The Ultimate Animal Crossing Game: Revolutionizing One Key Feature

Highlights

Animal Crossing: New Horizons' successor should balance leisurely gameplay with faster-paced options to cater to both casual and hardcore players.

The slow tutorial section of New Horizons establishes the overall pace of the gameplay, presenting challenges such as sluggish menu navigation and text/dialogue, a tiresome crafting process, and intricate friend accessibility.

Future games should prioritize accelerating elements that players perceive as monotonous, in order to foster a more seamless gaming experience.

The Animal Crossing series has always prioritized relaxation and the enjoyment of a cozy village life at the player's own pace. Animal Crossing: New Horizons takes this concept to heart with its focus on island life. While many fans find the leisurely pace of a low-risk game like Animal Crossing: New Horizons enjoyable, hardcore players may see it as a hindrance to their progress in the game. Therefore, the next Animal Crossing title should aim to achieve a balance between a faster-paced gameplay experience and the relaxed atmosphere that the series is known for.

One of the highlights of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is its extensive customization options, allowing players to create their ideal islands through features such as terraforming, deciding the placement of villager houses, and placing furniture outdoors. However, these features are predominantly locked behind a slow tutorial section, where players must first clean up their island and make space for buildings before gaining access to the necessary tools for customization. While this tutorial does facilitate a sense of building an island from scratch, it also sets the slow pace of the game right from the beginning.

Animal Crossing Could Greatly Benefit from Better Pacing Options

After completing the tutorial section of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, players still encounter numerous pacing issues that hinder their progress in creating their ideal island. The navigation of menus, such as accessing Nook Stop and Island Designer, becomes a tedious process that interrupts daily tasks. Additionally, the speed of text and dialogue poses further obstacles when navigating through the game's menus. Although there is the option to hold a button to hasten the dialogue, it would be beneficial to include an option to skip it altogether.

The inclusion of crafting in Animal Crossing: New Horizons adds a valuable element to the gameplay loop, but it is hindered by its slow and arduous nature. Many players have found themselves needing to craft multiple copies of an item for a particular project, only to realize that they must craft each one individually. This tiresome process is further exacerbated by the prolonged crafting animation that must be endured each time an item is crafted. While button mashing can slightly increase the animation speed, a more efficient solution would greatly improve the experience.

Playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons with friends can be tiresome due to the steps required to make the player's island accessible. Navigating through menus at Dodo Airlines to open the island's gate and send a Dodo Code can become tedious. Streamlining this process by allowing players to open their island's gates from anywhere, cutting out the need to talk to Orville at Dodo Airlines, would greatly improve the experience.

Considering the slow pace and real-time progression of the game, it's not surprising that many players resort to time traveling in Animal Crossing: New Horizons to advance faster. To reduce the need for time traveling, a future Animal Crossing game could offer more options to increase the game's pace, such as adjustable text speed and override permissions for features like opening town gates and terraforming. These features would significantly decrease the number of menus to navigate and are essential if the series wants players to enjoy building their towns from scratch.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available for Nintendo Switch.