New Horizons: Failing From Success

foreign a Japanese man is sitting on a train feeling lonely in the massive city of Kyoto Japan his new job for video game company Nintendo pays pretty well but his heart misses the days of his childhood he misses spending time with friends and family because in this new city in this new job he was just another person but back home he was Katsuya aguchi the man who would create Animal Crossing [Music] the Folly capture the loneliness of the city iguchi began experimenting with ideas of how to turn his somber experiences of living in Kyoto into an enjoyable game for kids it was important that his vision didn't make kids depressed because like obviously Nintendo doesn't want that it had to be Charming it had to be unique and in 2001 dobitsu namori released in Japan and for the next few years Animal Crossing would release in America Australia and Europe and it would be enjoyed by many people who gave the game a chance when most people look at animal crossing they say oh animals talking to each other you know like I'm I'm what's the word anthropomorph anthropomorphic and entrepreneur animals that are like humans that are just talking to you and you set up a house that sounds like a real real babies game but Animal Crossing has always been a video game that had a slight tinge of optimistic loneliness yes you are moving to a new place you know you get all the freedom you want do whatever you like what you soon realize you have no friends no money and no job and then you realize oh no this guy is just like me Animal Crossing New Horizons released in 2020 a year where forming connections with people was no longer a viable option New Horizons was released at a time where people could not socialize people were so desperate for this game they wrote a letter to Nintendo to release it earlier than planned dear Nintendo uwu and hello we are the Nintendo fan club of Discord Reddit 4chan whichever the worst one is and we would like you to release the Animal Crossing New Horizons game a week early so I don't have to talk to my family I obviously Nintendo were so touched by this letter that they canceled the game completely people loved it it got outstanding reviews everybody on Twitch and YouTube seem to be making streams and videos about this game even those who never played Animal Crossing played this one even video game Donkey was getting in on this one oh see Beth I didn't know they had sea bass in this game foreign passing the likes of Super Mario Odyssey Legend of Zelda breath of the wild and even Balan Wonder World but if you ask a fan of the franchise if they thought this game was great the answer isn't always so Crystal Clear so why is this why is the most popular most successful most played Animal Crossing game the one that the fans are most mixed on and after writing this video essay I think I might just know why let me tell you why Animal Crossing New Horizons failed from its success real real blue [Music] this video will showcase every problem I personally have with New Horizons so feel free to disagree with anything in the comments but a lot of what I will say is factual information on how New Horizons feel so different from the previous games I am in no way expecting this video to change your outlook on New Horizons or to this Nintendo employees who worked on this game because they did a very good job I'm making it out of love for the franchise and to document why this game doesn't work for a lot of fans [Music] so Animal Crossing games do not have a plot I mean the plot is sort of what you make it in these games you're the main character you are the protagonist of your own story animal crossing new leaf gave a little bit of plot allowing you to become a mayor once you arrive in the town but after that it's the same as the previous games the goal in every animal crossing game is to make your own goals the NPCs are there for you to meet and play with but your story is what you make it yourself and your goals are always up to the player never ever the game the game May point you in a direction to say oh you gotta catch some fossils or you gotta catch some some bugs to fill up this Museum but you don't have to do it you definitely don't have to do it to experience some features in the game New Horizons gives the player a plot and goals you go on a deserted island retreat with zero money to your name because you're a broke little lad and then you have a dream about a dog playing guitar this is KK Slider and the overall goal that this game introduces is to get him to perform a concert live at your Island so to do this you need to make your Island look as presentable as possible and how do you do that well a little bit of imagination and a degree in architecture Agriculture and city planning this is one of the reasons why many people didn't play New Horizons for too long not the fact that there is a goal to achieve but once you pass this goal and keiki slider arrives to your town there is really nothing left to do aside from the basic Animal Crossing stuff that we've done in past games improving your house fishing and Bug catching fossil collecting but it feels like you've finished the game based on the way that you've completed the game's main goal wait I just see credits have I done it did I beat Animal Crossing well to get KK Slider there if it feels longer than a tutorial should be it takes weeks to do this which is why it feels like it's the main part of the game it feels like this is The Game's goal and once you finish it the game ends the game drops off a cliff after this moment after you complete the KK Slider going to your Island thing because despite it playing like the old games now it feels emptier because the game gave you something to do which was never done in any animal crossing game before it feels like the game should be giving you more to do after you complete this goal or nothing to do in the first place which is what the other games did if that all makes sense which it does because I'm right Animal Crossing is not a game that