, is when they talk to each other
Absolutely. The conversations the villagers can have with each other has genuinely gotten me to crack up. More of THAT, please.
Lol that's like when your boss at work witnesses your totally fake personality while you are more open with your coworkers. 😂
Problem is though, the conversations tend to get repetitive. Like sure, there’s certain variations of the conversations that take place, but I don’t find them to be quite as interesting.
...but have you met nathan?
things i enjoyed in nh:
- placing furniture outside
- being able to change your skin colour
- more pocket space
thats it
In addition to your points, the only other thing I liked was the updated sound effects/ambience, like the wind rustling in the trees and the rain stuff its so GOOD AUGH-
@Lady_Autism yeahhh the weather and lighting was nice also days being longer in summer and shorter in winter was awesome!
@@BottledPoe Yes!!! It's a very nice touch :3c
The lack of being able to place things outside since the original always felt weird.
Just a little garden area would have been cool, rather than having to have a weird basement garden.
and the fact you can customize almost everything thanks to Cyrus (I know you are going to say that was a thing in NL but its different enough imo + not having to wait 30 mins every time)
and being able to change more aspects about your villager like hair, nose, eyes etc without having to spend 3000 bells and only being limited once a day or worse, having to start over because you picked the wrong dialogue at the beginning of the game and Isabelle telling you which special villagers are visting the town and the extra bugs and fish to catch and the tool wheel and the wands and fences and the gyroids actually being in sync with the music and the lighting system indoors
my first AC game was Wild World. I would constantly speak to my villagers and they would always say new stuff, it was amazing. One day i noticed a repeated line of dialogue and i distinctly remember saying “ah-ha! so they’re not infinite!!”. Now enter New Horizons, where god forbid you have 2 villagers with the same personality type. They’re just mindless puppets strolling around. The whole focus of the game is just decorating, and villagers are yet another piece of furniture to make your place look superficially pretty.
Yea me too. I hadn't played since wild world either but the sanitation of personalities kinda ruined it for me
Wild World has the deepest conversation trees of the whole series. It was the only game where what the villagers said didn't depend solely on their personality. The DS was the most limiting console of the whole series but that limitation pushed the devs to make the most interesting character interactions in the series to keep you coming back.
@@IPITYTHEFOOLZto this day nintendo is still obsessed with the squeaky clean sanitized image and its holding them back because the entire gaming landscape has changed drastically since the 90s. parents let their kids play graphic shooters and horror games nowadays, so whats the problem with small animal banter?
wild world was also the only animal crossing game where town npcs would vent some of their problems to you
why have they not expanded on episodes is beyond me
I think you can play Wild World for about a year solid before the systems start to reveal themselves, really insanely good game.
There’s something intimate about the older games, for me new leaf, where I don’t feel like I have to make my town “look good” or compare with other people’s. There was something private and genuinely joyful about logging on and seeing your community. It felt like a second life. New horizons is great for creativity, but it has none of the soul and coziness of the old games. It’s just never going to compare in that respect.
Everything is so overly "realistic" in New Horizons and I miss all the quirky stuff in the old games. Like for example, now there's a chessboard item which is neat but it removed all the giant chess items. Having a giant king piece pretty much double the height of the player character was so silly. Or how the Gyroids now. They're all ~aesthetic~ & unintrusive now. But in the old games they used to be big & strange. I just miss that kind of energy the game had.
This is the problem I had with furniture but I could never put it into words. It feels watered down in a way
@@marvelous9718Also some of the old mario furniture was interactive. The cannon shot bullet bills and the star would make you invincible
@@FigureFarter Oh, I loved the stuff you could get from the fortune cookies. You could even get Majora's Mask and wear it.
As someone obsessed with the gamecube original animal crossing weirdness and grew up with it as a kid, I think I actually do prefer New Horizon’s take on gyroids. They’re generally more creative and have more going on with their concept and model and design and animations. I would like if we had some creepier looking ones though, yeah
@@orbic521 I wish the new horizons gyroids came in different sizes. They used to be small, medium, large, or tall
A lot of animal crossing players share this same sentiment, but my ideal animal crossing game would be somewhere between population growing, new leaf, and new horizons. the small-town charm and unique dialogue from population growing, the wealth of activities and interesting NPCs in new leaf, and the endless customization of new horizons. I don't think anyone wants this series to regress, but almost everyone, myself included, would love an animal crossing game that feels like a true expansion on those classic animal crossing experiences
Honestly, the biggest thing that struck me about New Leaf vs New Horizons was the tree.
Remember? When you start your town in New Leaf, you plant a ceramonial tree in the town plaza that you get to watch grow. And when your town is a year old, you get a statue of that tree in celebration for you achievement of building and cultivating this community.
Watching that tree grow was more rewarding than earning Nook Miles will ever be.
god thinking about my tree maakes me emotional everytime, new horizons is so souless.
Seeing that tree grow over time was amazing. Add in the amazing StreetPass feature for New Leaf and it's no surprise I spent so much time playing that game and took my 3DS with me everywhere.
I also loved how once your tree had grown quite a bit, you could sit by it and you would get a history of your town since you moved there. I really hope they bring the town tree back in the next game, it was so special.
@@firetamer the streetpass feature was one of my favorites bc my family likes to travel, we would go on a few roadtrips and id play acnl in the car and i passed so many people. some people from other countries, even! it was really cool
@@kiwiparfaits I took my 3DS with streetpass on it round Disneyland Paris and got a veritable smorgasbord of nationalities across 3 days.
Got a few foreign passes before, but I live in part of the UK that isn't exactly a tourist hotspot.
Man when you switched to Animal Crossing for the GCN and I heard that music, it felt like a warm blanket was delicately placed on my shoulders. What an era.
the hype i felt for NH was indescribable... i have never been more disappointed in a game. I need the animals to call me a stupid broke bitch
You understand me
Man for real...I was SOOOO excited once I saw terraforming in the trailer. Then I played it and the game was soooo tedious and the villagers sooo boring.
same here. whats worse is that it was a disappointment that set in over time. i really wanted to like this game, but i noticed it felt a little hollow from the outset. the monotony of waiting for the game to give you features that you should have had from the start was the first thing to leave a bad taste in my mouth. the bland villagers were worse than New Leaf, and the tedious-as-sin terraforming is where i finally dropped it. they took a step back in everything but the graphics.
Dawg its just... So boring
I swear the hype ia from glazers of some sort that only like the game for aesthetics, or from what i remember, just the villagers, even though the villagers really really suck and are boring, i swear theyre ai 🪦🪦.
Also while writing this now, i cant believe people hyped over a cat with heterochromia and glasses and a suit, like thinking about it.. that design in itself probably shows how bad the game is.
the only reason i spent my hard earned $200 on a switch lite WAS acnh. i was so hyped for it and telling everyone they should get a switch for it too. funnily enough, i ended up using my switch for every game one could think of EXCEPT nh. if i could get my $60 back, i would in a heartbeat. but i learned not to get overly hyped for the next ac game at least
13:56
You think that's bad? I've had that happen three times in a row within the same MINUTE. Dude spouted the same dialogue he's said countless times before, so in search of something new or even just something different I spoke to him again immediately after the conversation ended, to which he simply repeated the exact same dialogue he JUST said word for word. I rolled my eyes and spoke to him again right after that, and he.. Repeated it. Again.
I felt a sudden sting of utter disappointment, defeated. I walked away that time and came to the saddening conclusion that there's no reason to bother talking to villagers anymore, so days went by where I simply ignored them. It felt wrong feeling this way about them, I mean the villagers are THE reason for playing an Animal Crossing game. Yet everytime I played it I felt more resentment towards them knowing that there's no point talking with them at all, just a bunch of empty husks repeating themselves ad nauseam. No thoughts, no meaningful interactions. I should not have felt this way about ANIMAL CROSSING I mean c'mon. So it didn't take long before I stopped playing altogether.
I went back to playing New Leaf for this reason 😢
I remember on the gamecube my villager got mad at me and was hostile at me at first and i was sad by it, but then the villager got nicer and i really felt like i had a connection with that villager.
Starting them off worshiping the ground you walk on and never being mad at you made them feel lobomized. It feels so worthless to build a bond when you're already at the top.
