Five things I want in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Nintendo’s exquisitely adorable turnips-and-chill sim is a fuzzy-wuzzy fun time, but some of those fuzzy-wuzzy funs are fuzzier, wuzzier, and funs…ier than others. There are probably dozens of mostly inconsequential things I’d change about Animal Crossing: New Horizons because I despise the colour or the geometry or Lionel or whatever and I’m selfish and arbitrary like that and would inevitably change it back, anyway, but these are the five most important. Plus bonus extras because I’m bad at lists.

MASS PRODUCTION, PLZ

Crafting DIY items is a big feature of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but some things – fish bait, for example – would be much less of a chore if you could queue up multiples instead of making one at a time.

Also, if I have the necessary parts to make a flimsy fishing rod and a regular fishing rod, I want to skip the tedious prep work and get busy with a regular fishing rod. IT’S THE SAME THING, BUT WITH IRON NUGGETS, OKAY.

Also-also, if I have those necessary parts in storage, can I use those without first moving them into my pockets? I realise this violates the laws of physics, but so does the hyper-dimensional box with a million eggs in it that I can access with a button, and besides, it’s a game with talking raccoons. Let’s bend some rules.

(In the meantime, though, did you know you can speed up the crafting animation by pressing A once for fast, and twice for even faster? Because I didn’t until yesterday.)

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

Tool durability, the real enemy of productivity. Even the top-level “gold” tools break after a preset number of uses, and the game doesn’t warn you that your extravagantly gaudy shovel is about to evaporate in a poof of dismay. Although you can cheat this, sort of, by customising a tool before it breaks, that means counting each use and I don’t want to count each use.

DÉJÀ VU, I CHOOSE YOU

There’s a lot of dialogue attached to activity completion in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but when you’re 100 hours into the game, the same puns become kind of monotonous. Besides, I know it’s a coelacanth, because it looks like a coelacanth. I don’t need to be told it’s a coelacanth. It’s obviously a coelacanth.

Gulliver and Wisp? Don’t even tell me, I’ll be back in a moment with your things.

Add an option to disable these dialogue pop-ups or replace them with an on-screen cue, and problem solved.

ON THE SUBJECT OF DIALOGUE…

This isn’t a real screenshot – it’s a prototype by Twitter user Mehdi – but it should be a real screenshot. Most of Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ dialogue-to-action sequences are questionably convoluted, but Dodo Airlines is the most egregious offender in this category. Who wants to negotiate an interminable series of dialogues to open their island for visitors or join a multiplayer game? Nobody over 10, that’s who.

AND ON THE SUBJECT OF MULTIPLAYER GAMES…

It sucks. I know Nintendo Switch games aren’t exactly celebrated for their innovative social features, but the multiplayer system used in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an unmitigated disaster. In theory, inviting or joining other players should be the fuzziest, wuzziest, funsiest time ever, except it isn’t – connectivity is slow and erratic, and for some inscrutable reason, every player is pushed to a loading screen when somebody else joins or quits a session. You can’t even send an invite to a player on your friend list, which is, like, one of the most basic functions of a multiplayer system.