What is my most played game on the Nintendo Switch? What do you think? Super Smash Bros. Ultimate? Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity? Well, not even close, where it's actually Animal Crossing: New Horizons, as the above screenshot indicates. I've started playing this game over a year ago and have been playing it on a daily basis ever since, which accumulated to hundreds of hours by now. It has even surpassed the amount of time I've spent with Hyrule Warriors or Breath of the Wild on the Wii U, so this is one of my most played games ever.
And a lot has happened during this time, where I want to share some of my progress with you. I've completed Critterpedia, provided everything to the museum except for one piece (the Robust Statue), participated in all events, got photos of all my villagers so far, shaped my island the way I want it to be and raised it to five stars.
The game gives you a lot of goals to go for, but it in the end it's all about what you want to achieve, similar to games like Minecraft. But it's a lot more contained thanks to the real time mechanics, which makes it the better choice for me right now. One of my ongoing projects is to breed all possible flower variants from scratch, while I'm always busy with collecting and crafting all recipes, as well as cataloging all the things, ordering all insect and fish models, and completing all Nook Miles achievements.
But for me those activities are all just excuses to keep playing the game, which I enjoy a lot, where my island became a virtual second home to me and part of my daily routine. I wouldn't want to miss it, which is saying a lot from someone who couldn't have been bothered with the Animal Crossing series before. But the possibility of changing the landscape really sealed the deal, where it made this game so much more interesting to me personally. And with that in mind let's take a look at...
Dodolint Island
Don't expect anything too fancy, since I'm not someone who puts form over function. For me a lot of my island design went into making everything easily accessible and supporting my overall goals in the game. I also don't like to build things that have no real purpose, where I don't want to create scenery that looks great on Instagram, but is otherwise just in the way.
That being said, I do want to feel at home, so it's not radically optimized and I put in quite some effort to make everything cozy for myself. So, I was trying to find a good balance between gameplay and design. Frame rate is another deciding factor, where it can go down quite heavily with lots of flowers, wheat, and such. And I want to avoid that.
Without further ado, let's take a look at the map of my island, Dodolint, in its current state:
You can compare this to the map visible at the end of my post from one year ago to see how much has changed since the beginning. There is still a bit of my original island in there, but most of it has been terraformed. I've also uploaded my first Dream Island today, in case you want to check everything out yourself. Simply search for "Dodolint", it should be the only island with this name out there.
The island is split into two halves, where the west side is almost entirely on a plateau with my farm on it. My house is directly in front of plots for the nine different types of produce in this game, where you have a silo and a "stable" right next to the house as some decoration. This part is loosely inspired by the original Harvest Moon for the Super Nintendo and GameBoy Color, which I loved quite a bit back in the day and where Animal Crossing: New Horizons became my replacement for this type of game, especially after it has introduced more crops with the big 2.0 update. It's much more relaxed, of course, but this makes it all the better.
Harvesting all the crops fills about half an inventory for nearly 60.000 Bells. It's not that much, but more than enough in the long run if you keep selling regularly. Plus, I keep going for the money trees, which I plant next to the silo for some 30.000 pocket money at the start of each day. And by now I don't really need more money anyway, where I have over 42 million on the bank.
To the south of the crops you can find my flower breeding area with everything sorted into eight/nine colors in a tic-tac-toe pattern. I'm still missing a few flowers and the final boss will be the blue rose, but I'm patient.
To the north of my house is the "Fruit Forest" with enough trees of every foreign fruits for three stacks each. There are also some ponds there and an upper-level river area. The latter was one of the main reasons why I wanted my farm to be elevated over the rest of the island, because certain type of fish only appear there and not in the bottom-level river. As I said, a lot of my island was designed around gameplay goals.
Fishing as whole is a topic of its own, where the rare pier fish are simply ridiculous. I probably would have never found out about them if I didn't look things up in the wiki. Catching all the bugs and insects was more enjoyable, but there are also some crazy rare beetles in July and August, which felt like another final boss in this game. Though, there is this weird phenomenon where you won't find a certain rare creature for days, but then suddenly you will get two or three of them in a row... Which does help with getting all the models, where you need three in total.
Other than the many fruit trees, where I use the domestic apple trees for decoration in some places, there are exactly 22 hardwood and cedar trees on my island, so each time you shake one of these trees something will drop from them. The cedars are all placed in the campground mountain area to the north. And the hardwoods trees are all around the village on the east half of my island.
Speaking of, the village itself is split into two halves as well. There is a beach promenade in the south with four housings in a row. The service center and the shops are located above of them, where you have this little shopping mile at the center of my island. And the museum got its own temple-themed peninsula.
The northern half of the town is my version of Kakariko Village, based on A Link to the Past and partly A Link Between Worlds. It's not an accurate reconstruction and it's not supposed to be, so it doesn't have all the houses and some of the houses are in different locations. But I've tried to capture the look and feel of the original.
When I started playing New Horizons, I didn't want to recreate any video game environments at first, but I had the Zelda villagers from New Leaf in mind when I've designed this part of the island. So, I knew that I wanted this to be a Zelda-themed village – I even started calling it "Kakariko" before anything was built there. But I really liked using the hedges, where this was a very good fit for the classic Kakariko, so one thing led to another, and eventually I ended up with my own version of the town from A Link to the Past. That's a lot of Super Nintendo love on my island.
Sadly, the Zelda villagers, who were supposed to live here, haven't seen a return in New Horizons yet and probably never will. Which leads us to the next big topic...
