Animal Crossing
/ October 22, 2026
I really like the Animal Crossing games. Please listen to me ramble about them, and what “the point” of the series is.
The Animal Crossing Games
For those who aren’t familiar: Animal Crossing is a series of life-simulation games developed by Nintendo and released over various Nintendo consoles since 2001. In modern parlance, they’d almost certainly be put into the “cozy game” category. In each game, you move into town populated by an assortment of anthropomorphic animal characters, and then you… live life. You furnish your house, make friends with your neighbors, go fishing, plant flowers - and it all takes place in real time. While there may have been earlier examples here and there, Animal Crossing was the first series that I recall that relied heavily on the system’s real-time clock. “Once per day” activities truly are once per day, and the residents of your town keep to a true daily schedule.
The series started in a not-at-all-confusing fashion: Dōbutsu no Mori (“Animal Forest”) released in Japan for the Nintendo 64, closely followed by an enhanced port for the brand-new GameCube. It was localized for the US as “Animal Crossing” - which was an enormous six-month-long translation effort that involved creating new items and in-game events that would be more familiar to a non-Japanese audience. The game was so well-received in the US that the new features were then ported back to Japan for an updated re-release.
Nintendo followed up with Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS, Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii, and Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the 3DS, with 3-4 years between each game release. The sequels were mostly slight iterations and improvements on the existing formula and featured increasing amounts of Nintendo’s attempt at online multiplayer play. Wild World allowed for visiting another player’s town with the DS local wireless connection (the original Animal Crossing did allow for town visits, but it was a clunky system involving multiple memory cards and didn’t allow multiple simultaneous players), while City Folk supported some elements of worldwide online play. New Leaf made the biggest change thus far to the series - the player character now becomes the mayor of their town and gains more control over their environment, being able to slightly modify the town layout and schedules.
Then nothing happened for 8 years, besides a few mobile/minigame spinoffs. I’ve heard Pocket Camp was actually quite fun, but I never played it and it was a very different game than the main series.
And then in 2020, the funniest thing happened and we all went inside for several months. In one of the best-timed game releases ever, Nintendo dropped Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and we all got to go live on a tropical island with a bunch of happy-go-lucky animal pals. It was a perfect storm to become a global hit, and tens of millions of people devoted hundreds of hours to their island life.
Now I’m going to tell you why New Horizons sucks.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Misses the Point
New Horizons was a major departure from the previous games in the series. The player is once again the mayor of their own little town, but is now offered incredibly granular control over the island they live on. The single biggest feature is the new “terraforming” system, which allows the player to resculpt the actual structure of the island, customizing the map to their liking. New Horizons also showcased Nintendo joining the 21st century of online gameplay, allowing players to visit other islands all over the world without the complex song-and-dance usually required by other Nintendo games.
These are features that a lot of people had a lot of fun with. I’ve seen some truly incredible works of art as people sculpted their islands into picturesque villages, escape-room mazes, and weird “full-island art pieces”. Being able to join a game with your online-only friends created some fantastic mid-pandemic socialization experiences and allowed players to alleviate a lot of the randomness involved in trying to get a particular villager to move to your town or to find a specific piece of furniture.
The problem is that, in my opinion, they fundamentally break the “Animal Crossing” experience.
Animal Crossing shouldn’t be a game about curating your perfect little dollhouse, featuring all of your hand-picked dolls and meticulously-planned layout. It’s a game about “living life”, and rolling with whatever that happens to mean. The opening cutscene of the first Animal Crossing game features the player character talking to Rover the cat on the train into town, chatting about the scary-yet-exhilarating experience of moving out on your own for the first time. You, the player, are just one more resident of your quaint little town. Each villager has their own life that’s just as much a part of the world as yours is. It’s a slow game - there’s not really all that much to do on any one day, which means that the best way to play is to keep coming back for 15 minutes here, an hour there. Villagers will move in, and villagers will move out - and it will be a tragedy when your “best friend” decides that they need to pack up and head out into the world.
Maybe not all of this is the fault of New Horizons. The world of gaming is so different now than it was for the previous games in the series. Everyone reads the wiki, everyone wants to optimize and plan and show off. But I really do think that the new changes make New Horizons almost a completely different game.
And to prove it to myself, I went back to play the oldest Animal Crossing.
Animal Crossing Deluxe is Awesome
I recently got an actual hardware GameCube and then did a bit of modding on it, which means I can now play Animal Crossing Deluxe on real hardware. This is an amazing mod - it takes the original Animal Crossing and adds a very well-chosen handful of changes. Some are basic tech updates (proper widescreen support, a free-scrolling camera instead of the acre-by-acre transitions of the original) and some are much-needed quality-of-life features (highest impact: letting Blathers identify your fossils without having to mail them to the museum!). There are even a great set of inclusivity changes, as the player character can now choose a skintone as well as opt for non-binary pronoun usage. But the new features have a light touch - this is still the Animal Crossing that I grew up playing with my siblings after school.
Most importantly, though, it preserves the feature that I think is the most clear evidence of the way the game has changed.
Villagers are Still Assholes for No Apparent Reason
There are a few hundred villagers in the Animal Crossing series, and it would be impossible to write truly unique dialogue for every single one of them. Instead, each villager has a unique catchphrase that they use to tag dialogue, while the rest of their lines are pulled from one of 6 (eventually 8) “personality types”. This gives a decent-enough sense of variety that, when combined with the catchphrase and their unique sense of style and decoration, makes each villager feel like their own personality.
One of those personalities is called “Cranky”. An example of Cranky dialogue from the original Animal Crossing:
Well! If it isn’t my neighbor, ! My, my! Loafing about as usual this afternoon, are we? Looks like it to me, ! Don’t you have a job, ? You really should go get one.
And in New Horizons:
Well, nice of you to finally show up! Gahaha! I’m just joshin’ around with you, !
That’s not “Cranky”. That’s “mildly sarcastic” at best. Some of my favorite memories playing Animal Crossing with my siblings involved us dealing with Camofrog, a frog villager painted in a camouflage pattern with a military catchphrase. It was funny in a harmless way to go chat with him and get yelled at for no reason in particular - he just wasn’t in a good mood that day. It made the game feel like a real town - a real place with real “people”, not just a fantasy land driven entirely by the player’s presence.
It’s been 6 years since the release of New Horizons, but Nintendo has figured out this whole “Down-loadable Content” thing now, so they’ve been updating New Horizons with new content as recently as the beginning of this year. I imagine it will be quite some time before we see another actual full Animal Crossing release, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that it gives me more of a world to live in, and not just a fantasy dollhouse.