have you gotten less sentimental about new leaf?

[Charcolor]

i'm not sure how to word the title so let me explain.

during the era where new leaf was the newest game, there were already lots of people whose towns didn't have much sentimental value and so they reset it often. but there were also people like me who loved their town so so much and never ever wanted to reset. whether it's because of the memories attached to it or because they'd already worked so hard to develop it, they would never even consider erasing it.

but now that new horizons has been released, and less people are active in new leaf, i think it's likely the sentiment for new leaf might have faded for some people. i think a good amount of people prefer new horizons to new leaf, so maybe deleting your new leaf town doesn't sound so scary anymore.

i hope that makes sense. i'm not very good at wording things.

personally, i haven't played new leaf since the day before new horizons was released (i had been playing new leaf leading up to the release so that i could get comfortable in an animal crossing mindset) but i still want to keep my town for as long as i'm able. it means a lot to me. it was my first game, i started it when i was 13 and now i am 20. i have way too many memories attached to it and too many precious things that i can never give up. the only thing that's changed is that now i'd be less upset if a villager in my new leaf town moved out. i would simply try to find them again in new horizons. they can move out of my town and onto my island!

what do you think? have you cared as much about new leaf since new horizons was released?

 

[daringred_]

i wouldn't describe the way i feel about NL as sentimental, but i do still care about my town. i wouldn't delete it. ever. i got the game when i was 13, almost 14, and i'm 22 now. i never reset my town once, which is why i ended up with a second copy -- because i wanted to design a new town and have more villagers but couldn't bring myself to undo all the hardwork i'd put into my initial town. i played both of them daily up until the release of NH. now i mostly only check in once a week if i remember. not because i dislike the game (it's my favorite of the series lmao) but because i'm a bit of a graphics snob, and my NL towns are basically finished while my NH one isn't, so i have reason to play it more. thankfully, my villagers seem to be "locked" in place. when i finally remember to log back on, the leaving date for the villager who asks to move is still 10 days away, so. i don't worry too much about loading up the town(s) and seeing a villager missing.

 

[LadyDestani]

I'm still very sentimental about my New Leaf towns, but then again I'm still playing them daily. I never moved on to New Horizons.

Once I complete all my goals, I will eventually 'retire' them and go back to play some of the older games in the series, but I know I could never delete them or restart. I put my heart and soul into creating them and I may want to revisit them some day. So I will either document the date I last played or lock the villagers in place by stopping a mover on the last day. That way I know I can always come back to my towns worryfree and find things more or less the way I left them. I like to imagine the animals still going about their daily lives even though I won't be there to see them.

 

[EmmaFrost]

I will admit I haven't turned on New Leaf in over a year, however I still appreciate it because I poured many hours into it, and focusing on it helped me through some really rough life changes. It was my first Animal Crossing game, so I guess I do feel sentimental about it. Not enough to turn it on though. I don't even know where my 3DS is.

 

[peachsaucekitty]

ive been playing this game for just over a year but i always reset my towns eventually because ive just never been happy with them
hacks and time travel have kinda ruined the feeling i could've had which is another reason why ive had too many towns to count, but also i can't stop myself from doing those either lol
it's kinda hard for me to enjoy the game without hacks but i still dunno why. so i've always had this desire to have a town without hacks, which only succeeded with the first town i made, cause i didn't know i could hack it lol

 

[cherrysmilesonice]

Since the new update I haven’t really touched new leaf. It still has a special place in my heart tho.

 

[neptoons]

No. With time passing I feel more and more sentimental about the game, even though I reset my town about a year ago. The summer days of 2014-2018 playing for hours on end make me heavily nostalgic

 

[Tay.]

For me, it made it more sentimental.

I fell out of love for gaming for a while and NH brought me back into gaming and the AC community! But I missed the nostalgia so I ended up repurchasing a N3DS XL HHD and N3DS with two seperate copies (one of which I haven't started because I get easily distracted..)

