This will be a long post. Sorry in advice for my bad english.
I really feel strange since ACNH was released and today I'm really starting to think to stop playing ACNH, so I need to write what I think so I can understand if I'm the only one feeling this way.
I became fan of Animal Crossing when New Leaf came out. I fell in love with it and I started to play lots of hours with it. My love for AC was growing a lot and I shortly became obsessed with it. After some time, they announced HHD and Amiibo Festival games.
Even if Amiibo Festival was a bit delusional, I used to enjoy it because it was on a new console, it had lots of different things compared to NL (different map layout, had graphics, references to works and so on...)
Same thing for HHD: After designing the entire plaza, I started to feel bored about the game, but at the same time I was loving the game because it introduced ton of new things: furniture outside, a giant plaza with tons of customizable shops, a lot of interaction with special villagers, villager interacting with stuff, villager making different things based on where they were located etc... And it was a great way to learn new stuff about special villagers.
Even if HHD and Amiibo Festival weren't good enough to replace New Leaf, I never get bored playing New Leaf. I used to have 2 copies of the game and after the update came out, I bought another one and started a new city.
After some years, I started to dream about the new game and it became an obsession. I used to analyze HHD and Amiibo Festival to speculate on how the new game could be. I even started to bring Animal Crossing content on my channel, where I used to talk about AC origins, trivia about special characters, speculations and things like that.
Since the new game was taking so long, I decided to search for all the missing games and try them. I couldn't define myself as a big AC fan without trying all the games.
I started with Wild World. I really some things about the game and I was really surprised about some features removed like talking about blood donation or talking about donating to a poor city, or the dump, but I was having difficulties with commands. I really hated every time to need to change between touch and buttons (in New Leaf you can make both things with any problem, while in Wild World, if you are on touch mode and you press a button, it activates button mode and you need to press that button again to make it work...). This made me quit the game shortly and after that, I tried City Folk.
I really loved that game! Even this time I was really hating the commands...Using the Wii remote pointer to make some action was really stressful, but the game was really fun to me and I loved it! I know some people hate this chapter because they say it's a carbon copy of Wild World, but I enjoyed the fact that it was introducing a plaza with lots of shops. And Serena... gosh, I loved her! She was so funny and unpredictable! But commands brought me to quit the game after some weeks, because I was finding really difficult to play it.
Before I move on, I'd like to say that even if I had difficulties with commands, I really loved both games!
After some months I finally was able to buy Animal Crossing for Gamecube.
Gosh, I can't believe how much this chapter surprised me! It was more than 15 years old and you could see that for lots of things, but the game was so full of things that all the convenient features missing were not penalizing the game. I used to play it with a broken gamestop Gamecube controller and I had drifting problems, buttons not working but gosh, I never got bored about that game! It was really fun to see villagers interact and every mean dialogue was even funnier! I loved little events like morning routine and the tropical island with the special islander... Gosh, so cool!
I managed to pay the entire house loan and get the golden axe from Farley...
If I think about my favourite Animal Crossing, I can't decide if I love more New Leaf or the first Animal Crossing, but I think I would choose the original one.
And now there's New Horizons. I wasn't 100% convinced about this chapter because of the new mechanics, but I thought "Nintendo always did a great job, so I'm sure this chapter will be epic". But it wasn't like I thought.
From the start, I felt like something was different and of the most important things about the standard Ac games was missing: feel relaxed.
Since the first day of playing, I have a constant feel of anxiety and even game's music isn't helping for this. Some times I really wish I could be able to turn the music off and just play enjoying nature sounds. I was a big fan on Animal Crossing soundtrack and I used to use it as ringtones too.
Sometimes I used to play New Leaf songs to relaxing while studying or working at the computer, but now I sometimes prefer to completely mute the game and play it without sounds, instead of listen to the music.
But this is not all:
-This game is incomplete. New Leaf introduced lots of new things (like diving,Tortimer's island, Dream Suite...) and all these things are now removed from the game. Why? I know some people will answer "they are planning to add them with updates", but why? It took 7 years to release the game, so why they are releasing it incomplete and adding things slowly?