should force the player to achieve something if you don't achieve this goal you're locked out of a lot of things a lot of new features that this game promotes stuff like terraforming the island and placing paths aren't in the game until you complete this KK Slider thing even the iconic hourly music isn't added into the game until you finish this goal overall this is one of the biggest reasons why I think people got so bored of the game so quickly it changed up the Animal Crossing formula in such a way and made people feel like once you completed the KK spider thing you completed the game [Music] it says it right there in the title animal Crossing they're an essential Cog in the machine that is this game because they're what makes Animal Crossing stand out from any other life Simulator games if you've read about some Animal Crossing discourse online anytime recently you may have heard something along the lines of the villagers being too nice in Animal Crossing New Horizons well what do you mean by too nice this game can be played by actual babies why is that a bad thing it is a bad thing and here's why I'll give you an example say you have a friend right just in this hypothetical situation you have a friend and they always say positive stuff about you are around you and not around you right they never critique you they never judge you it's just having a yes man right that's that's all that is now imagine that but for 10 different people the older Animal Crossing games Blended the perfect cocktail of nice and mean they would sometimes complement sometimes critique they'd crack jokes at your expense this makes these 3D models feel alive in some weird way New Horizons villagers just feel so programmed like their sole purpose is to kiss your ass and give you gifts in the mail the basic interactions you have with villagers are just you walk up to them and you say oh hi and then they say oh hi Dino your clothes look great is that a new haircut do you like the fountain I gifted you in the mail or it was hell trying to get it in that little envelope water got everywhere and I dislocated my ankle trying to send it at the post office but I pulled through because my love for you was so strong point is their attitude almost never changes and I think that this is a factor as to why talking to the villagers in the game feels so pointless in a 2020 game developer conference devs of New Horizons revealed that making the animals do things on their own was a vital part to making them feel more real this addition to the game I believe is brilliant because it's true seeing your villagers do stuff like yoga or reading a book under a tree or drinking a soda really do well to aesthetically bring the villagers to life whereas in past games other villagers would do do is walk around the place this doesn't fix the main problem however villagers are more expressive and display more personality than ever before but only when you're not talking to them which is the reason why they are there in the first place for New Horizons you get these rewards called Nook miles it's a form of currency you obtain when you do chores around the island like selling fruit shooting balloons etc etc etc but I have a problem with one of the ways you can get these Nook miles one of the objectives is talk to three villagers and while yes this encourages players to talk to their villagers and to not abandon them I feel like you should not be rewarded or enticed to do this like talking to your villagers should not be a chore that you were rewarded for it should be a part of the game that the player themselves wants to do with their own Merit but then I realize why they made this a chore the dialogue is unbelievably repetitive this might be a common argument among this games fan base but hear me out right this game actually has a lot of dialogue believe it or not this game has so much dialogue in it so many paragraphs for any situation you find them in if they're reading under a tree they'll close the book and they'll say oh I'm just sitting here under a tree yeah but the problem is most players will never see half of this dialogue there is so much dialogue in this game but there's not enough from where you will see it from the villagers most and that is when they're outside and you just feel like talking to them they have such limited things to say you know how I know there's so much written text in this game the male the male letters that you get in the post I didn't even bother reading a lot of the mail in the previous games but New Horizons villagers will write about the article of clothing they're gifting you if it's a pair of shoes they'll write about the shoes I genuinely don't think I've read a similar letter in this game in my 3 years of playing it which I commend because that takes a lot of work but why couldn't they do this for the dialogue or give the villagers a little bit of sass you know just just something the only way to irritate these villagers is if you hit them with a net yeah it takes physical violence to make them react in a different way to you I feel like maybe it shouldn't be like that you know I get that kids won't want their favorite villagers to smack talk them all the time but I mean it's important to teach kids that people can be mean sometimes giving them a land where everyone is happy and nice is not a bad thing but for adults and teens who play this game which a lot of adults and teens play this game it just makes every villager feel soulless the villagers can have up to eight personalities cranky smog jock lazy Uchi Pepe snooty one two three and normal yeah that's right normal is a personality I think you could tell what they are based on the names obviously like the lazy characters are you know more more lazy and lounging and laid back and you know the peppy villagers are the ones are so hyped up but you can have 10 villagers in your town at one time which means yep at least one personality will be repeated in your town for example if I have cube a lazy personality type in my town and Rodeo