It also reminded me of how much I loved NL and the way NL plays because sometimes I get too overwhelmed by all the terraforming and possibilities in NH. NL will always have a special place in my heart! ☺

 

[CasualWheezer]

I'd say New Horizons coming out hasn't affected how I felt about New Leaf, I don't have a Switch so New Leaf is really the only AC I can play. I was playing it regularly for over a year after New Horizons came out and have only paused since I've gone to college.

 

[xSuperMario64x]

I'm still very sentimental about my New Leaf town, especially my original one which I was forced to delete a year after I made it. The one I have right now, I've had since July 2015 and I would never delete it.

on the other hand, I did restart my NH town recently, as nice as it was I didn't feel any sentimentality towards it. so I guess it's kinda the opposite of what you're asking about lol.

 

[michito]

Since 2013 I think I have had... 5 different ACNL towns I think?

• 1st town lasted a bit less than a year. Reset was because my town layout was terrible, so my sister agreed to make a new one.
• 2nd, lasted for around 4 years. Reseted it when my sister got her own ACNL copy, I wanted to change my character's name and got kinda bored of the game, so a change of town made me pay attention to it again. I do miss this one a bit.
• I dont quite remember my 3rd town..... But I know there was one between the 2nd and 4th.
• My 4th town, had this one during high school. Had a pretty cool layout, villagers and house positions (plus I had my crush street-passed and on the friend list), but ended up deleting because I wanted to change my town & character names (they were fandom-themed)
• And my current town, gatito! Made it in 2019 iirc, but abandoned it after a few weeks. I picked it again recently and it made me fall in love with new leaf again. I learnt how to homebrew and it made the game feel brand new honestly.

And to actually answer your question, ACNL is probably the game I'm less sentimental about town-wise, probably because my 1st town was deleted so early. I do miss my old files a lil bit and used to visit them from time to time thru the dream suite (I'm sad that currently all my towns except the 4th & 5th have been deleted from it due to lack of updating....). but yeah apart from some nostalgia I'm good, I think each town fulfilled its role and have good memories attached to them. ACNH actually made me appreciate ACNL more (i havent touched ACNH in more than over a year, I'm not a fan of it [yet?]).

The game I'm more sentimental about is ACCF, I still beat myself up for deleting my og file sometimes (ACWW was my 1st game but it got lost soon after, so city folk ended up being my first town ever basically) since it had so many memories and havent been able to stick with a town ever since, I almost always reset my town every time I pick up the game again.

 

[.: Meri :.]

For me, I don't think this is the case—I love NH, but I still love NL too. Lately, I've even been playing a lot more of New Leaf than New Horizons. I'll probably also retire my town once I'm through with it (especially since I've been trying to cut back on hobbies that need my daily attention), but I don't see myself ever resetting or deleting it; I still feel very attached to it and my villagers. I may want to come back and visit my town in the future, but I don't think starting over would appeal to me even then. Possibly even less so, for nostalgia reasons. And if I do want to start NL over in the future, I'll just buy another cartridge and make a second town.

 

[Croconaw]

I stop caring about the old games when a new Animal Crossing releases. I only have enough patience for one island. I applaud the people who have more than one file and maintain both islands. I could never have the patience for that. I wouldn’t describe it as sentimental, though. I guess I just prefer the newest game because more people play it. I want to be part of the hype when the new game releases. I remember the burst of activity when New Horizons released and that was a nice feeling. That feeling’s gone, though, because New Horizons has now been out a while. New games do get stale so I can’t complain, but it’s nice to experience the game on release day or close to it. I’m kind of going off topic here, though… I’ll say I stop feeling attached to my old games once a new one comes out. That’s how it always worked for me.

 

[Introspective Onlooker]

I've known about Animal Crossing for a while, now, but didn't play any of the mainline games until last year. Seven months later, and I own physical copies of all five of them, and I'm trying to get K.K. to come to my island.

