Hey, let’s talk about Mitzi the cat, and about how Animal Crossing: New Horizons abandoned the series’ origins to promote player expression through control.
In my original Animal Crossing town, Mitzi was my favorite villager. I liked Bunnie and Punchy, too, but Mitzi was my favorite. I eventually learned that a new friend of mine had the game as well, so one day I visited his town.
Now, in addition to having to plug both memory cards into one Gamecube, visiting another town in the original AC meant that a random villager from one town could immediately move to the other. And, wouldn’t you know it, when I got back to my town, Mitzi was gone.
I cried. I was devastated. I never visited another town again. People will often praise games that move them to tears, but I’m pretty sure they don’t mean like this.
Still, the original Animal Crossing did something that I think New Horizons is incapable of doing: It gave the villagers agency, that they may act outside the player’s control and feel believable and alive.
New Horizons does everything it can to make you feel like you’re in control, and indeed you are; the placement of every building, the decision to allow a new villager onto the island, even the landscape itself are all up to the player’s discretion. The entire progression of the game serves to let players handle things how they want and express themselves.
In the original AC, the primary objective is to make enough money to pay off your debt, with side goals of scoring high marks with the Happy Room Academy for displaying complete furniture sets and of completing the museum. There aren’t really any shortcuts to these, as the only way to earn Bells or acquire things to donate is settling into the daily routine of fishing, foraging, and so on. You could try selling turnips, but whereas in New Horizons it’s easy enough to hop on someone else’s island when they have a good price, in AC even if you did have access to multiple towns you’d give up a villager to make the trip.
The only consistent option for achieving the primary goal was to engage with AC as a lifestyle game – jump on for a bit each day, make steady and measurable progress, enjoy the occasional seasonal events, savor the mundanity.
This ultimately aligns well with the game’s core conceit: You’re moving into an existing town when you boot up a fresh save, joining what is supposed to be an existing community. As the original English commercials emphasized, the game is designed to feel like a living world that keeps going whether you’re playing or not, which makes your town feel alive and makes the residents feel like they have agency, and you can’t simply binge it for a few days to generate all the cash you need.
New Horizons, on the other hand, positions improving the island as the main goal. The literal main quest line to entice K.K. Slider to the island culminates in raising your island’s rating, to which all the previous quest activities (inviting more villagers and building buildings) happen to contribute, and your own house is largely irrelevant towards that end.
Critically, since the biggest rewards and goals in New Horizons are terraforming and placing new bridges or exterior features, nothing in the game dares to make any meaningful changes to the state of the island in the absence of the players. Villagers feel like toys, living wherever you decide they should be and just as likely to do some fun activity of their own accord as they are to drop everything at your appearance so they can give you a new chair to put out on the island if you want to but hey, if not, that’s cool too! If someone wants to move in or out, they will make certain that you have had the chance to vet their decision first. If you feel like shuffling some buildings around, say the word and Nook will make it happen.
This also causes some weird metaphors with the deserted island setting. I’m sure not qualified to do a deep dive into the role of capitalism in New Horizons, but suffice it to say that when it offers an infinite supply of definitely uninhabited islands to extract resources from (“uninhabited” aside from all the bugs and fish, but they don’t count, except for when they do) without any regard for the consequences, I’m just a little troubled. And let’s not get into the weird gray markets players have made for trading villagers who are ready to move out (and the scramble after launch to learn how to force certain animals to move out), such that players can easily exchange animals they dislike or find ugly for those more in line with their sensibilities.
Note that this behavior would be unacceptable if you believe the villagers to be real characters making their own decisions, but if they only exist as objects, toys to be dressed up and played with, then it would be more reasonable.
Granted, all of this does very effectively transition the game into a fully customizable experience, and lots of folks have made impressive works out of their islands. For people who want that experience, and for people who just want to connect with their friends online, New Horizons is working out great. But for a game franchise predicated on simulating life whether you’re playing or not, New Horizons sure seems preoccupied with doing nothing of consequence without your permission. Whether you think that’s good or bad is up to you, but it’s certainly different from the original game.
Also, isn’t it weird that the original Animal Crossing allows more villagers than every other game in the franchise? With all the space on my island, I was surprised to be limited to 10 villagers. How am I supposed to have room for Mitzi??
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