another lazy personality type in my town they will share the same dialogue the same jokes the same reactions they are basically clones of each other how could you form any connection with either when you already know what they're all going to say don't get me wrong the pass games had some problems with this as well but a New Horizons it just feels so prevalent because every time I go up to either of the Villager they say the exact same thing and the rare times they do say something different it's in a weird situation where you meet them at a cafe or something and you've never heard that line of dialogue before they look so expressive when they're walking around but then when you go to talk to them it's just like talking to a robot I I don't mean that in a bad way safely but you know you know how it is I'm not surviving the robot take over Animal Crossing happy liner was a spin-off game to the popular 3DS game Animal Crossing new Leaf it was basically Animal Crossing but for people who only like The Styling their house part of the game kind of like those people who only play The Sims to decorate their house the ability to decorate stuff was expanded upon and I really enjoyed it of course you could also just fill a room full of toilets and color today wow look at this place I can't believe I get to live in such a lovely world it was a good game and had enough stuff to keep it unique but really if it came out in 2023 it would have probably just been DLC which is exactly what happened with New Horizons when The Happy Home Paradise DLC dropped not only could you design as many houses as your little heart desired but the update also let you change some things about your villagers you can now change their homes both interior and exterior as you pleased for a small sum of a couple thousand Bells I am all for a little customization in games but I need to explain why this amount of customization hurts this game over overall what I pointed out earlier was that the animals in the older games had a lot of personality but they also had a thing called Free Will in newly for example once a villager moved into your town the spot that they placed their home was unchangeable New Horizons now lets the player choose wherever the villagers must live which is a good addition I won't lie in terms of laying out your Island this is very useful now you're essential but the problem arises when a villager wants to leave in the older games if you didn't play the game for like a week or so your favorite villager or a villager you couldn't have cared about to be honest could have moved away without you knowing until you booted up the game to see their house replaced and a goodbye letter in your mailbox in New Horizons you could skip 200 years into the future you could be a time wizard you could you could skip into the year 5023 and your town will have the exact same people in the exact same places doing the exact same things it will be the exact same except for a couple of weeds of course for these villagers there is a lack of Free Will in New Horizons which sounds weird because they're just cold yeah I get it they're not actual real people but the fact that every villager must ask you before they can leave is weirdly dystopian they feel like Collectibles that are unable to escape from this island you're basically building Alcatraz when you invite them into your Island but I know if those villagers can't leave doesn't that mean you can keep your animal friends forever how is that bad it is a blessing and a curse because it takes the entire message behind animal crossing the entire theme and the meaning of the game and it just breaks it because of customization the older games had this solemn charm to them where any day could be the last day you could see this villager anytime you log back in the thoughts of how things might have changed enter your mind it's this kind of emotion that is lacking in New Horizons because I know when I log back in after a month of not playing Rodeo's big dumb ahead will still be there whether he likes it or not and the reason why they couldn't just let villagers leave whenever they wanted is because you can spend money on changing their houses and changing the exterior and interior of stuff and it would feel like a waste of money if they just moved house next day the game had to keep these villagers here for the customizable part of this game Animal Crossing has always had its customizable aspects to it of course decorating your house and putting on your sick drip was always a core part of the game morphing your house from this ramshackled shed into a more stylished ramshackled shed made it feel like it was your little slice of the island now this entire island is your slice of the island and that is where placing items outside arrives into this video if you didn't know New Horizons allows players to place items outside whoa now believe it or not this has never actually been in the game before and now we have an excuse to go out and touch grass and if you've been watching the New Horizons footage so far you may have realized my island is swag as hell look here's my firm and here's my amusement park and there's the pipe that leads to places and the addition was badly needed to this game so am I going to complain about it no but hear me out there is the option to terraform your Island and as you can see by my 90 degree angled River I'm a master at using it basically you can now change the land and shape it into whatever you'd like the past games you were stuck with whatever random town that the game gave you but New Horizons gives people the option to change it whenever they want once you've passed the KK Slider part again of course like that like I mentioned at the beginning of the video these aren't bad additions but I think it's one of the few reasons why people may feel the charm has gone out of the game a little bit in past games you are arriving to a pre-established town that already had shops and villagers and and everything in it then no leave changed things around by