The Dissonance Between Old and New Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing is a special case in the modern game industry while it feels like so many games these days are created to be constantly changing updating and always vying for your attention and money with new DLC Animal Crossing is instead a title that invites you to take breaks when you like and return at your own Leisure the game does receive updates yes but I never feel the pressure of needing to jump back in when they drop or else I'll be missing out somehow no Animal Crossing has always been a game that I feel I can come back to in my own time and with new Leaf I did just that over the game's lifespan I Revisited it four times obviously for the first time when I got the game around its release in 2013 twice in 2016 once in Spring and again in winter when it got its welcome amiibo update and one final time in 2020 during the leadup to its sequel New Horizons which I was so indescribably excited for that I had to feel the void somehow and so March 20th 2020 rolls around and I play New Horizons rampantly for maybe just over a month and uh I make it a point to not get too excited for games these days even ones I like the idea of or I think look great you just never really know what you're going to truly think until they're in your hands because after that month of play I dropped New Horizons like a sack of [ __ ] huh bear in mind I had just been playing this games at the time 7year old predecessor for 3 months straight with no issues before this did I just burn myself out on Animal Crossing before the launch of New Horizons I didn't think so but it didn't matter I'd just wait for Animal Crossing to Temp me back in naturally like it always does but then nothing happened keep in mind this was early 2020 where no one on the [ __ ] planet had any responsibilities other than not going outside L they catch the donkey kongga virus I was hand delivered the perfect reason to waste all of my time on stupid animal game and yet it didn't interest me in fact pangs of disappointment started to creep up on me and those pangs of disappointment eventually started turning into feelings of resentment Animal Crossing New Horizons sucked it was missing so many Legacy beaches no perfect fruit no Cafe shop no shop upgrades no fortune cookies so with my Island's baseball stadium still in construction I completely abandoned it to be honest this video was originally conceived as a Amal Crossing n Verizon sucks dick video but then not long ago something unexpected happened I felt the game calling me back it took over 3 years but I felt the desire to play New Horizons so I did but unlike my various reunions with new Leaf it barely lasted a couple weeks but it did reveal one thing to me there was more Nuance to this than I thought New Horizons did have stuff I liked some features that I thought were really cool and yet it once again failed to Captivate me why was that to figure it out I decided I had to go back to somewhere I'd never actually been the beginning of the animal crossing series on Nintendo GameCube [Music] while I'd never played the first animal crossing I knew the gist of the game and I knew all about where it came from within the fandom it's common knowledge that the creator of Animal Crossing Katsuya iguchi created the game with the themes of family friendship and community in mind based on the state of his life after moving to Kyoto from Chiba to work for Nintendo when he was 21 leaving his friends and family behind to begin a career in a new unfamiliar setting this is reflected in the original anim Crossing pretty clearly with your player character moving to an out of the way town with little to their name and no friends upon arriving in penis 3 I was quickly greeted by the head of the raccoon mob Tom Nook and given a shitty Little Shack toiv for the low low price of 19,000 Bells which was 18,000 Bells out of my budget Tom Nook asked me to swing by a shop later to hook me up with some work to pay off my debt but I first decided to explore the town and introduce myself to the locals hello who are you I don't know I don't know this one Iggy he's named after a shitty [ __ ] Mario character The Village Peter oh my God Co bson holy [ __ ] Co head like a [ __ ] orange yo Monique she was in my new Leaf town when I was a kid we got Monique as well all right so this is where we do like the morning aerobics and [ __ ] penis inspections and [ __ ] where is the feeding seed ah oh it's a [ __ ] [ __ ] bull that's a voice something I was quickly struck by was how much more personality The Village's dialogue had compared to New Horizons some of them were a bit more standoffish and didn't immediately take a massive shine to me whereas in New Horizons they pretty much Start instantly sucking on your toes 9 seconds after meeting you for the first time they even take little Jabs at you or hurridly want to get to the point of the conversation it's a much more realistic depiction of trying to mingle in a new Community as an outsider she's calling me a broke ass [ __ ] are you the mental run of the litter or what holy [ __ ] that's brutal in only 2 hours I found my random assortment of GameCube Villages more engaging than the ones I've been talking to for 4 years in New Horizons the game indiscriminately makes you feel like a bit of a bottom feeder that needs to find their footing in a new place and work their way up the social ladder until they earn some respect I've just woke up in a [ __ ] steaming mood yet cuz I live in a [ __ ] hole Birmingham is a [ __ ] [ __ ] hole I hate the [ __ ] place it's full of [ __ ] I [ __ ] hate it the first hour of gameplay more or less consists of you doing odd jobs for Nook in a desperate attempt to pay off a little bit of your debt to him once he runs out of [ __ ] for you to do he prompts you to go off