That happened to me and I was terrified of him for so long… thought he’d fight me or something. Eventually I decided to be brave and stop avoiding him and he gave me a wallpaper- I was so damn excited and proud. It was silly but to a little kid that was a very exciting arc
Lobotomized is such a visceral way of putting it, but God it's so accurate, it's almost off putting how nice the villagers are towards you initially
@@lilyfae7197that's a great lesson to learn in such a harmless and fun way. Facing your problems is really hard but things will be better afterwards
@@alejandropulidorodriguez9723 wait that’s a really good point! I didn’t analyze it much outside of it being a funny half remembered memory, but you’re totally right. Animal crossing characters with edge can definitely teach you to build confidence in yourself because you have to confront everyone even if they don’t immediately love you
One thing I do think this game did really well was the museum. It looks beautiful and all the fish look really fresh with the hd graphics. That has been my favorite part of this game and I feel is a core part the series that is left in this game untainted.
describing the villagers as decorations and not actual neighbors living with you in a community is SUCH a good way of explaining it. and it makes me so sad, as someone who has played since i was a child (gamecube ac was one of my favorite games as a kid) i have a LOT of hours in acnh (mainly from 2020) but much of my time has been spent trying to design it, rather than enjoying it/my villagers. i hope that the next animal crossing game will return the focus to the villagers and community. actually having to build a relationship with your neighbors is so much more rewarding, and keeps you coming back. like with the gamecube one, i would run upstairs after school and spend hours talking to my villagers, sending them letters, and running around town doing activities. i want that feeling back!
Another video went over this, because of all the decoration stuff you couldn't have the villagers disagree with you. So like you could just move peoples houses wherever you wanted or do whatever.
Honestly it would've been cool if your villagers didn't want to be moved, or at least you had to become good friends with them before you could move their house.
Ngl though I did love NH and it's pretty much my 2nd most played game on switch. Even then I would've definitely prefered a bit more life sim stuff over the decoration. As I'm gonna be honest the island decoration stuff just gets tedious for me and really it feels like the endgame for it once you've done everything else.
HHP was fun at the start it just felt like a slog near the end. I was getting tired of island decoration so you know what would be good, more decoration!
I would like to try new leaf but it's so difficult to emulate and I honestly don't want to spend hours looking at a tiny screen for ants.
Even as a complete newcomer to the series (and an adult) I was just confused by the villagers, I just could not get my head around the fact they weren't programmed to be interesting. I'd heard so much about Animal Crossing and how much people loved them, and there was just nothing there.
Peak rose tinted glasses....
right? ^ its like these people's main arguments on why NH "sucks" is because their experiences with older AC games were better, of course it would be, you were a child. all games were magical when we were kids, its not an objective reasoning at all. most people would find anything they play now or the games they enjoy more lackluster because we've grown so accustomed to it all. all this trash take is just peak nostalgia glasses, nothing more. ACNH delivered on what it had in mind and it was successful with it, and its a solid addition to the franchise. you cant be serious acting like it sucked when it had the whole world in a chokehold when it came out, and no its not because of that damn pandemic, but because it was genuinely good. people just got burnout, and also some people found it boring, which is normal because not everyone likes the same sh*t.
@@princesszelda8577 when did i ever say new horizons sucks? i have over 2,000 hours in it. please don't put words in my mouth. people are allowed to dislike parts of the games they like. to me, the villagers in new horizons are much weaker than previous games. and that includes new leaf, which i played as a teen, not that long ago. also, i haven't played that many games in my life as a kid or as an adult because of financial reasons. so again, please stop making assumptions about me based on one (1) Not That Serious comment i left on a youtube video. which was also critiquing the game. that's why i left my comment. god you guys have nothing better to do. sorry i expressed an opinion about a game on the internet! guess i'll die
also sorry. leaving this reply is just so insane to me i reread my original comment and it's just. not even negative?? yall are weird. "this trash take isnt objective" yeah and? i was talking about my own Subjective opinion based on my own experiences lol. lmao even. have a good day
I haven’t played OG Animal Crossing in a long time. But I remember my villagers would get angry, sad, or gleefully happy. In New Horizons, they all just seem chill happy all the time. That’s no fun.
It’s a great dollhouse. A bad Animal Crossing game. You’ve articulated how I feel so well
Eh.....no it's a decent Animal Crossing game but it has it's flaws for sure.
@@Jdudec367 a good game, a bad animal crossing. It's just a construction/decoration simulation... not a life simulation
@@rathalos4783 I disagree, with how you build up the island and well....make a life for you and the other villagers it is a life simulation too. The villagers themselves though feel lacking in persoality though.
@@Jdudec367 Idk being in charge of terraforming feels bigger, busier, and ambitious. Just having the possibility to overhaul your island gave a lot of idealism and anxiety. On the other hand, the life simulation part comes really short compared to New Leaf.
@@thegreatleaderjimpickens7919 I mean..I dunno maybe? My point is it isn't entirely gone in NH and is there to a degree still.
Johnathan Intercourse casually doing a Perfect impression of the cow's Animalese for no reason.
New Horizons was too focused on single player and decorating. The villagers had never been more repetitive and one dimensional. I felt like there was more to see and do in the GameCube version. It took months to get features new leaf had at launch, and many features it just never got. It finally gave us a outside only vendor area somewhat similar to main street. But it was off island, behind a longer loading screen and you could only go there by yourself
I find it so ironic that the game that lets you have 8 players on one island also decided it was a good idea to get rid of Tortimer Island's minigames, and games with villagers in general
For a comparison of just how much fun stuff AC had on Gamecube, vs NH, I recommend BrianMp16's video, highlighting his journey to acquire 100% items through legit play.
There were SO many unique things you could get just by participating in the game and talking to villagers. No crafting grind, no paid DLC, just playing the game.
I guess it’s just a different take on the formula
@@Duskool
I forgot it was bumped up to 8 players, although me and my friends would only have up to 4 of us altogether on one of our islands and that already started feeling crowded. Not sure what 8 people are supposed to do together, especially without minigames or.. SOMETHING.
I mean c'mon, most people are nowhere near as interesting as they want to believe, and bumbling around in each other's town with nothing to do is definitely not worth the horrid online experience either, if there's not even anything to do we'd be better off avoiding the whole damn thing and simply continue talking on Messenger or whatever.
You reminded me of just how hard Wild World pushed its online features by having so much content that promoted interacting with other players. New Horizons would have been the perfect time to revisit that scale of online interaction but everything regarding other players feels like an afterthought. Even Pocket Camp feels more social by having a player market.
The amount of control they give you in New Horizons is why it attracted the batshit crazy control freaks from games like the Sims that create Ethnostates.
One of my most cherished memories of OG Animal Crossing is that I tried everything to get Opal to move out of town: Pushing her into pit traps, Smacking her on the head, failing her quests...etc but she never moved out. Meanwhile, my favorite neighbor camofrog moved out. 😭
I used to play the OG game on gamecube with my mum. She passed away a few years ago, and sometimes I feel like going back to our town and meeting up with her character again. But it feels.... really hard.
I’m sorry for your loss! ❤
Its not my place to tell you what to do but I think you should visit her character. It would be hard but cathartic.
Do it before you can't. Data doesn't last forever. Drives and memory cards get corrupted, discs degrade.
Im really sorry for your loss. Maybe one day it will be something you will want to do and might be a good thing.
Everyone one talking about animal crossing this or that but no one paused and read the letter at 1:33 because there is not a single comment on it and that letter gave me psychic damage I need to go to bed to heal
the furniture sets being missing ruins it the most for me. i hate having "normal" furniture. i dont want a realistic looking house, i want my animal crossing furniture sets! the ones i love! and cant wait to collect from nooks! nooks in new horizons is useless, everyday its boring furniture that i dont want
it immediately made no sense to me that they got rid of staples like rococo and lovely and rustic sets. it was so fun seeing it all come together but now nothing really matches anymore
@@fbs927 the lovely furniture was the first one i fell in love with in wild world ;-; then in new leaf my fav was the sleek and rocooco set! i loved the customisation colours you could do on the rococo!!
I miss my ugly New Leaf house that was crammed full of weird items I got given or found during a seasonal event
@@zoruasnivy honestly. all the character and personality of silly quirky weird furniture is gone ahah
i miss the gracie grace sets :(
One of the only things that kept me playing NH was collecting one of each type of flower. In hindsight, it was one of the few things that players can't have total control over. You have to learn these super obscure breeding mechanics, water your flowers each day, and hope that the flower you want shows up. Slowly I collected them over the course of months (I think) until finally I got the last flower, a blue rose. It felt awesome. I don't know how to explain it, but this optional, somewhat hidden, and surpisingly deep gameplay mechanic made me happy and I wish the game had more elements like that. Hopefully the next game is more like the old ones.
Now I wish I bothered with the flower breeding in NH more. I liked it a lot in NL but never bothered in NH, likely due to the much more expansive options in decorating your island.
15:15 there’s something about an evening stroll through an abandoned new leaf town that gives the game its soul. That poignant reminder that life moves on without you. It’s completely absent in NH.
