8 Best Changes In Animal Crossing New Leaf’s Update

Mii Masks Change Your Skin Tone

Animal Crossing: New Leaf is one of the best games on the Nintendo 3DS. And yet, it has had a major flaw since its release: you can’t change your character’s skin tone. You can customize their eyes, their hair, their clothing, even their socks for chrissakes, but you can’t change your skin tone except by weird roundabouts like leaving your character on the island for hours, so they’ll get a tan that will eventually fade. Your character is doomed to be a pasty white person no matter what. As a pasty white person myself, this fits, but I imagine quite a lot of people maybe would prefer something else.

Happy Home Designer finally added skin tone options, so there was some slight home that the feature might make it to New Leaf, but the update didn’t deliver. There’s a small concession: Mii Masks, which give your character the face of a Mii character of your choice that’s saved to your device, now not only change your character’s face in Animal Crossing but also match your arms and hands and legs to the skin tone of the mask. Before, you were a pasty white person wearing a Mii Mask. Now, your body matches.

This doesn’t solve the original problem, of course. I’ve listed the Mii Mask change here because it’s an important improvement, but the onus is still on Nintendo to fix this in the next Animal Crossing game they make.