The Essential Change Animal Crossing's Next Installment Must Bring to Its Beloved Trees

Despite its immense popularity among Nintendo Switch owners, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is not without flaws. Although this latest installment in Nintendo's beloved life-simulation franchise introduced innovative crafting and terraforming mechanics, some of these aspects felt underdeveloped or lacking in depth. Specifically, the game's approach to trees and the benefits of consuming fruit could benefit from improvement, and the next installment in the series should focus on enhancing this mechanic in a significant way.

One of the standout features in Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the ability for players to customize and transform their islands to their liking. While the ability to manipulate the terrain and create rivers received well-deserved attention, there is a lesser-known aspect of terraforming that allows players to remove rocks and trees from their island by consuming fruit and gaining temporary strength. However, there is vast potential to expand upon this feature in a future Animal Crossing game.

Animal Crossing Fruit Trees Should Diversify Their Buffs

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The current mechanic in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where eating fruit boosts the player's strength to perform actions like removing trees or rocks, is a valuable feature. However, Nintendo missed an opportunity to enhance this mechanic further. Currently, any piece of fruit can be consumed to gain this strength buff, but it would make sense to assign specific buffs to each type of fruit, considering there are six different varieties available in the game.

The potential benefits of eating fruit extend beyond simply increasing the player's strength. For instance, consuming cherries could increase the chances of rare insects appearing, oranges could enhance the likelihood of encountering rare fish, and peaches could boost the player's movement speed. Moreover, with the introduction of swimming in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, coconuts present an excellent opportunity to enhance the player's swimming speed without requiring excessive button pressing.

In the Animal Crossing series, fruit trees have an exclusive quality as players start with only one type of fruit in their towns. Usually, this encourages players to visit other towns or islands to obtain different fruits. Currently, the only advantage of doing so is that foreign fruits sell for a slightly higher price with the Nooks. However, a more appealing incentive to collect all types of fruits would be if they provided players with unique abilities or buffs based on the fruit type.

These changes may not seem highly significant in terms of gameplay, but they present a straightforward way to enhance an underrated mechanic and increase the usefulness of fruit in the Animal Crossing series. Completing the Critterpedia in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which involves collecting all insects and fish, can be challenging. Therefore, rewarding players for connecting with others by granting them access to buffs that can enhance their efficiency in this task would be a great incentive. Additionally, such a system would give players more reasons to have fruit trees in their towns, beyond solely using them for farming and selling purposes.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available for Nintendo Switch.