A Belated Review of New Horizon's Intro
Following the release of the 3.0 update, and seeing friends and content creators hopping back in to Animal Crossing New Horizons, I decided to give the game another shot. A couple years ago, after holding out in hopes of a handheld sized handheld, I bought a Lite from one of my usual Japanese warehouses on eBay, alongside copies of New Snap, Skyward Sword HD, and Animal Crossing. Having missed out on the madness of covid-era Switch gaming, and being primed by friends to be a bit wary of New Horizon's changes to the Animal Crossing formula, I wasn't particularly surprised when I bounced off the game after a couple weeks of daily play. The Switch hardware brings me little joy even now, and New Horizon's plodding pace made it easy to put down the game and not return. Now, motivated by the new update and a desperate desire for a comfortable slice of tranquility in an era of genuine horror, I've finally done what I couldn't do before: I beat the tutorial.
Ok, so it's not really a tutorial. It's an introduction, from the point you start the game to when K.K. Slider plays his first show on the island, that lays the foundation for how Animal Crossing's gradual progression systems work. House debts, bridges, daily tree shaking and rock bonking, fishing and netting bugs are more or less all you have. In some ways, it's a very traditional Animal Crossing experience with little to motivate the player beyond the banality of every day life and the chatter of neighbours. However, New Horizons is the culmination of a shift in emphasis within the series that torpedos what would otherwise be a strong start. You see, when Animal Crossing was in its infancy, the series was imagined as a roleplaying game wherein the friction was not in developing your village into a thriving city or making the money needed to fit all of your accoutrements (though these were present), but rather in forging relationships with the eclectic and independently minded neighbours. Bunnie might be a sweetheart, but Fang would really rather you fuck off into a trench. Navigating Fang's retorts and coming to terms with the weird and wonderful animals in your town was the focus of the series and the strong personalities of the villagers enables that.
New Horizons isn't that flavour of Animal Crossing. Where Gamecube, Wild World, even New Leaf each emphasize relationships with villagers and villager interactions heavily, New Horizons' villagers feel more like collectable figurines. You choose where they live, you can choose what they wear, inviting new villagers to move in is easy and deterministic. If you have enough Nook Miles, you can carefully craft your town to only have the snootiest cuties or the most manly birds or whatever you fancy, and this makes them feel less like characters in the world and more part of your efforts to customize your model village. Further, their personalities are noticeably less intense. In the couple months since I restarted my town, I haven't seen two villagers argue, have them tell me off, or even so much have a bad mood. These random events of selfishness were key to the villagers as prompts to roleplay with, and their lack has fundamentally changed Animal Crossing from a slice of life RPG platform into a village management sim. As more features are unlocked in later stages of the game, this new style of Animal Crossing comes into its own and is fun in its own right, but as the game begins with only the essentials, there is little reason to seek out your villagers outside of the rare moment they telegraph that they want to give you an item, unlock a new emote, or what have you.
New Horizons isn't the first Animal Crossing to start slow. New Leaf was also criticized for its start, which requires the player to work on the town in order to earn the development permit. What New Horizons does that differentiates the K.K. show from the development permit is that it takes weeks of casual play to earn the three-star rating required for K.K. to show up, while it takes a few days to earn the development permit. Just by watering your flowers and interacting once with each of the village mechanics that Isabelle directs you to, you'll earn the permit in a few hours of work over a few days. In New Horizons, however, the requirements are quite a bit higher. Daily activities don't contribute to the town rating, so the player is pushed to develop the town using their limited available tools, which means planting flowers en masse and scattering your inventory all over to up the "development" rating. Personally, I find a town with random tables and junk littered about less developed than one with well kept forests and wildflowers, but New Horizons doesn't see it that way, and so players who want to expedite this process are pidgeonholed into a very specific way of building their town. So much so that if you watch New Horizons development vlogs on YouTube, you'll find many aesthetically minded players actually artificially metagame in order to meet this requirement, and then proceed to ignore their town rating entirely as creating their adorable cottagecore dream or developing a lovely little ranching town are actually incompatible with the metrics New Horizons (and, to be fair, most other Animal Crossing titles) uses to judge town quality.
Finally, there's a real lack of permanent character in New Horizons' early days. Characters like Brewster are often a later introduction, but folks like Isabelle aren't around in the earliest days and Nook, Timmy, and Tommy are all very utilitarian NPCs with clear gameplay purposes but not a lot of chit chat. Characters like Lief and Kicks only show up intermittently, while Sable and Mabel only move in a week or two into your town's life. The kappa family, Harriet, Cyrus and Reese among others are only available after completing the introduction. The lack of staple characters adds to the feeling of hollowness during this period, and the fact many of these characters have no dialogue outside of their mechanical purpose (selling you items, providing services, completing a daily task) creates a frictionless experience that manifests in an easy apathy towards characters, instead treating them as personified menu options. Lief will weed your town and sell you bushes, but he won't talk to you about his favourite flowers.
That's not to say all of these recurring characters are lacking entirely. Sable is wonderfully written and her anecdotes about her sisters younger days are endearing and empathetic. Isabelle's morning announcements are written with a personable joyousness that always starts a play session off on a high note. Nintendo's writing talent still does wonderful work, and the issues with character writing in New Horizons are of design rather than of quality. Like the shop owners and Nook family, villagers aren't poorly written, rather they're frictionless and lacking the warts and wrinkles that make real people and quality characters interesting. With each post-launch update, New Horizons has seen the introduction of new characters, many of whom offer fun ways to customize your island or take an expedition to another style of gameplay or a new place with new resources to take home, but the early game has continued unaided. There's little joy in crafting tools, harvesting new materials, and creating furniture when your island is populated by automatons, with edges shaven down to nothing.
Now that I'm passed this portion of the game, I've enjoyed my time quite a bit more. The new Hotel tickles my interior decorating itch, fleshing out Harv's island has given that feature a purpose finally (and brought back my lovely Harriet, complete with adorable hippie garb), and I've had a great time moving around rivers and cliffs while figuring out the pathways of my budding metropolis. Unlike my first go around with New Horizons, I'm pretty well hooked now and there's something to keep my interest every time I boot up. But it also took me two full months to get to this point, and I eventually had to litter my island with fencing in order to get passed the intro. It was tedious and boring in a way no Animal Crossing has felt, and if I hadn't seen all the cool new features the game promises on the other side of that hill elsewhere, I never would've gotten over it. As we head into the era of the Switch 2, and presumably a new Animal Crossing game in the not-too-distant future, I'm hopeful that Nintendo finds a middle ground between these new village management features and the social RPG of yesteryear — Or at the very least, pays closer attention to the how slowly and painfully the game burns in its earliest hours.