With that said — no. At least not towards New Leaf, but since I just got New Horizons this month, in conjunction with the updated re-release of the first game that only came out in Japan, I've been occupied on both of those, as well as trying to figure out how to transfer my WW town from an emulator to my DS cartridge.

City Folk was my first real exposure to the series, and while I knew the game had issues (all games do), playing the other titles makes these problems more obvious. I don't care about the localized dialogue, and the way the dialogue system is handled is busted — because dialogue options are completely removed, save for doing favors and whatnot. It's often regarded as another version of WW, despite removing a lot of what made that game what was it. It introduced Animal Tracks — a lovely mechanic that turns your town into a desert if you simply walk on it for too long. And its main selling point — the "City", isn't particularly interesting by itself; it might as well have been just a prototype version of the Main Town in NL. And if there's any game that I'd lose my investment in, it'd be City Folk. New Leaf is everything CF should've been, and more, and I'll probably only start over if I'm playing a Japanese copy of it to help with my immersion in the language.

Also, this isn't related to the topic or to anyone in this thread, but it's dumb to think that because a new game is out, anything that came before it is unplayable to people who didn't already play those games. Everyone's different, and what draws people in differs from person-to-person. Just wanted to get this out there because I read a really dumb post about it being "impossible" for people to play WW if they played NL, first. That's ridiculous. People might prefer WW over NL because of the dialogue, events, and how the former, overall, feels more akin to a community, because you are just another person living in it; you aren't special beyond being more capable than the other eight villagers. I still wish later games kept the villager cap to eight so people wouldn't complain about how repetitive the dialogue is in the newer games, because dialogue was ALWAYS repetitive in this series.

 

[pumpkinpuppy]

I'm more sentimental about New Leaf than ever. New Horizons has felt like such a letdown, so I've been dipping back to New Leaf more than I had in the couple of years previous.

 

[Firesquids]

New Leaf was my first Animal Crossing game and I was a bit of a late comer, I got it about two years after it released. I was hooked, I especially loved catching bugs as one of my hobbies is catching and pinning insects in real life. I played NL almost daily until New Horizons came out. Now here we are and I'm 3,275 hours deep in to NH (NL maxed out at like 959 hours or something so I'll never know the real number lol)
I haven't truly picked up NL since NH came out for any notable amount of time. It really doesn't help that Wolfgang decided to plot himself down in my blue and purple pansy field. All that being said, I really loved NL, I sorely miss some of the NPCs who didn't make it to NH like Blanca, Katie, and Gracie. I really wish the devs had added any kind of minigame or multiplayer island hopping. Items should have more intractability, we should be able to ride the caraselle, and rock on the rocking chairs and sit in pools and bathtubs. Villagers should interact with items too, all they do is wander around aimlessly and sit in my paths when there's benches everywhere. Anytime I hear music from NL I feel incredibly nostalgic, NH music just doesn't hit the same way, maybe it will when the next title releases, but I don't think it will.
I may feel slightly less sentimental to my NL town than I did right after NH released but I definitely still wouldn't reset it.
I've never been the kind of person to reset my town/island, I like letting RNG choose for me sometimes. I am on the same one I started when I first got the game and I don't ever have plans to change that on either game.

 

[Cam_Tubing]

I am trying to make my ACNH island really pretty and nice, but if I did not have ACNH I would make my ACNL look nice. I think because I already have that "nice island" thing going now, I don't feel as bad resetting my ACNL town. I am using it now to finally complete the game and get all the catalog items and then sell them on the forum because I never had the space before ACNH. Now I have space so it's kind of nice.

 

[Bui]

Not at all! I still have my original town from the game's launch and I still like to check in on it from time to time. If anything, New Horizons has given me a greater appreciation for New Leaf and what the game had to offer.

 

[Elias_]

Not at all! I still have my original town from the game's launch and I still like to check in on it from time to time. If anything, New Horizons has given me a greater appreciation for New Leaf and what the game had to offer.

Absolutely agree, I totally feel the same way about New Leaf.