There's no doubt that I did enjoy my time with New Horizons on balance, but my complaints began to stack up from the opening hours. As someone who generally doesn't enjoy survival games, I was conscious that many of the changes that Nintendo made were likely not made with me in mind, though I tried my best to get into it. I wanted to love it, perhaps a little too much. I have a deep, abiding love for the series, and when I jumped in, I hadn't put significant time into an Animal Crossing game in over five years. Squint your eyes while you're chopping down yet another tree to collect enough of the right type of wood to build your favorite fence, and you might imagine one of Minecraft's creepers shuffling through your idyllic island.Īt first, I embraced New Horizons with open arms.
Hours into the game, players unlock the ability to terraform their islands, essentially giving them the freedom to completely change the face of their town as they see fit. The game strongly encourages hoarding recipes and key ingredients like lumber to craft the items you want.
Players are encouraged to craft their own furniture rather than waiting for Tom Nook's shop to stock their preferred items. These changes make it arguably the most innovative game in the series, for better and worse. True to its name, it introduced a number of fresh mechanics to the formula, particularly those popularized by the survival genre, albeit with their sharp edges sanded off. However, that all changed with New Horizons.
ANIMAL CROSSING A NEW LEAF GUIDE SERIES
What's more, I realized that New Leaf simply had a depth of content that no other entry in the series could match at that point: more shops, more villagers, more events, more items. The various mayoral perks in New Leaf might cost an absolute ton of Bells, but they gave me something to work towards beyond a house payment-a thing that I begrudgingly admit I want in a modern Animal Crossing game. When I played the original Animal Crossing games, I was a kid with seemingly infinite time on my hands-I could put in the hours to savor the measured charm of the series without worrying about bills or responsibilities. However, as I got further into New Leaf, I realized that these tasks gave me more of a purpose beyond the furniture and fossil collecting of the previous entries in the series. They struck me as antithetical to the "make your own fun" approach that made me fall in love with the series back on GameCube, and I ignored them for the most part in my early hours with the game. When I first started playing New Leaf all those years ago, I found these increased responsibilities (as I interpreted them) to be bothersome at first. You can even pass "laws" that cause your village's businesses to be open later or earlier, depending on your personal whims. This gives you the ability to create new fixtures in your town for hefty fees, including light poles, bridges, benches, and cafes. New Leaf's biggest gameplay change is that you're now the mayor of the village, rather than simply a new human citizen living among animal folk. New Leaf nails the fundamental aspects of Animal Crossing as a series, while adding a number of key enhancements that make it significantly better than its predecessor, City Folk. Though that might sound like a criticism, the slow-paced life simulation offered by Animal Crossing doesn't need dramatic shifts to entice fans, especially when they wait a few years between releases. Prior to New Horizons, every new entry was essentially more of the same, with a few small twists to keep things interesting. New Leaf is the fourth entry in the Animal Crossing series, and it's fair to say that the game was considered a somewhat conservative evolution of what made the series so good in the first place.
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