Except for the flowers that take over your town like the plague in NH
I agree about the control thing. Like, in New Leaf, once when I was a kid I didn't play for a few days. I don't remember why, maybe I wanted to play something else, or more likely my toxic mother didn't let me play at all.
And when I finally came back, I recieved a letter. Flip left. The thing is, I liked Flip a lot. He was one of my favorite neighbours. And since I was a kid, it made me cry that he left Something my video game-hating mother couldn't understand.
I know you can prevent your villagers from leaving in New Leaf but since I wasn't playing for a few days as I said, I couldn't prevent it. But this experience is the entire reason I still remember the guy to this day.
Apparently villagers can't move out without your permission in New Horizons. Well to be fair, it is a good thing in several aspects, but also I wouldn't remember Flip as much if he didn't leave back then. The emotional impact wouldn't be as strong.
They just become your prisoners though, lol
Hear me out... Imagine in new horizons you could start out as just a regular resident and then later down the line had the OPTION to become the resident representative and depending on if you chose to take that opportunity some players would have more or less limitations. As for the villagers there could be a system in which when your friendship level is low/average the villagers could move on their own while if it was high they'd ask for your advice, which would give you a reason to come back to the game and talk to your villagers in order to keep them on the island. I feel like that would both satisfy older players who are there for the life sim experience and the players who are looking for creative freedom to turn their island into whatever they want it to be.
I agree. I think the next game in the series should try and find a compromise between life sim and sandbox. Something I didn't touch on in the video is that NH completely lacks the feeling that your Island is developing over time that the older games had, and I think the higher level of control and sandbox elements could work as far-flung endgame rewards.
@@JohnSexDD I didn't play the other games so I can't really compare but for me New Horizons just progresses way too fast in general, with time travelling you can speedrun getting up to 3 stars in just a couple hours and after that there's not much left to do aside from filling your museum and decorating your island. I wish that part of the game wasn't so gameplay focused and for example expanded more on the lore of the special characters rather than turning them into tutorial text boxes. Also wish there were more ways to interact with your villagers instead of just hearing the same line of dialouge everyday and occasionally finding a lost item or earning a reaction. It does seriously feel like a sandbox game with extra steps.
@@JohnSexDD Your island does develop a lot though, from a small empty island to a big place with a real community to it.
I had the same thought as I was watching this video. If being elected "mayor" or "resident representative" was something you had to work towards over time by bonding with the villagers, rather than something that just got handed to you, that would let them give villager relationships a little more focus and depth. (Also bring back letting me just ask for errands to run, I kinda loved these dorks just randomly lending each other's stuff to a long chain of friends.)
why is your name like that @@JohnSexDD
I hope Nintendo really takes these points into account while drafting the next major Animal Crossing game. I started with the Gamecube edition and hadn't played another title until New horizons. I played New Horizons a ton for nostalgic reasons, but it's really like they took the "soul" out of it. I always liken the original animal crossing to the blues. It relateably highlights the tough times while reminding you that life's still a good time!
man you reminded my how much i miss just swearing in youtube videos. no stupid sound effects. or baby words. just a normal person swearing and saying whats on their mind
Someone's gotta teach kids to swear. If it isn't youtubers, who's it gonna be, their weird racist uncle? 💀
"And then they....unalived them with a....stabby stab"
if only youtube didn't get so soft with the creators and adsense and actually allowed most of them to speak normally. i hate that you can't even say dead or death or make any mention of it without saying that "unaliving" thing. its so stupid and completely takes you out of the moment. thanks youtube for caring about money and ThE ChiLdREn 🥴
Let me guess, you're 14?
@lilaclunablossom You don't gotta be 14 to enjoy a bit of profanity. Content has gotten so forcefully sanitized to the point that it just doesn't feel genuin anymore. People having to work around their vocabulary just so they can get some money out of their work has gotten so bad to a point where the fun of honest commentary is just gone.
The differences between listening to a TH-cam video essay, or literally anything on mainstream TV nowadays is barely present anymore.
Let people swear! Off-hand comments out of nowhere are waaaay more fun and human than playing a 5+ year old Vine clip instead, or talking like TH-cam's got your nutsack gripped at every second.
New Horizons reminds me of the Berenstain Bears story "Too Much Birthday." It's fun to customize your clothes and decorate your house and choose the layout of your house..... but when you can customize everything and change the layout of the entire island and choose who gets to live on your island and choose your exact face and hairstyle... then it's not fun anymore. Limitations are what inspire creativity. Endless horizons bring stress and boredom in games. Also, I just want my tools to not break. I'm supposed to be relaxing, not counting the exact amount of times I've used my tools so I can be prepared for when they break. It's just a mechanic that does not work at all in AC and imo it barely works in Zelda.
The absolute worst is the Lazy personality types. In the GameCube games they're absolutely charming, to the point that Cube was one of my favorite villagers. I don't remember much about New Leaf, but they were still fun to hang around with. In New Horizons, it seems like 70% of the time, they're talking about the bugs in their walls. Like, what the heck. It got bad to the point that I only keep one Lazy villager just for the unique items they can give.
Insane enough, I met my husband through NH! I poured thousands of hours into my island during quarantine, and it's how I meet the most important friends I still have to this day. For all of it's weird, quicky, boring faults, this game will always have a special place in my heart. I haven't played in years at this point and I'm not sure I ever really will, but my husband and I plan on growing turnips in our old age
Congrats! I know New Horizons brought a lot of people together.
In New Leaf, years and years ago, as a child, I walked in on my at the time favorite Villager, Frank, and Curt talking. I hadn't known this could happen, but Frank was planning on moving out and a little cutscene played where he was asking Curt (I was very attached to the two, so I guess I got them to like me a bunch) to take care of my character when he was gone. It was so incredibly sweet and this kind of thing is missing from New Horizons. I wish there were more of that!
Animal Crossing: New Horizons, because of the hardware, is the most graphically beautiful Animal Crossing to date, but there are so many things you say here I can't help but agree with. I say that as someone who played far more ACNH than you with a higher tolerance for when I got bored of it. First thing I noticed was how your villagers are basically glorified decorations who only ever gargle your balls. It gets extremely boring very quick. None of them are allowed to leave on their own and move on, so I can control who stays. I have zero repercussions for ignoring them, and would only ever talk with them for Nook Miles. They'd never get mad at me for more than a second, and then go right back to deepthroating me.
I actually enjoyed the terraforming, but by the time I got it, I fell in love with my island the way it was so much that I barely touched it apart from making paths and tweaking the odd thing here and there. I loved all the clothing options available, as well as the wand. I didn't mind customizing furniture myself, but would have liked that function tied to an NPC. As for changing your hair and whatnot, I wouldn't mind going back to an NPC for that, but I just would like the ability to fix my hair like in ACNH if I had to take a long break from the game.
For all that I loved about ACNH, I was given far too much control and as you said, it felt more like a sandbox than a home. I rarely find myself returning, and that makes me sad.
"they have absolutely NOTHING of worth to say" 😭🤣god the ruthless rundown is so accurate
Just earlier today, before I found this video, it had occurred to me that the villagers *depress* me real bad. All the attachment I got for them comes from the previous games and now they're these hollow shells.
And trying to talk to them simulates trying to socialise with people I don't feel connected to and this leaves me, like, *genuinely* depressed and alienated.
I guess I'll get my old New Leaf out again...
That's a general thing with Japanese entertainment I noticed. Everyone is so damn nice in kids media now. The og Pokemon is the most popular example of this shift.
It's really depressing to see. It's setting up kids to not know how to handle conflict because not everyone is going to be nice to you and kids need to learn how to deal with that.
Yeah, it's a trend of 'we need to protect the kids'. Because appearently the 90s were to raunchy or smt
@@lorettabes4553 more like people in the 90s had a sense of humor. No one knows how to handle snarky humor anymore
its so watered down nowadays that people are able to be offended by the smallest of things (like opinions,) and now censorship is extremely heavy nowadays. we can't say anything without either people getting offended or the "bleep!" noise getting overlayed. ON EVERYTHING.