on your own and find ways of scrounging up some cash by yourself maybe by collecting and selling items around the town or by doing favors for your fellow villagers and well quite honestly it feels like the villagers just start messing with you with some of the errands they want you to run oh my God they're [ __ ] with me I'm going in circles so originally Stella wanted her Game Boy back from Chuck I go see Chuck about the Game Boy and Mo'Nique has it so I go get it from Monique I give it back to Stella and then Twiggy starts talking about oh I gave my Game Boy to Chuck who gave it to Jory who gave it to Stella who gave it to Monique [ __ ] these guys [ __ ] them they're trying to [ __ ] with me I'll [ __ ] with them right back I'm getting that game boy from Mo'Nique and you know what I'm doing with it I'm [ __ ] keeping it guys I know I have a phallic shaped personal gyroid assistant but I'm still not gay please refer to the board within only a couple hours of play time on the GameCube title as well as everything I remembered from New Leaf what exactly I thought was wrong with New Horizon started to become more and more apparent and so I've come up with three main issues I have with the game number one even after its DLC updates it's still missing so much content from the old games number two the new and cool features and ideas it does have are implemented clunkily and finally what I think is the biggest sticking point over all three in giving you control over almost everything it sacrifices the series original identity let's start from the top there is so much Legacy content that isn't present in New Horizons even after its updates that it's actually hard to list all of it without missing some stuff out furniture sets store upgrades perfect fruit Island mini games Nintendo fortune cookies special offense NPCs and their respective shop buildings it might sound like nitpicking but these do end up piling up I think the most egregious of these things are the way way some NPC characters have been shafted in favor of menu functions who needs Dr shrunk to teach you a new emotion when villagers can just randomly do it who needs Harriet and shampoo when you can just look in a mirror and change your expression and hair instantly no need for a post office just send letters at the airport you don't need retail just sell stuff to Nooks com sprouts and customize furniture at your workbench it's weirdly selective as well Jack still shows up for Halloween but blaner is nowhere to be seen on April fools but the other missing stuff sucks too the lack of Island mini games means there's a lot less fee to do with your friends when they come over usually you just do a lap of the island and then say yeah that was cool and then [ __ ] off home in fact I've seen a lot of people just make their own mini games within the limitations of the game because it just doesn't offer anything worthwhile itself it also just really bothers me that some furniture sets that have been present in the games as far back as wild world are just completely dropped but are for some reason available in the godamn Animal Crossing phone game which also has some Banger Ass Furniture completely absent in New Horizons despite how easy it'd be to pour over hell remember the whole debacle about the froggy not being in the game that same fate beset so many other unique pieces of furniture that sadly didn't become viral social media memes to get Nintendo to finally add them back in so the game is missing a lot of old stuff however it does have a lot of new stuff to go around so let's move on to the second point to its credit new horiz does things I wanted in New Leaf for years Furniture being able to be placed outside organic path making and even Island terraforming these were some of the features I was so excited about being in the game so it sucks that they're implemented so horribly making PA could feel like a tued lay and task in new e city Folk since it wasn't really supposed to be an actual game mechanic and was instead born from player creativity so it baffles me that New Horizons doesn't streamline the process very much and it feels almost just as cumbersome as ever but I guess I can forgive that what I cannot forgive is the island terraforming dear Lord terraforming your island is some of the most absolutely mind-numbing [ __ ] garbage busy work I've ever encountered in a video game I know animal Crossing is a slow burn experience but Christ man it takes hours or at least what feels like hours just to stamp flat up small section of your Island it is so boring in fact I remember it being one of the main reasons I dropped the game I was attracted by the idea of being able to shakee My Island to my liking but it just took me so damn long even in the [ __ ] covid-19 coronga virus era that I just felt like I was wasting my damn time another Trend New Horizons jumps on is crafting this isn't inherently a bad idea it's not one I care for but I can see the Merit of it but it's also clumsily handled it takes way too long to collect a decent amount of materials compared to a game like I don't know say Minecraft and the act of just crafting itself can take ages if you're trying to make a lot of one item one at a time baby over and over and over compounding the issue is that a lot of furniture is craft exclusive and are only obtainable from RNG bottles that wash up on your Beach or random handouts from villagers if you happen byy their house while they're crafting something themselves in addition to this craft recipes are even tied to villager personalities so if there's a villager archetype you don't have on your Island it's going to be very hard to get those recipes not to mention New Horizons also adopts everyone's favorite cancer upon modern gaming item durability even your gold tools will eventually go kaput so what's even the point of