Aya Kyogoku said that this game was made to be played at least for one year and I was like "gosh, if she said this, is because New Leaf wasn't expected to last this long, but I played it for more than 4 years, so how much will last New Horizons for me?".
But now I'm here, after one month and I already want to quit the game, because now I know that saying the game was expecting to last one year, she was meaning that they were cutting all the features from the previous games and adding them who knows when.
This is not my idea of making a game last longer, to be honest.
This is the first thing that really started to making me feel really bad while playing the game and now that one month is past, things are getting worst.
Gosh I'm writing so much and I still need to say a lot, so I think I'll proceed with points:
- Events: Easter events was a big delusion. Nintendo's twitter accounts were promoting this event like it would have been epic. Before NH was even announced, I used to make videos on my channel about ideas I had for events. For example, I imagined this:
Before easter day, you received a letter from Zipper T. Bunny and attached to the letter, there's a ticket. You bring that ticket to Porter (who will wait for you with an hot air balloon in the plaza) and he will bring you to the Easter Island. This is a special island you can only visit on easter day and it's full of themed houses and decorations... Your goal is to help Zipper T bunny to find all the eggs hidden on the island and bring them to him. You will get themed furnitures based on how many eggs you bring to him. But that's not all! Some special villagers lives on this island and if you help them with some side quests, you can convince them to come to live to your town!
This is a 3d model I found on the web that I used in my video to present my idea for easter day event (I used tons of other images to present the idea, but this is not the topic of this post):
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Now... I wasn't expecting a big isle like this, or a bigger event like. the one I talked about, but I was expecting something new for sure.
Easter event started before easter and after 3 days I already finished all the diy recipes. And when easter day came,Zipper T Bunny justsaid "oh cool you got everything, here are new diy recipes! And after literally 15 minutes,the bunny event was already over.
But the Earth Day was announced and it was the biggest disappointment ever.
This was where I decided to stop following Nintendo's twitter accounts, becausethey promoted this event again like it was this big event, when the only special thing about this event was Nook Miles missions.
Leif was introduced with the update, but since he will be available even after the event, it doesn't make him part of it, so this event is literally based only on one nook miles mission each day.
- Multiplayer/Online save. Playing with other players was lot of fun in New Leaf. You could go to Tortimer island and play lots of funny minigames or collect fish,bugs or dive together to collect fish creatures. Now all of this stuff is disappeared and the only thing you can do is run around the isle collecting fruit, fishes or bugs. you can craft materials, but if one player gets the material from a tree, the other can't, so it's pretty pointless... But the worst thing is: while you are playing with somebody, you need to pray for connection to don't stop, because you can't save in this game. It's 2020, now you pay to play online but surprise, you can't save and you need to leave/go back to the isle every 5 minutes if you don't want to lose everything.
I'll not mention the fact that this game was designed to force you to play with other players (for example, you can't get different fruits from your native and sister one, if you don't get them from other players).
- Lack of buildings. New Leaf had 14 different buildings (if you don't count the photographic stand and if you count Gracie Grace and Leif has separate shops) and Happy Home Designer had like 10 different buildings and you could even customize them outside and inside!(happy home designer example of SOME of the customizations for just one building:
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So ok, you don't want to release the shops at the beginning, but at least give me the opportunity to make my own buildings, since it was possible in a spin-off game!
- Mystery island. Advertised like cool mystery island where you can find villagers you can invite in your town... SO COOL! turns out that they are just a bunch of pre-existing island and after you have all plots full in your island, you will not see new villagers on mystery isles. And when you finally have an empty space, you have one day to find a villager on mystery islands, or random villager will take the empty space.
- Villagers. While NH introduced new things regardin villagers (compared to New Leaf - since Happy Home Designer already had most of these things), I feel like it's not enough. At the question "will you introduce new personalities"? Aya and Hisashi answered, "we will not add new personalities because we will work to make the existing ones better".