Villager History
By now I've had a total of 17 villagers on my island, so there was a bit of coming and going. But since I try to collect lots of photos from everyone, I've kept most of them over a longer period of time. Four of my villagers are even still there from the very beginning. Here is a list with all replacements:
- Billy
- Fuchsia → Cranston
- Anabelle
- Pekoe → Ankha
- Deli → Julia
- Tex → Gayle → Henry
- Vic
- Eloise → Pashmina
- Drago → Mitzi
- Tipper
Billy and Fuchsia were my starter villagers. Deli, Tex, Vic, and Eloise were villagers who I've gotten randomly from new housings. And the rest were villagers that I have found on Nook Miles islands, where I simply liked their designs or whatever. The only exception to this is Henry, who came to my island via the campsite. During that time I didn't have a smug villager on my island and I also liked the idea of getting a frog, so I let him move in. There was some fun to be had here, where at one point I got him to ask for an actual frog as a pet and I also gave him a frog outfit... I just couldn't help it with his smug smile.
Later I came up with the requirement that I should always have all eight personality types present on my islands, because things can get quite repetitive if I don't. So, I would only let villagers go if their personality existed a second time on my island and if I already got multiple photos from them. Version 2.0 made the latter a lot easier, where they kept spamming you with their photos for a while. Nintendo fixed this later on, where you now have to wait at least ten days before they can give you their photo again. But that's still better than before, where it took 64 gifts to reset.
Billy is the villager who has stayed on my island the longest so far, where I have this hate / love relationship with the guy. He always refused to give me his photo, where I only got a couple, while every other long-staying villager gave me at least ten so far. But he's also one of the biggest joke characters with his jock personality, mainly because his hobby isn't fitness, but "play". He talks about doing sports, but he never does. You can usually spot him sitting somewhere, eating a donut. Meanwhile, you could see all my other villagers doing sports, except for him. He is all talk and no action, but I find this funny.
Out of all my original villagers, Vic is probably the one who grew the most on me. I just like the cranky personality in general and he's a viking bull, so what's not to like here? He also scored first place in a ranking where all the villagers were measured by their fighting ability. And that made him feel extra special to have, not going to lie. Saying good-bye to him will be by far the hardest...
But Vic lives at the "Cucco Den" in Kakariko, where in the end I want this to be Knox's house, the chicken knight. Sterling, the eagle knight, should then be his buddy and neighbor, who will then replace Billy as the jock, who happens to live right above Vic right now.
Everyone will be replaced eventually with the exception of Tipper, a cow who I had found on a Nook Miles Island early on. Her house and look was simply perfect for the milk bar in Kakariko, so I will probably keep her forever. Plus, she would have been the perfect neighbor for Epona.
Originally, I had Ankha in mind in her stead as my final snooty villager. I wanted her to live in the ancient themed peninsula at the southeast
corner of my island, but this is where my museum then ended up, so I decided to remove her from my future island plans. But I've still found her via a Nook Miles Island back in June, so she is currently an inhabitant of Dodolint as well, but only temporarily. A guest of honor, so to speak.
Future Crossings
If Nintendo ever decides to bring back the four Zelda villagers (Wolf Link, Medli, Epona, and Ganon), I will use amiibo and amiibo cards to set up the final arrangement, which includes Knox, Sterling, Lucky, Coco, and Phoebe for the rest of the inhabitants.
Wolf Link, Medli, and Epona will live in Kakariko together with Sterling, Knox, and Tipper. Ganon is an outcast who will live next to his loyal, but unreliable Gibdo henchman, Lucky. Finally, Phoebe will cover the big sister personality, while Coco simply looks cool. I like the cranky and normal personalities the most, where I won't mind having two of them present in the end. Mitzi is actually one of my favorites right now, but I also want to get Lily at some point as a "girlfriend" for Henry. (She visited my island via the campsite one day and Henry was singing right in front of her tent, it was hilarious. But I couldn't invite her in at the time, because I just got Mitzi.)
Speaking of personalities, each one has a sub-type for different dialogues in the later friendship levels. I'm also trying to get some variety here, just to experience it all eventually. But I truly wish that the next game will mix things up a bit more and make the hobbies a bigger part of the personality. For example, instead of "jocks" there should be "competitive" villagers, where their hobby decides what they like to be competitive about. A competitive villager who likes to play may be obsessed with video games, while a competitive villager with the fitness hobby will be your traditional jock personality.
And something like the Zelda and Splatoon characters should have sets of completely original dialogues that you won't get from anyone else. Right now you really only have eight different characters with dozens of skins and one alternate set of dialogues, which can get boring after a while, because it's all just the same.
I would also like the next game to be less of a time waster. Yes, it's supposed to be laid-back, but this doesn't mean that the game should be unnecessarily slow and inconvenient whenever possible. The game loads your entire island just for the title screen, only to load it again right after, effectively doubling the loading times in the beginning. Proper bulk crafting and purchasing options would be nice to have. And the breaking tools can go to hell, where I'm saying this as someone who doesn't mind the breaking weapons in Breath of the Wild.
Anyway, that's it for now... I will keep playing and eventually I will share my progress a second time. However, if Nintendo never brings back the Zelda contents in New Horizons, because version 2.0 really was the last update (and not just the last "major update"), then there won't be much relevancy to this blog, I'm afraid... It's also quite disappointing, where the 2.0 update brought a lot of stuff back from previous installments, just not the things I wanted the most.
But I still have a little bit of hope left. Right now Nogami's development team is busy with Splatoon 3 anyway and maybe they will return to Animal Crossing: New Horizons afterwards to make some smaller updates, where they could start by re-introducing the Splatoon villagers as a promotion. The Zelda villagers could then follow with the sequel to Breath of the Wild (or The Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD re-releases, where those would be a better fit).
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