putting in the time to craft them in the first place even the golden watering can it's a [ __ ] watering can like how does that have j what the [ __ ] are you doing with that to make it break all it does is poor water right who who has ever broken a watering can in real life so I have major gripes with the terraforming in the crafting everything else in New Horizon adds to the formula are great additions though like I mentioned placing Furniture outside is an amazing addition and works great all the additional flourishes you can do with your interior decoration like adding pillars and walls are awesome I have no quals with any of that not that I can do it I didn't buy the DLC [ __ ] you but to be honest even those two reasons together I don't feel what really makes this game fail for me nor do I think I'm breaking new ground by complaining about it thousands of people have pointed out everything I've just said before me in fact there's even more common complaints that people have that I haven't even mentioned they're definitely big hits to my enjoyment of the game I mean you've been watching the footage considering my not insignificant play time on this game it's telling that my island is still a Bogan ass unfinished [ __ ] hole the customization while great on paper and lends itself to very cool possibilities is a complete slog in practice and the game built around it feels like a shell of its former self but what I think really kills this game for me is something a bit more abstract but probably the most important and that's my third point in giving you control over almost everything it sacrifices the series original identity this is really the meat of the video Let's recall what inspired Katsuya aguchi to make Animal Crossing in the first place the loneliness he felt after moving to Kyoto the struggle to fit into a completely new community and this is a universal feeling we've all known what it's like to feel like an outsider in an unfamiliar setting this is what made Animal Crossing a life simulation game simulated life yeah I know subscribe guys but seriously the identity of the franchise is rooted in coexisting with your neighbors making your living making friends and at least finding compromise with the people that didn't become your friends there were things you could change but a lot that you couldn't you could choose where you live and what your house looked like but you couldn't choose where other people live and you couldn't choose who those other people were this is what made the older games engaging the rough as well as the smooth your town would never be perfect but it was your home all the same even in New Leaf where the concept of you becoming the town's mayor was implemented you still had limitations you couldn't control everything because in real life you can't control everything you change what you can and manage what you cannot let's contrast this with New Horizons where you are an all knowing allseeing God among cartoon animals you are given the power as if you are the resurrection of Jesus Christ himself to do almost anything you please who moves on to the island who leaves where do they live you get to decide all of this and this is compounded by the fact that the villages have been reduced to completely one-dimensional doll ards they have absolutely nothing of Worth to say spouting the most generic boring dialogue in tune with whatever archetype they have my favorite villager of all time in New Leaf was Nana who was my neighbor on my childhood Sile sweet and caring always interested in Friendly small talk I even once talked to her so much that she got upset and daintily told me to get the [ __ ] out of her house she was such a favorite of mind that I bought her a amibo card in order to add her to my New Horizon's Island however I've actually sworn off interacting with Nana ever again in New Horizons because no word of a lie on three separate occasions all completely different days she said the exact same line of dialogue to me every time I spoke to her this is of how little substance the villagers are in New Horizons a jock villager will speak of nothing but protein shakes and lifting weights a Pepe villager knows nothing but being a chronically online golf area and all of them no matter how much you push them around or build a prison around their house or accidentally swinging ax at their head we'll always love you always be happy to see you we'll always offer to give you a hand job behind the town hall so with the Villager dialogue and personalities is being so flanderized as well as the fact that you're granted so much agency over their lives and the fact that there's a fairly abusable way to roll for ones that you want I feel like Villages are more like decorations than actual inhabitants of your Island in New Horizons I mean [ __ ] you can even make a [ __ ] ethnos state or divide your Island by animal race if you're you know like that they don't even ask you for favors anymore content to just faf around and sit under trees for hours on end and another massive problem I have is the lack of consequence in this game you could abandon the game for 17 years and you'll not receive so much as a slap on the wrist from your neighbors just a quick oh what where were you man and then back to your regularly scheduled sanitized dialogue in the older games if you left the town would move on without you but in New Horizons you can abandon the game for as long as you want and the flowers will not die the weeds will not grow and most important of all no one will leave New Horizons puts a b they done lots of things people complained about in previous titles Villages suddenly moving or moving into undesirable spots in the town but I'm going to argue that those things were actually important in building an emotional connection between you and your town and The Villages