@@littenfire3563 the 90s had the Satanic panic
the direction of animal crossing games makes me feel conflicted. because on one hand, i love new horizons and the customisation and freedom it offers, but it is missing the charm of the older games. it doesnt feel like a little virtual world i can escape to with villagers that actually feel like people, when wild world and new leaf have always been that for me. and i feel like that small town charm will never come back because now theyve given us all this freedom they cant really take it back (i do hope villager dialogue is improved at least). idk its bittersweet, new leaf is truly a perfect balance i wish theyd go back to that
As a person who played new horizons as their first animal crossing game, it was like night and day when I first picked up New Leaf for my 3DS. It felt like a genuine simulation experience, whereas New Horizons feels like a design contest where you can manipulate the game, island, and villagers to do as you please. The game no longer fits the narrative of a life sim if you’re given too much independence with it. Playing New Leaf was like a cultural reset. It felt like a living breathing town that moves and grows even when you aren’t present. You can leave New Horizons and come back years later to have it still be exactly the same, like you’re jumping into a photograph each time you play. I do find myself enjoying certain aspects of New Horizons, such as the DLC which builds off of Happy Home Designer. I love the ideas Nintendo had with the customization aspects of New Horizons, but I truly hadn’t played an animal crossing game until I played New Leaf. While I love decorating and designing spaces in New Horizons, I’ll be visiting New Leaf or Wild World for the genuine life sim experience.
Eh no coming back years later it won't be exactly the same, you will have villagers saying they missed you and weeds too.
im so glad you experienced and loved new leaf! it's probably my favorite game of all time!
except... no? in new leaf if you stop playing and pick it up after a while things will be there where you left it. outside of weeds and the unique villager dialogue... and also can you imagine how anooying would it be if you disappeared and when you get back to the game again, you find some stuff moved around? that would be so annoying ngl
@@aazronzaz9654 I guess that comment more goes for villagers in wild world. My villagers keep moving without telling me 😭
New Leaf was one of my favorite childhood games. I didn't like the tedium of making bells though. I only got to upgrade my house a couple of times.
The hourly music in ACNH compared to ACNL is what kills me every single time I play. I have radios placed outside just to hear kk near the shops instead. NH music sounds so goofy imo 😭
Great video. I came in ready to be a NH defender, but actually agree with all your points. I have ONLY played the original gamecube version before NH, a childhood experience I treasure dearly. I've put 2000 hours into NH with a perfectly customized terraformed desert castle botanical garden crumbling temple theme. It took so long. So tedious. So frustrating. Its a poorly optimized and clunky experience, even though I'm obsessed with it. The villagers are just set pieces, even if I love their designs, and relationships between them are largely my imagination. I hate how much the villagers love me... I hate how sanitized the experience is.
Honestly, more power to you for managing to get that level of enjoyment out of New Horizons because I genuinely wish I could say the same.
The funniest thing about the self-made mini games in NH it's that it feels like we've regressed back to Wild World and City Folk times, where (due to hardware limitations in the case of the ds ig) we had to improvise games to have something to do to pass the time with friends. But the fact the mini games were absent in new horizons when they were present in new leaf was weird and one of the things I truly dislike about this game
I haven't had the desire to play NH since I dropped it 4-5 months after it released, even though I really wanted to turn my island into a Japanese suburb. Late last year though I booted up NL for shits and giggles and nearly cried just walking around. I don't even think I talked to anyone. Maybe it was just nostalgia from when I was a kid, but even though I didn't really use the ordinance feature to customize the town, I had made that place my home. I'm scared to think how I'd feel going back to WW. My memories of that game are even vaguer, playing in the wee hours of the morning before school when everyone was asleep and all the shops were closed. I played both WW and NH at points in my life when I had all the time in the world, but I know I only enjoyed one enough to still think back on it so fondly.
Yeah, my revisit to NL in 2020 was supposed to be a single shits and giggles visit as well...
Then I got sucked in and played it right up til NH's launch. Magical game.
I really get sad when I think about how badly Nintendo dropped the ball on new horizons. :( I usually get sucked into a new animal crossing for at least 2 years but new horizons struggled to keep my interest after 6 months. :/ like he says in the video, they don’t have any content that we’ve learned to love and are used to. I wish we could have a hybrid between nl and nh, that would be the perfect animal crossing.
I wasn't alive in your generation but what does WW stand for? If its a game is it avaliable on the DS 3? (I'm getting a ds 3 for my birthday)
@@SlLLYN I was referring to Wild World, the second game in the Animal Crossing series that came out on the DS in 2005. You can play it on your 3DS though since it's backwards compatible.
I think adding guns to animal crossing should fix it easy, guys
The older games felt like a real place, at least as much of a real place as you can simulate on a gamecube. New Horizons feels like a dollhouse. There are certainly other issues, some of those issues exist beyond the game (wikis, metagaming), but the difference is design is quite striking once you notice it.
The real problem is that Nintendo released it with several features from older games not present at launch, and only added them back in a few updates before dropping the game entirely, while a lot of those features are still missing or very poorly integrated. The thing that baffled me most was that this game was centered around being ON AN ISLAND and at launch they didn’t have diving or swimming… ON AN ISLAND. But New Leaf had that feature day one. But the fact they only thought to include it after launch in an update says it all. I know launching RIGHT at the start of the Pandemic also didn’t help things, it certainly boosted the sales numbers, but also led to Nintendo caring less because New Horizons was becoming a ‘fad’ during the pandemic. Then after 1-2 years Nintendo just dropped it entirely. While New Leaf was alive for basically the 3DS whole life span, continuously updating it and even making a HUGE update with the Amiibo content that added so much to an already great game.
TLDR; New Horizons is mid, New Leaf has a lot more going for it
I'm glad to see someone else upset that the whole island theme was never reiterated upon. Although New Horizons has tons of flaws, this is the one negative aspect of the game I never see anyone else bring up. After a couple weeks I completely forgot that I was even on an island to begin with, and I don't mean that in a good way. Nintendo just...didn't include anything to make the island setting worthwhile. Aside from having beaches surround every side of your town, there's almost zero difference between past town setting from previous games
I disagree that a lot of those features are poorly integrated really. Yeah that is weird that diving and swimming wasn't a thing day 1.
I dunno....New Horizons has a lot going for it too and has stuff that New Leaf doesn't have.
I'm glad you said. Seems like people really took it very easy with the fact that the first year of updates was base content of the older games.
The reason why they went with that drip-feed approach? Look at the development team's previous game: Splatoon 2. They tried capturing the same success as that game and it's predecessor, not knowing that the live-service system works well for online shooters... but not so much for life simulators.
Going into new horizons I thought for sure visiting other islands was going to be a big part of it. I was 100% confident at least tortimers island would be there. It would have been so fun to play the mini games with friends during lockdowns rather than just aimlessly wandering around each others islands for a few minutes before leaving
The original will never be topped. I know that sounds like just looking back at past with rose tinted glasses but no new iteration just has the same feeling. The characters and their houses are locked. Making their personalities shine through and the towns folk (minus the last one who will leave) eternal. It just is the better feel.
"I hope the plane crashes" that shit has me in fucking tears
Personally, the fact that villagers could just leave without letting you know, or being aware they could leave after not playing for a week, stressed me out so much that I didn't *want* to play. New Horizons fixed this anxiety, which I appreciated greatly. That being said, I really miss them being jerks. XD And I *really* miss the Sweets furniture set and all the extra fruits New Leaf introduced. I hope the next release brings 'em back.
The problem with the newer AC games is that all their different mechanics are at odds with each other whereas the early pre-CF games' mechanics mostly complemented one another. We shouldn't be able to manage so much of the infrastructure in New Leaf if it can be easily ruined by villagers randomly moving wherever they want and devastating the aesthetics you worked so hard to create. When you can't control anything at all then it doesn't really matter where the villagers plop their house. The focus should really be put into fleshing out villager personalities, adding more variety to the dialogues and continuous improvement of customization options without making cuts of older features but also keeping it reasonable and not allowing us to become literally God. The overall tone used to be so good when we couldn't overdevelop or urbanize our towns, just a cozy and slightly melancholic FOREST community. Yes, forest. The game's Japanese title, Animal Forest, which it's anything but at this point and the series really forgot its roots now despite this title still serving as a reminder of what they used to be.
I really despised the addition of phones for that reason. I love the forest aspect of the older games
you are wrong in so many aspects about Animal Crossing as a whole
@@aazronzaz9654 Look up the very first strip of the Dog'n'Cat web comic. That is all.
So you want to have a super ugly vile disgusting town
I have a really cool idea that I think could fix a ton with the Villagers.
They should add an affinity chart system. Similar to Xenoblade Chronicles 1, the villagers will interact with each other. When you talk to then they might tell you about something that happened, which is then followed up by a notification saying affinity has changed. This system would allow your villagers to have spice again and also add a mechanic where you can be a mediator. Sometimes you'll have to do tasks or talk to people in order to mediate. Sometimes both villagers could give you bias sides to the story and you have to ask around with other villagers to get the full story. This system can effect not just the villagers but even yourself, as sometimes the villager will be mad at a villagers who you're best friends with and make you an enemy as well.