allowing you to become the new mayor you could build Bridges and benches and many other work projects for a little fee rather than just placing them down like items like you do on New Horizons I think this really worked well because despite you becoming the mayor of the town you still play like you're just another villager they may address you as the mayor sometimes but at the end of the day you're still the newest person to move move into this town there was nothing gameplay wise that really changed anything that made you feel Superior to your neighbors the New Horizons you are practically the god of the town when you first start the game and go to the island you are immediately given the title of a resident representative which basically translate to a do anything I like kid go nuts that's my dumb luck impression this is why New Horizons does not feel or play like an animal crossing game you're no longer a little lad moving into a humble Town you're an island designer in charge of everything let me be clear the designing aspects are quite fun but they're just not what an animal crossing game should be about this game in particular tries to please every type of player who can play the game and in the end they don't fully satisfy any of them some people just don't want to customize their Island but after you complete the KK stuff that's really all there is to do even the customization players of this game caters to the most run into problems the game limits You by not allowing any items higher than the third layer of your town of course at the beginning of this game's launch people managed to find waves around that people used to make castles and decorations up there of course Nintendo patched this out so they can't do that now the best customization things in the game like partition walls pillars villager house editing are all stuck behind the DRC expansion paths can't go in a diagonal angle without looking weird and clunky and the fact that the stairs in the museum don't line up is annoying okay now that the ramble is out of the way I think it's time to just take a small break so I don't get myself so riled up ah these little bastards DIY recipes are a mechanic introduced to New Horizons that allows the player to build items with ease as long as they have the materials for it for example collect three sticks and you can combine them to make a campfire what a lovely little feature there's definitely nothing wrong with this feature at all Dino said before exploding into a zillion shards of glass the biggest problem I have with these DIY recipes is that they are impossible to keep track of you can get them from messages and battles that show up every day on your beach and you can get them from your villagers too you also get starter recipes at the Nook store hooray here's the kicker though there are hundreds of recipes [Music] and you get repeats all the time there is no limit to how many times you can get these same recipes one time I got the same recipe twice in one day for the same item I got the same thing and there's no counter so I don't know how many recipes there are without looking it up I don't know how many I have I don't know how many I need to get and the fact that some recipes need other DIY items to make them drives me out of my tree this item Here My Dear viewer this Ironwood kitchenette recipe this recipe can be bought near the start of the game right before you even do the KK cider thing I'm pretty sure you you can get this DIY recipe but to make it I need the recipes for both The Cutting Board and the iron wood dresser as you can see on screen here this is the two things I need I have over 1 000 hours 1 000 hours from over three years of playing this game and I have still yet to get the recipe for an iron wool dresser this game needs to update how crafting operates because feeling the need to go online to find someone to give me the recipe is a horrific game design I should never have to sink so low to get a sink in a video game and while we're on the topic of tools they break now if this is your first animal crossing you may not have known this but tools never broke before this game they break now to have an excuse to get you to use the grafting system first of all unless they have flimsy in the name these tools shouldn't break or if they can break let the player see how long it has left until it breaks in Legend of Zelda breath of the wild you could use a weapon like a stick right and you could hit a bug Goblin a couple of times right and it will flash saying this item is damaged so you know you only have one or two more tries with it before it breaks New Horizons does not let you know how many hits you have left on your shovel on your net on your fishing rod it just does not tell you you have to again look it up online to see how many hits it takes and then you have to count how many times you use the item and then you can make sure that the item doesn't break letting the player know that the item is nearly damaged is a good idea that way you can craft something to fix it but it's a good thing that these golden tools don't break due to how hard it is to get them this game is testing me so golden tools do break I think if you spent enough time playing this game you should have the ability to not care about your tools breaking especially if you make a golden tool that takes a gold nugget again and those aren't exactly the easiest item to get in this game anyway the system of tool breaking sucks because you can legit just buy nets fishing rods shovels axes slingshots from the Nook store it's just even quicker to buy them because for example to build a shovel first you need to make a flimsy shovel and then you need the flimsy shovel to make a proper shovel just buy the shovel instead it's easier as you can tell I'm way too passionate about this game having the golden tools be unbreakable or having any visual indicator that your tool is nearly broken will be way better than the current system of around and find out people hate the fact that you can't craft in