Animal Crossing: New Horizons Missed The Most Important Part Of Its Franchise: Friction
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is celebrating its 5-year anniversary today, March 20, 2025. Below, we reexamine how its unprecedented flexibility may have made the series less engaging by presenting fewer problems to solve.
In the original Animal Crossing, you are an outsider: A human living in a town populated with creatures and critters, where time keeps passing even when you turn the game off. There is a sense of distance between you and the town's various inhabitants. They lived here before you. They'll get on just fine without you, even if they might resent you for not dropping by and picking some weeds. These friction-filled touches give these games a unique texture, even in the now-crowded "cozy" genre. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released a whole five years ago in 2020, is the franchise's most popular game by orders of magnitude, selling 43 million copies as of November 2023. Its coincidental release at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic made the game a cultural and critical powerhouse. But years later, it's hard not to characterize New Horizons as a disappointment. Its island paradise setting is customizable and accommodating but it lacks the friction that made Animal Crossing a classic in the first place.
In part, this is the result of a difference in theming. Unlike every game prior to it, New Horizons positions the player as a settler on an uncharted island. To start, you are the island's resident representative, chosen to be the village’s primary decision maker. You build out the town and pick more of its populace as you go. With every new building, you choose its location on the island. You can freely place furniture items out in the world (more on this later). With these systems, you can structure the town to maximize efficiency. Eventually, you gain terraforming tools to mold the island's layout completely to your whims.
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