Thank you John sex, creator of sex. This is another great creation (behind sex of course)
I love your pfp 😆
ywnbaw
YWNBAW creeper.
The thing that makes me the most mad is that they won’t change any of this in the next game, because if they do the New Horizons fans will get mad that they can’t have their trophy display of their nice everlasting villagers
OG Animal Crossing OST hits a special place frfr.
1000% correct
I think the minimal instruments that were generally ripped from a soundbank ontop of a well-composed soundtrack makes the original Animal Crossing's OST standout among the other titles. It, whether intentionally or not, gave the game more of a fantasy feeling than the other ones. New Horizon's OST is great on its own but ive never considered the series' soundtrack to be largely centered around acoustic guitars and live-recorded instruments. I haven't touched New Horizons for almost 3 years now and I genuinely cannot think of anything memorable, it all felt same-y and the melodic structure didn't feel so "dynamic". Of course the series has to evolve overtime and can't stick to its old roots, but I think New Horizon's dull gameplay didn't mesh well with the new soundtrack.
i still hum a few tracks from New Leaf to this day lol
It hits a different way
..until you play other games and realize the newer games are better and theres virtually nothing to do in the older games, especially GCN animal crossing
Before I started playing Wild World, I never understood why people would ever play the older AC games. That was mainly because the main things I loved about New Leaf was building onto and disigning my town, a playstyle which New Horizons catered to with infinitely more options as far as town building and customization goes.
That being said, I feel like the newer animal crossing games slowly skimped on the life sim aspect of the game. New Leaf made villagers a bit less interesting by making them always nice and rarely opinionated (and New Horizons made sure to make them even more bland, villagers with the Normal personality in NH have traits interesting as watching paint dry), though this is good for kids and people who just want their villagers to just be dolls essentially, the sass of villagers in the older games added some spice to it! And it made it feel so much more genuine when a villager would give you a compliment that wasn't back-handed. I've only really just started playing it for real, but so far Wild World villagers seem to actually get closer to you the more you interact with them. They're indifferent and even rude when they're first acquainted with you, but it seems that you grown on them overtime. Also, there were way more frequent events in the older games, not just for holidays, and that added a lot more flair and fun to the life sim aspect of the older games that the newer games just lack. I still love New Leaf and even New Horizons, but I definitely see why it's not everyone's cup of tea now.
I really missed having conflict among the neighbors and having to pick sides - was definitely why I played City Folk for half a year or so. The feud between Becky the chicken and Wendy the sheep was legendary, as it caused my original bestie Melba to move & every new villager who came in was subsequently sucked into orbit. Will never forget how disappointing it was to get Becky in New Horizons and see her just be a complete suck-up whose snootiness just comes down to being interested in fashion.
@4:30 Dawg, you nailed the voice impression!
This is a feeling I've had for a while, and while I am seeing more people share it, I don't see a lot of them go back to the first game, usually just New Leaf. The most desire I feel to play any AC game is for the original. My life has become busy and the games I want to play that actually end keep growing, so the prospect of putting time back into it is daunting, but there's no other game I'd choose if I ever finally said 'I need to add a life sim game to my schedule.' I still occasionally listen to the original's soundtrack at the appropriate hours of day from time to time, and I only recently stopped almost obsessively listening to it's special rain music whenever it rained.
I had only gotten the chance to play the first game a few years ago, and I love it so much. It’s a game I remember my parents and grandmother playing, and although I play NL more for the content, there’s something about the original that I feel like was never captured in the other games. I play GC for a short amount of time compared to DS, Wii, and NL, but it holds such a special place in my heart that I can’t choose between it and NL as my favorite
@@marvelous9718 I absolutely love NL as well for the streamlined experience, it feels like with every AC that comes out it's harder to go back to each one besides the first one. Even NH has some really good features, despite the fact I despised talking to any of my villagers after about a month.
I've long kind of held the idea that multiplayer/online features was the beginning of the end of the original feeling. WW still felt rural and cozy, but with the spirit of the game being rooted in 'making it on your own', adding communication with fellow human villagers kind of stuck out like a sore thumb. I don't think the answer would have been to not do multiplayer or anything, I don't really think there is an easy answer here.
I still find enjoyment in each new entry, NH was just so bare for all the reasons listed in the video and more. I easily played it daily for a year and a half, the rest of the time was a little forced because I wanted to break my record and hit 2 years 🤷
@@Shades14236 I feel the same way. Even in NL you could see things like the villagers’ personalities/conversations getting watered down. And even NH was able to bring some good additions to the table.
We can’t expect the series to stay the same over 20+ years, but you can still feel a huge gap between how the original game was and how it is now. I’d say I do go back to NL for the content, but I go back to GC for the atmosphere, which is what got me attached to the series in the first place. I really wanted to like NH and didn’t want to seem like a “the older one’s were better” kinda person, but I think NH really derailed both from the content and atmosphere found in the older games.
Listening to the right music at the right time and pivoting proportional to the weather is just God’s work
Oh gosh I’m the EXACT same way, I still often listen to the Gamecube’s rain music during actual rain. I find myself humming the hourly tunes embedded into my brain. I can never say the same about NH
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19:16 Shoutouts to this specific bit of B-roll footage. In New Leaf if you did that they would've reacted. But there it's like the locust never existed to her. Completely out of sight out of mind.
Thank you - you've finally put into words what I've been feeling. Any time I've tried to voice my opinions on how ACNH coopted the gameplay I loved, I get told I'm just hating on people "playing the way they want." But I mean, what fun is a game with no rules? No limits? And sure, those players get a game THEY want to play, but they already had the Sims and other design games. There is NO replacement for the quirky charm older AC games had. It's all gone now. :(
I am a long-time fan of the AC series - old enough to have pre-ordered the first Game Cube game way back in 2001. Was hooked immediately, played it for YEARS (and still have my original save; I should check to see if my BFF Quetzal is still living in the town.) I enjoyed ACNH but it never had that emotional pull that the older games had. Interactions used to mean something, you had to actually WORK for your furniture and clothing items, and paying off your house was a way bigger deal. You were just livin' life ALONGSIDE your friends, all scraping by but loving the simple life. Sure, it hurt when your bestie moved away, but it came with the blessing of meeting a new character. A totally RANDOM character. Now most people playing ACNH have all of the same 20 or so villagers, hand-picked for a theme or aesthetics. You can time travel around and get whatever event items you want, put houses and buildings anywhere. It's completely different to the type of game I fell in love with.
i really resonated with this video as someone who spent a lot of time playing every game in the series during my childhood and it really makes me miss the old vibes, i hope we get a new game that's more of a life sim and less a creative tool, though i do like a lot of the creative ideas and understand why people may like NH
First thing I noticed was, that the villagers have no personality anymore. You don´t get quest from them or want to befriend with them to get a framed picture.
the fact that the first installment of the series is still looked upon so fondly and is touted as having features that the sequels didn’t live up to is kind of cool, though. I’ve been playing games in this franchise since ACGC and I can definitely say that the older games have a charm to them that i don’t think can ever be replicated
I am SO glad you tried out the gamecube animal crossing! It's gotta be my favorite nintendo game and its such a comfort. I agree with what you have to say about animal crossing NH, I was excited for it. I didn't have a switch and I am SO glad I decided to borrow my friends switch instead of buying my own for the game. I was easily bored, and it felt like minecraft. That's thing though, I don't want to play minecraft, I want to play animal crossing. Also, where did my villagers go? I don't feel like any of them are trying to be friends with me, but are just fake nice to me. I'm glad I didn't buy a switch for the game, but I would 10000% buy a switch if they remastered the old animal crossing or even implemented some new parts into it while keeping the base of it.
It's funny how in trying to make the villagers so incredibly friendly they end up coming across as passive aggressive fake nice LOL
Ohhh my gosh I agree with you so much. I also was incredibly excited for New Horizons, preordered it digitally because "I've loved every other AC game !", now really regretting that because if I bought it physically at least I could resell it or hell even give it away for free honestly. Because of NH I never let myself get excited for or preorder games again, lol.
It feels soulless. What used to be a game about living with animals that could help with loneliness is now just a soulless doll house. You're absolutely right that they're just decorations now. Making your island look good is all New Horizons is good for, but that's not what AC should be about imo. Tho for me I'm like "why would I care about making my island look good when I don't care about anyone living on it?"
It's a really shallow game to me. I don't know why the devs decided the animals and their personalities weren't important anymore but it makes me sad.
I agree with what you said you like about the game, but I think it's telling that all of those things are just decorating AND THEY DON'T EVEN DO IT WELL!
