Animal Crossing: New Horizons is Great… Except for These Things

By: Ryan Ramakrishnan

Nintendo took the world by storm for the last month with “Animal Crossing: New Horizons.” And I’m no exception, having punched in dozens of hours into progressing my island without a tiny bit of signing off on the horizon. However, like all great things in life, this game is not perfect. For every addictive hustle of flipping fruit and turnips or creative endeavors in my up and coming mansion, “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” leave me frustrated by simple decisions made or lack thereof. These are those annoyances that Nintendo should have done differently in the latest “Animal Crossing.”

For starters, let’s talk about how you have to push through repetitive dialogue every time you want to do, basically anything. In fact, this is going to be a majority of this piece since “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” insufferably commits this sin in several ways.

We all go in and out of our houses to put things in our storage and switch them for others, and as a result, it should be easy to mass select. If I want to put several new purchases or bundles of materials away, why do I have to individually? And the same obviously applies vice versa. Speaking of my house, why does it cost so many hundreds of thousands of bells to get a room? Okay, I’m kidding. We all know the economy is just as messy in “Animal Crossing” as it is in our own backyard.

I digress. But I find it annoying that I can’t use the special feature of pressing “down” on the directional pad to move around hung up items. I want ease of movement with my hung-up shirts, shoes, hats, clocks and wreaths. It is annoying that to reach the clothing item that I didn’t mean to place so high cannot be removed without removing everything beneath it.

Oh and speaking of clothing, I also find frustration in the fact that I can’t hang my clothes and display my shoes, fancy and all, if I want to wear them. Nope, my wardrobe just doesn’t seem to have them.

Let’s take a walk outside of home and struggle to properly place things with the invisible grid system of the world’s layout. You don’t know how many times I aimed in the wrong direction with my shovel or swung and missed my axe like a minor league baseball player. Or maybe you do since we’re playing the same game.

Breaking my tools is the worst, especially when you don’t have the materials needed to make another one on hand. It’s a long run back to the house to tediously grab some more, then to go back to the closest DIY bench. Can you guess what’s next?

I’ll tell you but first give me a whole minute to hold “B” as I rush through the game asking me if I want to craft, proceeding to ask me again after I made a flimsy tool. You see, “New Horizons” should just let us make the better versions of axes and shovels, rather than making the inferior ones, then going to use them for the better ones to be crafted. It is all slow and unnecessary. The game knows what is required for an axe so why bother asking me to make a flimsy axe. The buzzwords are “wasting my time.”

Of course, buying things at the store causes similar problems. A little known secret is to buy as much of your native fruit as possible, then visit a friend’s island to sell them for more. Next, you buy their native fruit until there is no more space on hand to return home to sell all of them for maximum profit. That process is actually the definition of “grind.”

So for starters, I can only buy apples in bulks of five or just in singles. I can’t imagine who buys singles but more power to you. It is oddly time-consuming to have to say yes to them every time they ask if I’m interested in buying more. I don’t understand why they only sell five when a bulk in your inventory is 10 but even buying in bulks of 10 would take forever thanks to the dialogue’s continuously repetitive nature.

But travelling to and from friends’ islands calls for us going to the airport, opening the gates, more dialogue, waiting for the friend to enter as the game pauses everything going on to show the entrance of a lifetime that you’ll see constantly with your best friends and then finally it's game time.

I was however quickly discouraged by the inability to move furniture around or assess fossils when friends are visiting me, among other little deeds. And of course once my friend exits his vacation on my island, the game goes through another process of stopping us dead in our tracks again.

And now we are home sweet home. I spent the last hours collecting, storing, crafting and selling, rinse and repeat. So I save and quit and I return to the home screen of just such joyous music and the itch to play “New Horizons” begins to hurt. I almost instantly want to go back as soon as I quit. And that very thing has happened multiple times. So that is the moral of the story. Even with this overwhelmingly negative criticism of the game’s many core features, “Animal Crossing: new Horizons” is still an absolute delight to play. It is addicting as anything; I always have things to accomplish and my future endeavors are all the more exciting given how I play just for a little while but daily. I am never bored in “New Horizons,” just a little frustrated by the tedium of the systems at place. But this is a great fame, don't think I dislike it. Much like people, sometimes you just have to be brutally honest and real with those you love the most.