bulk you know like like fishing bait for example it takes one clam to make fishing bait and you can press a and then you know you're making the fishing bait and you have one fishing bait for fishing people often dig up a lot of clams so they want to make them in bulk you know it's a prefer so it doesn't take half an hour to just make the fishing bait but on New Horizons you cannot craft in bulk so it takes half an hour to get fishing bait that you throw away you might not even catch the fish you're looking for it's a disaster it's a disasterous system and I really hope the next Animal Crossing game fixes it because this this needs to improve I'm gonna have to have a cold shower after this video I am really work I am really getting worked up foreign Animal Crossing new Leaf the developers decided it was a good idea to remove the shops from the main town area like they had in the previous games and place them in an area called Main Street this way people could decorate their towns more while still having the shops close by number shops like cakes which was a shoe store shampoodle the hair salon Able Sisters clothes shop the garden center run by Leaf the knock store Nook homes the post office a club run by Dr shrink the dream suite and a psychic place the museum is up here too by the way I know that sounds like a lot of shops right but want to see how many there are in New Horizons two there are two shops the Able Sisters clothes store and the Nook store Nooks cranny the 2.0 update actually introduced an expansion into Harry's Island it introduced cakes leaf and Katrina the shoe store owner the garden center owner and the psychic they now have little minivans or whatever little miniature versions of their stores as well but these are so out of the way you have to leave on a Jet Plane to actually get there they also visit once a week but that's not very good compared to being able to go any day from the previous games the main shop I need to bring up in this section of the video is Nooks cranny and New Horizons Knox cranny has one shop upgrade and that is absolutely terrible and let me explain why if you didn't know upgrading the shops was a massive part of New Leaf because when you originally arrived to the town there is so little up in Main Street there's only Nook homes the post office Knox granny the museum that is it the more that you expand on your town and the more you play the more shops start to pop up and the more stuff you bought the better that the store got nook's cranny would upgrade from a small shed to a supermarket and eventually you can even upgrade it to an Emporium the current fully upgraded store in the horizons looks like this in comparison it's actually funny seeing them side by side because wow inside you have five total Furniture items you can buy along with wallpaper and stuff stacked in the shelves this is absolutely nowhere near as good as new Leaf where the fully upgraded shop has three floors on the first floor you have tools and other items like stopwatches megaphones fortune cookies stuff that New Horizons just completely got rid of you also had two KK Slider albums you could buy Here hooray the garden center is also a part of this area where you could buy flower seeds or tree saplings shrubs bamboo even fertilizer but that's all on the first floor by the way that is just the first floor alone the second floor has a host of furniture items and has dedicated areas for ground items and wall items it also has new wallpaper and flooring the third floor is the designer area owned by Gracie Grace a giraffe who has extortionate prices for the most outlandish looking furniture although her stuff is expensive she does have a sale on at the end of each month and what I loved about these sales was that if you arrived later in the day stuff would actually be sold out and why is this important well it gives a great illusion that the villagers actually buy stuff there it also incentivizes you to play earlier in the morning to grab these items for cheap before anyone else can get to them well cheaper than the usual prices because the prices are still mad eight thousand bells for a goth dress man I'll take out a loan somebody has to slay in this town my biggest problem with how New Horizons tackles the shops is that it takes away all those upgrades you upgrade the place once and that's it no designer items no special furniture and most importantly no fertilizer which is absolutely heartbreaking to put into a word it's underwhelming because I guess they wanted to keep that humble shop design sort of thing since you're on a deserted island after all but no why give the players the ability to place roles and traffic lights fans and cars the shop badly needs an update it leaves visually actually in New Horizons it would make more sense for the upgrades to be longer than in previous games because in New Horizons you're actually building your own town yourself and these upgrades will make it feel like you're making more progress even after you complete the KK Slider thing which is actually something the game should do which should incentivize you to to update the stores more the fact you can't build other shops either is a sin I think there should be an option to invite the shopkeepers from Harris Island onto your Island that way people with no room can still visit them at Harris Island for people who want more buildings in their town can easily just invite them the fact that the post office was replaced with a stand this for pelian poly out of work one more shop I need to talk about retail this was the only store in New Leaf that was actually in your town area and what did it do it was a secondhand store type of thing where you could buy items that people had left in from much cheaper than usual this is a brilliant idea because the game won't care if the items are second hand or not you're just getting these items for cheap which is which is great you the player could also put items up for sale and charge just as much time even more than Gracie Grace does for her