The old Animal Crossings genuinely helped me through lonely times and also helped me learn English - I could never say that about New Horizons. If anything NH makes me feel lonely lmao.
I was thinking about the loneliness angle earlier and honestly I think the dead of night in NL with one sisterly villager being up with you felt less lonely than the middle of the day in New Horizons. It sounds over-dramatic, but the villagers in NH seriously feel like soulless mascots. I'm glad you connected with the video!
Soulless doll house is a perfect description:(
I wouldn't say a "soulles dollhouse" but the villagers are lacking Charm in NH.
I mean it's also good for progression your house and everything too.
I wouldn't say shallow but it ls lacking in key important areas.
I mean it's not just deocartion, it does island progession well in general.
This is so relatable!! I got a new Wii to be able to play the GameCube Animal Crossing recently, but I also used home brew to move my City Folk save file over to the new Wii (something you can’t do natively, sadly). I found myself being sucked into City Folk despite having last touched the game 12 YEAR AGO. It’s so nostalgic, and it reminded me what Animal Crossing was actually ABOUT!!
Next animal crossing, have it take place in a village/town, not a deserted island. Completely rewrite all the characters. Remove crafting, speed up terraforming and pathing. Remove some control. Done easy, that’s all they really need
as a lifelong animal crossing fan starting from the gamecube and onwards- this is 100% valid and most of us feel the exact same way. it was the feeling of being lost in a new, unforgiving yet heartwarming world
it's so strange to me that they automated what used to be interactions with the villagers.... only to make you painstakingly remove and add each wall by hand
I have been thinking about New Leaf a lot recently. I should go back and start a new town. Great video.
This video is another example of smaller creators making higher quality videos than their larger counterparts.
I remember the acute disappointment I felt in NH when my villagers started saying the same things over and over again when I haven't even played for a significant time, where on GameCube even after 8 whole damn months, they still found new ways to call me a dumb bitch.
oh its the eas dude
This is not good he’s basically saying oh games should make kids cry and new leaf better cuz nostalgia
You hit the nail on the head with the game giving you too much power. Previously Animal Crossing games would introduce me to new villagers that would end up becoming favorites. But with New Horizons I'm able to pick and choose who I want to live there, where I want them to live, and stop them from ever going. Like, obviously I'm going to put in my favorites if you give me the power to do that and if I can stop them from leaving, sure, I'm going to. But making you this all powerful god makes the series feel like it's missing something. Each game has given you more and more power which I had been getting more and more wary of but now it's granted you far too much.
I was so excited for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. After Seven long years since the release of the last game, I was hyped on launch day. But I also didn’t play it for long, for many of the reasons you listed.
What I find especially sad is that ACNH has had a bit of a ‚Botw Syndrome‘ issue, where a game explodes in popularity, and suddenly every game in the genre uses similar game mechanics and ideas without actually improving on them. For example:
Fantasy life was a great life sim/rpg experience for the 3Ds, with charming music, great art and area design, and tons of things to do.
The recently(ish) announced sequel, Fantasy Life i: the girl who steals time, focuses less on the unique contrasting area design, and instead has you *on* *an* *island* *that* *you* *can* *decorate* *to* *your* *liking.*
The parts of the first game I loved are now so unimportant that they were barely even shown in advertising. The plastic-like artstyle has the same issues ACNHs has for me: it looks corporate and soulless, and doesn’t have any of the charm the previous game had.
I hope that the game was just poorly advertised and the island builder is actually only a small part of it, but it kinda looks like they went „Animal crossing new horizons sold well!!! Let’s just do that again!!!“ even though the original Fantasy Life had so much going for it.
So yeah, not only was ACNH a disappointment for me, it also might’ve been bad for the industry (to me, specifically) as many games I would’ve like instead copy a successful game that *I* don’t enjoy.
I finally see someone saying this! I really really hope the upcoming Fantasy Life offers at least a bit of the unique experience I had with the original ❤️
I thought the exact same thing when I saw that in the trailer! I’m still going to buy the game on release day, though. Since I’m a diehard for the og.
There will likely be a divide amongst AC players now: those who enjoy the pre NH games more, and those that started with NH and think that's the standard. Perhaps a compromise between the two is still possible though. I'd forgive NH a lot more if it just had decent villager interactions and far less repetitive dialogues.
I think you make a solid point about new horizons really becoming entirely about customization. I've played over 800 hours in new horizons and I love the dlc, but when I think about why I loved new leaf it was also entirely focused on the decoration aspect. I loved happy home designer for the DS too. New horizons catered to people like me who just loved animal crossing for the interior and exterior decoration but in that process it did lose a lot of it's actual atmosphere and story.
I grew up with the GameCube Animal Crossing, so honestly my number one wish is that they’ll release some sort of remaster or remake of it in the future. I’m not holding my breath, but it’s also true that it’s over 20 years old and it’s never seen an official rerelease of any capacity, so they could potentially market it as being a blast from the past while people wait for the next mainline entry.
I’d love that! The GC version is one I played the least of, strangely, but it’s still a more interesting experience than New Horizons was. I did play NH for quite a while, but gradually lost interest because there wasn’t really much to do. Also just really didn’t like the events held on the other island.
Would love this so much! ACGC was my most favorite game
Nana enjoyers!! She was one of my favorites in my New Leaf town as well. Her house was super cute and she rounded out my town well since I had some lazy and grumpy villagers. But now villagers are so one note that having different personalities doesn’t even feel like a difference.
animal crossing games have always built on the previous, its such a bummer that so much stuff is missing. so much flavour was lost in a game thats all about vibes lol. the multiplayer island and barista job deserved to become series mainstays, the shopping street/city couldve easily been implemented (we eventually got that campsite area but cmon), having to engage with your neighbours to convince them to stay, all the town events they couldve brought back (wild world had some minor ones that i loved, like the garden competition and la-di-day), hell i was praying we would get pocket camp items including flowers and bugs. they couldve made the ultimate animal crossing and instead they stripped it back way too much. instead of bringing it back to basics they stripped everything except what those tumblr girlies with hacked copies of acnl wouldve wanted to make their ~aesthetic~ towns. i really really hope the next game in the series perfects what was added in new horizons while bringing back what previous games also perfected
"A peppy villager knows nothing but being a chronically online girl failure"
...feeling pretty attacked here, man
Honestly, the only things that I feel were really wrong with NH is that A.) If you have a villager of a certain personality type, you basically have ALL villagers of that personality type. They all use the same lines, just with different character models saying them, and B.) For all the leaps and bounds in what you can do to customize your town/island/whatever itself, there's very little customization for your house. Instead of three floors with five rooms each (center room and a room in each direction), you get one floor with five rooms, a single room basement, and a single room upper floor. So instead of 15 rooms to customize for your house, you only have 7 in NH, around only HALF of what you could have before.
Though, I can see where some of the smaller, finer details might also bother people. For example, the fact that aside from the Mario themed items, there are none of the Nintendo IP items like we saw in NL.
I feel as if NH took two steps forward with all the advancements in island customization, the crafting system, adding cooking as a thing, being able to move entire trees around, and the mystery islands you could fly and sail to... but then took one and a half steps backwards with villager individuality, home customization and fun little details.
There was only one instance I found something resembling unique dialogue for a specific villager. I had Zucker, and I happened to find him in the aquarium part of the Museum and he started to have an existential crisis. Since he's the only Lazy octopus character, I believe this is unique dialogue.
The sad part is, this is the ONLY time I saw anything like this. Older games had stuff like that all the time.
Your story of not getting excited about new releases was something I learned with Spore. And not hyping myself for a game has helped me enjoy games better now.
Finally someone who said it, Animal Crossing has been my favorite franchise since I was a child, New Horizons never clicked for me and I have it abandoned for several months, you stated all of the reasons I've been telling my friends of why I do not like it. It's a widely loved game and I'm sad I can't be part of that crowd, because I do not enjoy it.
Back at I don't know what year I managed to homebrew my wii and started to get Japanese games into it so I could experience those exclusive games including gamecube games. I got them and went at it. After I got bored and confused cuz I couldn't read Japanese I decided to boot AC once more and... the save was gone. It got deleted.
The reason: Whenever you play another region game the GC card must be formated and I did just that without realizing it. I was shocked and destroyed. It wasn't just my town. Some of my family had their house there. All of our combined experiences GONE.
I was shocked and extremelly sad. I tried to look for a backup save. Something. Nothing came up. We lost everything...
but...
Nowadays... I realized. It wasn't so bad. We didn't lose something: Our memories. We would remember what we did and it turned into a precious memory. We kinda considered creating a new town but... it wouldn't be the same. We weren't the same people anymore. With the same free time and what not. and you know what?
