Animal Crossing: New Horizons Year In Review
As we approach the new year, we look back and reflect on how Animal Crossing: New Horizons helped make 2020 more manageable.
2020, a phrase that once stood for perfect vision is now a term used for a year that blinded us with nonsense. In a year where everything happened at the worst possible time, one thing seemed to defy all odds and drop at the most perfect time possible. Not just in the year but possibly in our lives. That would have been the launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch.
In the United States (where I live) Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched on March 20, 2020. And while it was already hyped heavily as a “must-have” title for the Switch, a new selling point came to the surface in the States… quarantines.
While most of the world’s nations had realized months prior that they needed to get on the quarantine train ASAP, the United States wandered through the plague like some oblivious Winne the Pooh that mistook petri dishes for honey jars. So when the States finally decided to start issuing stay-at-home orders and quarantine regulations, it happened at almost the exact same time as the Animal Crossing: New Horizons launch — and it was perfect.
Instead of people being stuck in isolation and in their own heads, the over five million people that purchased the game in the month of the game’s launch now had a new land to discover and people to interact with. Not only that but it was a way better Animal Crossing than previous generations, giving us now only a house to customize but an entire island. We could craft our own stuff, place furniture outside, and, more impressively, completely terraform the island.
Now, instead of visiting people on similar islands, people were free to completely flex their creativity. I have visited towns that were everything from recreations to towns from the original Pokemon, modern Tokyo shopping districts to islands completely dug up to create floating island homes surrounded by water. Visiting your friends virtually didn’t just feel like you were investigating how their game was going, it felt like you were visiting their home.
It didn’t hurt the launch that a lot of celebrities were getting into the game heavily too over the last year. Elijah Wood became infamous as one of the most polite people you could ever have visit your town. Brie Larson’s Instagram became a fountain of screenshots of her showing off her town. And one of my favorite moments was when YouTuber Gary Whitta was taken by the nubby hand of famous tough guy, Danny Trejo’s virtual avatar and given a tour of his island. Listening to Danny Trejo gush as he shows off his food cart placement and his street layout is one of the cutest things I could have ever imagined.
As time went on, Nintendo flexed a new feature to the series that also really helped it become a pandemic hit, timed events. Traditionally, if you played an Animal Crossing game and you wanted to see all the stuff the, say, Halloween event had to offer, all you had to do was switch your system settings to the day of, and boom, this is Halloween.
One of the things I was worried about was a game everyone was using as a pandemic escape having its few story beats spoiled by people skipping ahead and ruining reveals. Nintendo was one step ahead. Now, if you wanted to celebrate events, like the recent “Toy Day”, you have to make sure your game was up to date and online on the correct day, and then, and only then, can you participate in the event. Even afterward, if I wanted to redo “Toy Day” after the fact, rewinding it to the 24th will just give me a cold winter’s day devoid of event. It’s an awesome way to allow everyone to experience something at the same time. You can even visit other people’s towns during these events to celebrate with them. Sitting on a bench on the 4th of July with a friend and chatting while fireworks go off over the ocean was honestly comforting.
The events got off to a rough start with Bunny Day, Animal Crossing’s Easter equivalent. It taught Nintendo a valuable lesson about scheduling as the Bunny Day event put eggs EVERYWHERE including in the water, essentially ruining the fishing tournament that happened at the same time, by making it more likely to catch eggs than the necessary fish.
Over time though, Nintendo made the events a lot more enjoyable, often adding things that stayed with the game even after the events. The Halloween event, for example, allowed you to unlock a plethora of new skin colors and hair colors giving people more customization options. It even allowed you to plant pumpkin crops which could then be used to craft a wide array of pumpkin-themed objects. The “Turkey Day” event gave you a bunch of rustic things to build. “Nature Day” even brought in the addition of beloved Animal Crossing NPC, Leif, the lovable Bob Ross inspired sloth who can sell you all sorts of plants including bushes which allow you to replace your fences with shrubbery that actually blows in the wind and produces flowers at select times of year. For example, if I go in my town now I’ll find my holly bushes are alive with berries. It even does a special event specifically on your birthday which I found adorable and mildly terrifying.
Even outside of the events there are always new things to discover and do in the game that allow you to get more out of the game. Whether you’re adding real images into the game, discovering bizarre glitches, or staying up uncomfortably late to catch a glimpse at a bizarre alien, New Horizons keeps letting you discover new things.
Now that the cat’s out of the bag with the majority of events in Animal Crossing save New Years and Valentine’s Day, it’ll be interesting to see if 2021 can keep Animal Crossing interesting now that all events have been revealed but I’m excited to find out.