ridiculous designs the item probably won't get sold for that amount but hey you miss 100 of the shots you miss and also it's funny as hell to just like put up a fridge for like 10 000 bells and expect somebody to buy it retail was such a Charming concept because it was another way of interacting with villagers and making it seem more like a community I remember pushing tank the Rhino around the shop trying to get him to look at my piano I had on sale of course he was never going to buy it but I was you know if you pushed him around enough he would eventually take interest in it stuff like that was cool alas retail never returned and in New Horizons the owner's race and Cyrus were reduced to Furnishing your items that's literally all they do but hey New Horizons added wisp to Island life hooray so now you can scare him into pieces and then have to go on a wild goose chase trying to find all the different pieces of him and then you figure out oh you have to catch him with your net and then you accidentally hit wisp with the net because like oh I I thought you were the orb sorry and then you actually have to run around like a mad thing around your Island trying to find the last orb and then it appears over a river so you have to wait forever to get it and then it froze the other side of the riverbank so you have to skedaddle your skinny ass all the way to the other side of the river and then you have to catch the ore and then you have to run back to Wisp and give him his orb person in return which he gives you you wisp foreign the game's fault kind of this part of the video is about Animal Crossings fandom and Community ever since the release of Animal Crossing New Horizons now don't get me wrong before New Horizons there were bad aspects of the community as well there were bad people who played this game and participated in online spaces but nothing compared to what happened in the peak of New Horizons popularity sit back in your chair preferably so far back that you cannot hear or see anything from this video because the stuff that happened in this community in 2020 was bunkers in the words of Randy feldface here's how went down so what happened well this is Raymond a smog type personality cat with heterochromia which is the thing where one eye is a different color to the other eye as you can see here since New Horizons didn't introduce many new villagers the few new ones that were released were often the most popular there were only eight new villagers when this game released so people who went villager hunting were extremely desperate for these particular villagers the most popular by far was Raymond I don't exactly know why maybe it's because everyone loves Raymond uh maybe it's because his design maybe his heterochromia eyes maybe it's it's the tuft of bleached hair that sways in the breeze I have no idea maybe it's because he's dressed like the boss baby who knows right but people wanted him they needed him and whenever somebody got Raymond on their Island they would snap at the opportunity to sell him selling villager what the heck you can't do that can you they can do that my point earlier about your villagers not being allowed to leave whenever they want it comes into effect here because when you do decide to let them go the next day they would pack their things and clean their house before disappearing the following day during this in boxes period which is what it's called anyone from any town could visit the island and pay millions of bells or or any other form of currency just to speak with Raymond to get him to move to your town anyway yeah people profited off of selling the cat and obviously people got scammed by doing this as well so hooray for the Animal Crossing community it doesn't stop there though at Animal Crossing's Peak Raymond was being sold for actual human money for real life dollars Euro Wanga Dash actual currency in real life genuinely people made Financial profit in real life by selling a fictional cat on a video game this was happening during a worldwide pandemic and I'm convinced that that is partially the reason why these people went to such lengths such insane lens to get a cat now the reason why people may justify this horrendous financial decision is the amiibo card functionality of the game if you didn't know Animal Crossing allows the player to touch any villager's amiibo card to the Nintendo switch and the Villager will instantly visit the campsite and you can just ask them to move in with you so it's a good way of getting the Villager that you want without having to go online to find somebody who has the villager I I don't I don't have an amiibo card so um foreign however as Raymond of the other seven are new characters they don't have amiibo cows yet because they released during the releases of happy home designer and the the other game for the Wii U I think people tend to like to forget that one so spending money on him was sort of Justified since in a way it was no different to buying an amiibo card but amiibo cards can't scam you so like yeah also the new villagers got amiibo cards the following year which begs the question why didn't they release them with the game and why did it take a year to suck them on the shelves like the entire reason why he was so popular and why people got scammed in the first place was because there was no legal way to get them without either being lucky or going to someone's Island this would have saved people so much more hassle since then though the community has chilled a little bit the game isn't as active as it was people aren't Raymond obsessed as they used to be but wow it's a bizarre occurrence to see people go to such lengths for a character in a video game the other most notable event was this image here the space buns controversy was an absolute disaster of an online argument caused by a Twitter user for posting this picture in November 2020. this hairstyle that is obtainable in the game offended people when they saw it being worn on a white player the Spaceballs which were also called afro puffs