That's life.
Sure, it's a videogame but life is like that. You lose things out of nowhere. You visit places and meet people that you will never see again. Make new friends and even forget old ones. It's not evil. It's just life.
In a weird way I'm kinda glad it happened cuz it's now such a special memory altough I admit that I'd love tho visit that place again. It would definetively unlock memories that are resting within my brain.
Unfortunately I can't say that for new horizons. I've done it and it will happen again. If I go back it will be as if nothing ever happened and that's... that's rough. You don't feel happy to be there again, you don't miss anything or anyone and yes the flat characters mean that I have no special funny memories or stories about them.
I guess not a lot of people got this experience btw. Playing the same town with friends or familly and I can tell you. It really sucks now. You could interact and mess with others. You can't really mess with others now besides moving their stuff that's outside but a lot of things are limited to the first player that stepped on the island. They can only do things like moving houses and build bridges. You can't even transfer money or something to other players. We had to bury bell bags. On GC and Wii it was very primitive and limited but man it was so fun being able to put things up for sale. Even overpricing them cuz you knew somebody else wanted them. The gyroid trafficking was REAL. Our favorite joke was adding traps around the exit of the house cuz most of the times you'd fall on them. Maybe you forgot your shovel or didn't see it. It was so good. They are way easier to avoid on New horizons.
So yeah. New horizons is amazing but man it doesn't have the same spark and I think is not my nostalgia. It's really not the same. Not a bad game... it's just not the same...
That’s a beautifully bittersweet story. I’m glad you and your family had that special experience.
I always thought the island was too small. It still blows my mind that you could have fifteen villagers in the Gamecube game, plus the shops and museum and service buildings, and they've never equaled that since. I think they could make a game that serves both the "life sim" and "sandbox" audiences, and I think it wouldn't have taken that much extra work for this to have been that game.
(Also the outro music made me smile, KK Love Song was the first KK Slider song I ever got and I always make sure to get it first in every new game)
I relate deeply. I had so many friends who never played until New Horizons, so it was hard to make them understand the appeal of NOT having so much control. More than anything, the characters having nothing close to the personalities they used to.... Feeling like I really had to earn their friendship. Villagers getting mad at you, depressed by you, making each other angry or sad or putting one another in way better moods so they'd skip around, it added so much complexity to the relationships they had not only with you but one another.
you put my exact thoughts into words!! i wish there was a way to toggle the moving out feature for certain villagers so you could still have that level of surprise if you wanted it but keep your besties- although in new leaf the game just seemed to know who i was invested in any way and they always stayed. i also hate how the last villager to move in in new horizons can’t stay… it makes it so you feel like you have to villager hunt and can’t let randomization do its thing which takes the fun of it. i also really miss the feeling of building relationships over time. ofc you want some friendly characters, but those relationships should deepen over time. my favorite relationships in new leaf were with the snootys and crankys who were rude to me at first, but over the course of a few years truly seemed to enjoy my presence. it felt so much more realistic and rewarding, and i wish they would bring it back!!
this is probably just a big preference thing, but i find NH soundtrack to be somehow really soulless mall music. New leaf's music was way more unique and stood out more. You can notice this instantly when looking up animal crossing soundtrack compilations / nintendo music compilations, and NONE of the songs are from NH, only the earlier games
Someone made an entire, genuinely quality, hour-plus long animation that actually expands upon some of your complaints about how much controll you have in New Horizons, making the player character out to be essentially a god that controlls everything. So this is definitely not an uncommon sentiment.
Where can I find this? It sounds interesting.
@@TheLimboOfTheLost It's called "Mask."
th-cam.com/video/KoRvwKjoobE/w-d-xo.htmlsi=9LncPk2gqMu-haYW
@@TheLimboOfTheLost It's called "Mask." I dunno how TH-cam feels about links, but if you look it up, you should be able to find it.
I wanna watch it, what’s it called
It's called "Mask." I said it twice but TH-cam keeps deleting my comments.
You basically summed up all my feelings about New Horizons. When the game first came out, I only ever saw positive things about it. As a longtime player of New Leaf, I was really excited and I waited years until my mom could afford to get me a Nintendo Switch. (Yeah, I bought an entire console for one game. I won't make that mistake again.) When I actually played it for the first time, I found myself getting more and more bored, until I eventually never opened the game again. I tried joining online communities like a New Horizon forum to get reinvested, but all the things they described doing (island hopping for the perfect villager, terraforming, etc) were so different from what I want in an Animal Crossing game. I want to revisit the game at some point, but I'll probably avoid the villagers for the most part since they just make me kind of sad.
"where is the Feed&Seed?"
...
CHUCK'S HOUSE
Well well look at the city slicker pulling up in his fancy German car
>I CAN'T SNEED
@@braziliantsar It's a subtle joke, you see.
I remember revisiting New Leaf for a „last time“ because I wanted to complete my museum and have every golden house feature. Safe to say, the house worked, the museum misses only 1 Art piece to this day.
I was so hyped for New Horizons, at that time, I‘ve been playing the series for 14 years. I remember I got the game 4-3 days early and I wanted to see the terraforming feature before release. I did just that, on release day, I had the terraforming and then I did so much terraforming and decoration that I was hooked for another few hours until I found the terraforming so mind-numbingly boring that I wanted to do something different, so I asked around in the town in hopes of getting new quests etc. But then realisation struck. That was the entire game. No need to grind for money, no need to grind for anything, I‘ve already seen everything. If you play the game the intended way, it takes you around 2-3 weeks to have seen everything there is to it. You can make so much money so fast, there’s so many stuff just made easy and accessible just like that, that there’s next to no quest in getting there. All the old games cold have me hooked for weeks and play on for months and even years without restarting anything because the grind is real. But that was all NH had to offer and I was just too greedy to enjoy taking it slow. I realised there were a lot of things missing, that I actually enjoyed. The villagers felt more like robots than they already did in NL. I found that I like the music less in NL than the previous games and here I liked it even less. The items nearly all looked like regular everyday items. The weird part was missing, everything was just made like it could be fun for the general public. Obviously, they listened to some feedback when they made the game, but they (imo) erased a lot of the DNA of the series, which made me not like the game at all. I restarted it this year and this time I took things slow, accepted that this game looks out for a different animal crossing experience. Since I knew the game already, I was prepared for a lot of stuff and it was actually pretty fun. I set myself some goals and challenges so I wouldn‘t get bored by not knowing what I could do because I always had something to do. I‘d still replay NL a million times over NH.
I feel the exact fucking same. New Horizons just felt so lifeless with the dialogue, material farming, and level of control you have. You've nailed it right on the head. I actually returned to AC1, mostly because it's easy to emulate, but also it's way more accessible to my kid compared to New Horizons. Sure there are less items and customizations, but what there is is personality.
Edit: Honestly, New Horizons should've been called... Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer 2 - The Building Material Farming Chore - The Game
The crafting, material farming, and tool durability were such bizarre and pointless additions that felt like they were simply lifted from popular survival games. I wouldn't be surprised if they had to hold back on putting in a stamina meter or an enchanting system 😒
@@Starpotion Sadly I think all of these new features will make it into future games. What I’m hoping for is different play modes. They should give us the option of playing god, mayor, or just playing villager.
I actually really love New Horizons (playing it while watching thia video), but the three things that make it feel incomplete to me are the lack of shop upgrades, lack of Nintendo crossover content (especially the villagers NL added) and the lack of minigames.
Honestly I think the fact that nothing happens while you're gone is one of the biggest things for me. The only reason I'll revisit an animal crossing game is to see how things have changed while I was gone, to see what I've missed. In new horizons, the answer is absolutely fuck all.
And my dumb ass heard they were gonna do updates for a whole year and genuinely believed they would add everything by the end. It was only after the last update that I realised how... lacking it felt. Also none of the updates coaxed me back to the game, I am very much in the "played it for less than 6 months" camp. I'm also still annoyed that you need to pay for an online subscription in order to share patterns.
Sadly I don't have an earlier game to go back to since I was never huge into animal crossing as a kid, I mostly just watched my mum lmao. The only one I even still own is New Leaf, mainly because it's downloaded, which I only played a bit of. I'm pretty sure I even inherited the mayorship from my mum, so it's barely even *my* town. Maybe I should try the original again as well...
A couple of things i really love about nh are the museum, its incredible, they visiting villagers like cj, flick and daisy sue, and the landscapes. The fact that your town can be on 3 different levels now makes some areas incredibly gorgeous even without player intervention
I could not agree more!