that lived in it and this is coming from someone whose two favorite villagers ended up slipping through their fingers in New Leaf if there's no threat of my villagers drifting apart from me and moving why should I care about maintaining my relationship with them why should I care about my Island at all if turning off the game just more or less puts it on ice you might think that contradicts what I said at the start of the video where I said Animal Crossing invites you to play whenever is right for you but the only reason I felt like revisiting my town in New Leaf was because of the emotional connection built from those elements I feel like the Animal Crossing series can be treated as a scale between the first and most recent game moving closer from one to the other with each new title so why am I specifically fingering New Horizons as the one that's lost the charm of the series well it's pretty simple I just feel like New Horizons has in its goal to Grant the player as much customization and control over the as possible has finally tipped the scales too far in the other direction and almost fundamentally changed the basic structure of the game while each subsequent game would Grant you more and more leniency in what you could and could not do the life simulation angle was still at the heart of them all until New Horizons because ask yourself is New Horizons really a life Sim Animal Crossing has always been about you making a life for yourself in its own world but in New Horizons The Animal Crossing world is cast aside in favor of letting you build your own world earlier I mentioned how New Horizons replaces a lot of the NPC functions through menus or other means this is still the case but I should mention that the game's big 2021 update added haves Island which is a hub where some of the ditched NPCs hang out in Exile and have mega function slapped onto them for example Cyrus is reimplemented as the guy you go to for customizing Furniture but hang on you can already do this yourself well actually you can only customize most of your furniture but there are certain items that you need to bring to sir this is New Horizons trying to have its cake and eat it too the base game wanted to Grant the player Independence and freedom to do whatever they want but now they're reeling it in and trying to reintroduce all the cucked NPC characters and I think it speaks to a larger identity crisis the game is having and with that Revelation I finally figured out why New Horizons just never worked for me at least not as an animal crossing game it's not a life Sim it's like the sandbox almost so the question is this is Animal Crossing New Horizons a bad game no it's just different to those that have come before it and unfortunately alienates some veteran fans with the direction it's taken including me but that doesn't mean the path it took is bad New Horizons offers unprecedented customization that none of the previous games can even hold a candle to so many people have created genuinely amazing islands and structures in this game well beyond what I ever expected from an animal crossing tile it's the best selling game in the series with probably millions of active players to this day so it' be absolutely Ely foolish of me to claim that all those people were wrong or that their positive experiences and opinions about this game don't count but what I am saying is that for me personally New Horizon stumbles at hurdles I didn't even realize existed until I really sat down and thought about it I didn't realize how much the lack of agency you had over the game and the consequence of abandoning your town did for my enjoyment of the series cuz they don't seem like obvious reasons you would enjoy it in the first place but in removing these elements and not streamlining the new ones it did introduce I just cannot see myself returning into the game to escape the stress of my real life like I did with new Leaf so many times over its lifespan I could go on like there's even more reasons I prefer New Leaf over New Horizons like aesthetically and musically and I could even delve into whether or not I think New Horizons is even successful as a Sandbox game especially since it's being tied down by trying to half-heartedly adhere to the series Roots but I don't want this video to just dive volge into mindless rambling I figured out why I didn't really enjoy New Horizons and I think I explained my viewpoint as well as I could have and I'm aware that I'm probably not breaking any new ground here it's not like I'm the only person who has ever thought these things about these games this discourse is probably all old hat to an active Animal Crossing fan but it felt like the only real way to get this off my chest for good was to express how I feel through a video you know it's funny while making this video obviously I had to capture footage of both new leaf and New Horizons and during those recording sessions I found that once I'd captured absolutely everything I needed from New Horizons I hopped off without a thought but my new Leaf recordings ran pretty long as once again all these years later I got sucked in just found myself simply enjoying the game if that doesn't reinforce the idea behind this video I don't know what does in fact maybe it's time I checked in on my old new Leaf town it's been a while [Music] there she is hello I'm not in right now [ __ ] she's probably a [ __ ] Chuck or something there's chuck oh my God I knew it I told you that is the kind of thing you cannot script what is Chuck doing he's he's got the got some crazy postn he's singing he's singing a tune he got that postn Clarity going he's so happy he's dancing a jig singing songs and [ __ ]

Channel: John Sex

Views: 138,134

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Id: NwvlIjZZkEQ

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2024