were identified as a black hairstyle and many took offense to the fact that a white person wanted to have this hairstyle in an animal crossing game many people were very frustrated whether many people were very angry at her and being the internet it only took a matter of days before she was sent awful threats and messages over Twitter as well as being doxed obviously some black players didn't care who used the hairstyle some did and if that's an issue they feel like being upset over that's completely fine but doxing and sending life-threatening messages over Animal Crossing is this cute game really the cause of racism arguments I mean the Animal Crossing community can have the most monstrous horrible people on the planet due to the massive sales of New Horizons the game obviously garnered a larger fan base than other animal crossing games there was always going to be people like this but the Animal Crossing community can sometimes be the definition of how looks can be deceiving [Music] foreign [Music] to the title of this video how did Animal Crossing fail from its success well this game was very hyped up by fans I mean there hadn't been a Home console version of Animal Crossing since the release of city Folk in 2008 and steadily throughout the years the franchise became more and more successful a ryzen sold 30 million copies which if you didn't know is more than all the previous Mainline games combined so financially for Nintendo this game was a major success from the fans perspective though the game always seemed to miss something a lot of charming aspects of the previous games were just gone Nintendo could have given the game tons of updates for years to come like they did for the phone application what's it called pocket Camp I I don't play it by the way if you couldn't tell but they didn't need to the game was a major success adding more stuff over a long period of time was just not a very good business decision because well they already got all the money they could get I believe Animal Crossing New Horizons failed from its success because most of what the developers decided to focus on in this game were never really important to Animal Crossing as a franchise Town building limited lines of dialogue everything I talked about in this video just there Nintendo focused on pleasing every type of fan that liked the game and did so much that it killed the original concept and heart that I believe many of the older games showcased so much remember the start of this video the entire reason why I told you about Katsuya eguchi is to Showcase how Animal Crossing started compared to how it is now it was once a game designed and programmed to make people feel less lonely but now it's a shell of its former self contrary to what this entire video may have you believe I still liked New Horizons as a game it was legitimately fun and for some it continues to be and that's great but it's not a good Animal Crossing game to please the most amount of people the developers needed to give the player more creative freedom and in a way it's a positive and a negative thing the older games always had that charm and and basically everything I said that was missing from New Horizons in this video but if New Horizons had all of that charm I don't think it would have been as successful Animal Crossing is an acquired taste some people like it some people find it boring some find it relaxing some find it frustrating introducing all of these new elements and ideas keeps the series fresh and more likely to tempt people into trying it the series is not just talking to villagers and moving into a new town anymore it's evolved from that and whether we like it or not it is good for the franchise in terms of mainstream popularity if you really like the style of the older games the older games will always be there to play because really aside from new villagers and dialogue the older games are almost perfect Animal Crossing games the formula went unchanged for three games straight until New Leaf struck a good balance between old and new but New Horizons is taking the French choice to new places to new heights and even if you dislike the game you have to admit it was absolutely necessary to keep the franchise fresh it succeeded as a game but it failed as an animal crossing game and if that's the direction that Nintendo are going with Animal Crossing who knows maybe things will get better soon maybe they'll strike that perfect balance again to finish this video I thought it would be nice to give a short anecdote of why I have a connection with this game and why I think games in general can be so good for the soul one day in May I believe it was during the 2020 lockdown I was playing New Horizons and showing my parents around the town I went through the museum showed off all the items I had and my massive big house eventually I got to the part of my Island that had Lily of the Valley flowers my dad was half watching but I showed him the lily of the valley and he took a second and looked at them and said yeah those were dad's favorite flower it took me by surprise of it because they were also my favorite flower I never got to meet my grandfather but I found it amazing how through a game I found a familiarity with him through a game without even knowing it I would find a flower that we both thought was our favorites he passed two years before Animal Crossing ever released but I feel like if he were still here today he'd love to play this game and although I've always wished I could have met him whenever I look at that lily of the valley flower it makes me feel like I already have and to me that's what animal crossing will always be about [Music] thank you foreign [Music] foreign

Channel: The Irish Dino

Views: 735,295

Keywords: Animal crossing new horizons, analysis, animal crossing, animal crossing new horizons gameplay, animal crossing news, animal crossing switch, new horizons, video essay, video game analysis

Id: zb-_x_JiT6A

Length: 44min 23sec (2663 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023