Ok, I'm fine with this. But I feel like it turned out to be the same thing as gamefreak did with pokemon. Villagers always repeats the same things and if you get 2 villagers of the same personality it even gets worst (NH has 8 different kinds of personalities, but you have space for 10 villager in the game, so you are forced to get double). I had Hamphrey and Dobie together in Hamphrey's house and while I was talking alternately to both, they were repeating the exact same dialogues.
Snooty villagers are now the sweetest personality of the game. They are always like "honey you are so cute!" "honey thanks for this" "honey you are the best of the world".
New Leaf lost lots of naughtiness, but now it is totally disappeared.
The meanest dialogue I got was from an uchi villager that said: "you keep coming here but you don't say anything concrete".
Another problem here is that villagers don't ask favors anymore... I used to get 3-4 requests each day in New Leaf, but now I can barely get one every 2 days.
- Designs. You pay to unlock the opportunity to download other's design, but you have only 50 slots available. You could think that it is cool compared to New Leaf who only had 10 (or 12, I don't remember). that's true, but in New Leaf you were able to create other characters to have other slots available. Happy Home Designer gave to the player 120 slots. And in New Horizons you need to share your 50 slots with ALL the players. So if you divide them, you get about 6 slots for each player... It's like half of the slots available in New Leaf. And the funny thing is that now you pay to unlock other players designs.
- Annoying things to do. Some things are really boring. Moving flowers in New Leaf was so good, but now it is a nightmare. You need to shovel every single flower, your shovel breaks so you need to go to make a new one and repeat this every 5 minutes if you have lots of lowers. And let's not talk about creating repeated items. I see some people paying other players nook miles ticket to make stuck of fish baits.
Today I played the game and I found myself running through the island without knowing what to do. After one month, my island is almost complete.
I have some free zones and I really don't know what to do with them, because I would like to make some commercial zones, but:
- Timmy and Tommy have only 4-5 items available each day (and there are no more upgrades available for now) and it seems like they are always the same. I should start stalking other players to ask them every day what they are selling in their isle, but I'm not that kind of person.
- If you create some stands with the diy recipe, you can't put "raw" items on them, or Isabelle will lower your island rating.
- I already reached the 8 ramps limit.
So I'm stuck here. I'm at 360+ hours of gameplay (I think that half of them running randomly without knowing what to do) and now I only play the game to talk to the villagers and collect materials and fossils (you can do this in half an hour) and then I already don't know what to do.
This is the first time that this is happening for me. Even the original AC made me play for lots of hours each day and in New Leaf I used to play
I still feel like I didn't explain well how bad I'm feeling. I hope you will not take this post as a hateful post because it isn't.
I'm just a big big fan of Animal Crossing who is feeling sad and deluded because he feels like New horizons is not like other Animal Crossing games anymore.
I waited for this game so much, I wasn't able to really enjoy other games during this years because could only think about this game and now that I have, I already want to quit it. It's really depressing.
Probably no one will read this poem, but I needed to write this somewhere, even if after all of this, I still feel bad...
EDIT: Just want to add one thing: I think that the biggest problem for me is that the game is incomplete for now, compared to New Leaf. Ok, maybe they'll update it adding the missing stuff, but this thing is making me more anxious, since I don't see why I need to work on my isle now if they will add things in the future and I will need to completely change my island to fit the new stuff.
EDIT 2: I'm having some difficulties to reply to everyone... I was not expecting this post to get so much attention. I saw there's a recurrent answer and I feel like it's better to answer here.
Lots of people are using quarantine to "justify" the fact that I can't enjoy NH anymore. That's not true.
I now leave in my own house and I have lots of things to do even if I'm quarantined, but when NL came out, I used to be home 24hours a day because I didn't go to school nor to work. So I used to play to NL even more than how much I play NH now.
So the quarantine is not the problem. The problem is that this game is incomplete (for now) compared to NL.
New Leaf had a lot to offer: just think about the good multiplayer were you were able to make lots of things without losing the progress, or the island with lots of minigames, or Harriet, were you could go to make receive a random and unexpected haircut, or diving, collecting bugs/fishes with friends... Some of the multiplayer things are available in NH too, but since you can't save during online multiplayer, it is like they are not existing.
So it's not a problem of how many hours I played NH, because I played NL even more and never got bored.