In fact, about a month ago I felt the pull of New Horizons as well. I started it up, feeling like there was some catching up to do. There were some villagers that I wanted, and I hadn’t decorated all that much in the past.. 3 or 4 years I’d spent not playing it
For two weeks.. stuff was pretty good, I hadn’t checked out the free update content. I got the Roost, I paid for all Harv’s campsite shops (and didn’t get a thank you for it), I grew some Gold Roses, made a couple landmarks and raised my island to 5 stars! Even redid some of the rooms in my house and paid off all the debts with my saved up Bells
In doing so, it very quickly stagnated. My daily Animal Crossing routine had… water flowers, hand out gifts, sell fossils… now what?
Once a week, I guess I could check Harv’s NPCs for unique furniture. Maybe grind for some Nook Milestones. But I’d also adopted habits that other players had, like now I understand why people buy shovels in bulk instead of craft them. I could never find the DIY recipes I wanted, so I traded with others and went to treasure islands. With such a slow, slow passing of time each day, and nothing to do in them, I wanted to expedite every process I had, because I was so… bored with myself
‘S been about another month now, since I felt the pull again. It took two weeks to experience everything, and I’m desperately grasping for more to do in that game. But… I’ve done everything, and I don’t want to log in every day for one more piece of something I could *maybe* do
It eventually just stagnated to the point where all I wanted was to play New Leaf. Buuuuut my 3DS is broken, so,
"Your home would never be perfect, but it was your home all the same"
Damn
it’s a great decorating game. but that’s all. personally i never put it down for more than a couple weeks, i have over 4000 hours in acnh & still play it regularly 😭 & mind u no one has visited my island except my ex boyfriend, & that was like 3 years ago. so i obviously love the game, but only for what is it. i love to decorate. but as someone who has poured so much time into it, i’d do anything for the villagers to be more engaging, have more personality, tasks for u to do, SOMETHING. ur right they have basically just fallen under another category of decoration and the game really suffers bc of it. always makes me sad to hear about ppl who only played for a couple months & didn’t touch it again but i understand
On the one hand, this is a masterfully crafted video, and as someone who only got into the series via New Horizons you've made me really want to visit the older games and see which one I like the best... but on the other hand I wish I didn't watch this while in the middle of playing New Horizons.
Like, your point about missing furniture was the only one I initially dismissed, but then you elaborated and I was like, "wow, he _is_ right, why is so much stuff missing". And the comments have pointed out a ton of stuff, too, like how all the furniture looks so realistic, as if this isn't a game with giant-headed anthropomorphic animals where you can get rich by smacking rocks with a shovel and where fruit trees grow in 3 days.
I've gotten back into Pocket Camp recently, on a whim, and this video made me realise, I enjoy decorating my little cabin in that app _way_ more than my island. Mostly because, like, the villagers **fucking interact with the stuff I set out** and so many items added have unique animations and properties. I recently got items from some Cinderella-ball event I missed, and villagers *_actually dance_* on the stage and dance floor items. The last time I'd played before quitting the game was shortly after the second anniversary, so my cabin's ground floor was still decorated with the *_fully functional orchestral instruments_* and food displays that my villagers would constantly play on and eat at.
You were bang on with the complaints about the villagers, too. I'm typically very easy to please when it comes to characters, because I naturally make up stories and characterisations for them, but even I can't stand how samey the NH villager dialogues are. Every jock names their abs with the exact same names. Every cranky villager invites you to get a drink - but a completely random drink every time, instead of each one having a specific favourite, so you can't even infer anything about their likes and dislikes.
I've been looking at Nookipedia a lot recently, and reading the villager pages I realised that the difference can actually be distilled pretty concisely by the villager information section; the "In New Leaf" section lists their favourite drink at The Roost, how many siblings they have, their likes _and their dislikes_ as well... while the New Horizons section lists the stuff they wear and hold. All visuals, but no personality. Glorified dolls, just like you've said. And this is coming from someone who actively ships their island's villagers!
I think the moment that really broke the magic for me was playing Happy Home Paradise, seeing Gaston (a villager I previously had on my island) at the beach and deciding to make a home for him... and him not only not mentioning having known me, but rolling the one dialogue option where he says he's _never seen me in his life_ before.
anyway. This comment got away from me at some point. Basically the only reason I haven't reset my island is because it's how I asked my boyfriend out, and because I'm hopelessly sentimental, and even that second reason is beginning to wane the longer I spend on my revisit of it.
Your point about the added convenience being a bad thing for the series is something I've been thinking a _lot_ about a _lot_ of modern games. Pokémon is the example that comes to mind for me. Like how the newer games have more TMs instead of Move Tutors, so you don't have to go to a specific person to learn moves any more!... so moves that _used_ to be special, like the Pledge moves and the starter's elemental Hyper Beams, aren't any more. And there are fewer NPCs in the game, which means less worldbuilding since there's no reason to dedicate time to unique NPC interactions, which in turn means there's no reason for a player to bother going anywhere they don't have immediate business. Hell, NPCs don't even give you items any more, so there isn't even a reason to talk to the few randos that _are_ still around.
It's the exact same problem as New Horizons, and Deep Cut from Splatoon 3, and just _so much_ of the modern game industry, and honestly a lot of modern entertainment in general. So much of the effort goes into making these worlds _look_ gorgeous, and doing the kinds of things that get content creators in a tizzy to make hurried analysis videos of surface-level details... but then once you look past that surface, it's incredibly shallow, and you can tell they didn't care about making an experience that sticks with the player. Just as long as the bigwigs in charge get their money, who cares if the player base completely forgets about the game?
There is still hope for Animal Crossing, I do believe. For one, the game devs are actually the same devs behind Splatoon, and they've in fact made strides in remedying the aforementioned Deep Cut problem. Because news in Splatoon 3 is skippable, they initially didn't put any effort into the broadcast, but since that broadcast is where you got most of the character for the previous idols, you ended up missing a lot of the finer details and only getting the broad strokes. But as time has gone by, they've fleshed out the characters a lot, adding in more personality beyond their base archetypes and successfully expanding on points they initially looked like they were going to brush off.
So, hopefully, the next Animal Crossing game will follow in much the same way. Though hopefully they'll also avoid taking the same content model as Splatoon again, since with Splatoon playing the same game modes over and over is much the point, while that kind of repetition is anathema to the AC experience in such large quantities.
Coming back to this video again because, by some miracle playing New Leaf and internalising this video have made me love New Horizons all over again, and made me learn to take it slow. Is it perfect? No, and the simplified villager dialogue still hits me, especially after playing New Leaf for a week. But damn if it isn't still amazing.
As I write this, I'm walking around the museum for the first time in months, maybe even years, for a reason other than checking if I've already got the art Redd has in stock. It was the museum in New Leaf that made me realise how much I missed this place; it's one of the times that New Horizons being much grander _really_ works to its favour, because this genuinely feels like a place I would spend hours wandering around and getting lost in were it real. The music being much slower and having more variations, the gorgeous, elaborate exhibits that you can feel the love oozing out of, things like the butterfly house in the Bug wing or the asteroid and the Hall of Species in the Fossil wing that just make the place as cozy as the island first was. Plus, it's wonderful to have a tangible, permanent reminder of the work I've done.
Which isn't to say the non-permanent stuff has lost its appeal. Being so in control of the island definitely does have plenty of downsides, your video still hits home and true, but on the other hand... leaving the game for so long, and then coming back to it, it does feel genuinely good to see the effects I've had, and the home I've made for myself. Because that truly is what my island is, it's a home to me, one I know will always be there to welcome me, one that holds so many of my memories and was there in a formative part of my life.
I don't know where Nintendo will take the next Animal Crossing game. My personal hope is that they pull a TTYD port and make a game in the style of New Leaf but with the QoL and visual polish of New Horizons. But I think, after all this, I'll be ready to take life as it comes, whichever way it goes.
The fireworks festival starts next August, on my island. I think I might go this time.
the combination of serious documentary thoughts and hilarious yelling gameplay is everything i needed xD thank you for an amazing video. i have been waiting for someone to make something like this for forever, thank you for putting into a video what we've all experienced
thank you! i couldn’t exactly pinpoint why i felt so bored with new horizons, and everyone else seemed to get so much hate for simply not liking the game. i have TRIED to get into it properly, and i haven’t gone back to it since 2022. Thing is, i’ve been playing all the other series games (minus city folk), and i can actually enjoy them as i’m not clouded by nostalgia as new leaf was my first game. in new leaf, i was obsessed with making my island look nice, but it wasn’t the ONLY part of the game as there was actually variety. even with the first game, i found it so charming, and it didn’t matter if your island looked a but rough and ready yknow. the villagers were the heart of the original game, and i think since new leaf, they’ve started taking a step back