Animal Crossing Should Fix Its Most Tedious Feature On Switch 2
One of the leading games in the cozy gaming world, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, is a highly celebrated game for its laid-back gameplay and its beloved, adorable world. The game's success is based on the game's unique, slow pace, which allows players to relax while playing and know that nothing they will encounter in the game is too unexpected or stressful. One of the most special features of the game is its emphasis on slow living, allowing players to live in the moment.
Embracing island life and a ton of creative freedom for players to restore their island and build the home of their dreams, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the perfect daily escape, and its real-time gameplay is effective at allowing players to feel like they're visiting an alternative reality. From the game's adorable animal creatures and a timeless and endless gameplay loop, the game can be picked up and returned to at any given moment in time. While Animal Crossing: New Horizons is designed to be an ultimately relaxing game, unfortunately, there is one glaring feature that can, for some, be extraordinarily tedious: the activity of collecting items.
Picking Up Items Is A Pain In Animal Crossing
Compared to more recent farming sim releases like Fae Farm or Palia, in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it takes an unnecessarily long time to perform the simple act of picking up items or collecting creatures, leaving the activity to feel quite laborious. These mechanics in the modern gaming scene now feel a little bit dated, with the potential to hinder some players who simply do not have the patience to wait for their character to collect items in the game. While the tap of a button is followed by a delay while picking up items, when a player catches a bug or a sea creature, they must endure the short animation that their character performs.
Quick Material Gathering Makes Cozy Sims Fun
The collecting mechanics in Animal Crossing: New Horizons can feel a little bit dated now compared to more recent, similar releases like Disney Dreamlight Valley and Fae Farm, where the activity of picking up items is complete in a matter of seconds. This allows players to be able to collect resources more quickly in a manner that does not hinder what should be an ultimately calming gameplay experience. Because Animal Crossing requires a ton of resource gathering, being able to obtain materials in a quick and satisfying manner is essential for the game to stand up to its more recent farming sim rivals.
Tedium is a problem in other Nintendo games as well, such as cooking in Tears of the Kingdom, where inventory navigation and cutscenes make the creation of multiple dishes laborious.
Ultimately, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a very timeless, classic cozy game and its overall gameplay loop is effectively relaxing. While the delayed process of collecting and catching items in the game is awfully tedious for some, for many other players it will not be a focal issue. However, the improvement of the mechanics should be taken into consideration, since the game's more recent competitors have better item collecting controls. Hopefully, with the release of the Nintendo Switch 2, this is a factor that will be taken into account for future installments of Animal Crossing, with the collecting mechanics becoming quicker and more comparable to more modern sim releases.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
OpenCritic Reviews- Top Critic Avg:90/100Critics Rec:99%
- Released
- March 20, 2020
- ESRB
- E for Everyone: Comic Mischief
- Developer(s)
- Nintendo EPD
- Publisher(s)
- Nintendo
- Engine
- Havok
- Multiplayer
- Online Multiplayer, Local Multiplayer
- Cross-Platform Play
- no
- Expansions
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons — Happy Home Paradise
- Franchise
- Animal Crossing
- Platform(s)
- Switch
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