In November 2021 the 2.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released and said to be the last major one. Luckily, four years later Nintendo has changed their mind about it and added a variety of new features alongside a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition for the game. This includes a collaboration with The Legend of Zelda, so let's take a look together!
The Legend of Zelda x amiibo
Let's actually start with the Zelda stuff, though pretty much all of it was shown in the announcement already. The only thing that hasn't appeared in the official footage was the Heart, which can be picked up in the same style as the Rupee(s).
It's generally a lot of fun to fully change into either Link or Zelda with a wink of your shiny new Tri Rod. I've never been 100% happy with the dress-up options in this game, even though there is quite a lot, but now I'm content. This is all I will need going forward. Well, it would have been nice if there was a second variant for Princess Zelda, like her appearance from the classic games or even Echoes of Wisdom, but what we have is lovely.
The interactions with the different items are also really neat. The Triforce makes the intro sound from A Link to the Past, the Goddess Statues bring their signature glow and you can wake up the Decayed Guardian. You can also "collect" the Rupees and Hearts, where it's a lot of fun to create some (secret) trails with them on your island. The Rupees can even be customized into six different colors (green, blue, red, purple, silver and gold), while the Goddess Statue has adorned variants based on Kakariko, Goron City and Rito Village.
Sadly, the treasure chest did not return, where it also could have had different variants from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Instead, the Master Sword will play the typical key item melody when you touch it... It also would have been nice if there were a second set of wall and floor, e.g. one based on the Sheikah Shrines. This would have been a great fit for designing indoor environments.
But the largest omission are certainly the Zelda villagers who are not returning from New Leaf. Both Mineru and Tulin feel quite special with their designs and are fantastic additions to the game, where I was quick to add them to my island. However, I could have a whole Kakariko Village filled with characters from the Zelda franchise if Nintendo wasn't so selective about this.
A good excuse would have been if the recent additions introduced new personality subtypes, a C-type so to say, where they get special dialogues revolving around their respective franchises. Mineru and Tulin could have forever talked about Hyrule, the Demon King and Secret Stones, for example. But that's not the case, where instead they both got the plain A-type and act like any other villager in the game. Their designs are quite sophisticated and detailed, but otherwise we're looking at low effort implementations, where they could have done the same for Epona and co.
Quality of Life
What has been a real treat are some of the smaller improvements, especially everything revolving around the storage and crafting. Not only can you have up to 9000 items now stored away, it will automatically take items from your storage when you're crafting things on your island. This frees up almost 25% of your inventory, because you now can just keep the different crafting materials, like wood and stone, in the storage, instead of always carrying some around.
And yeah, there is the new batch crafting functionality as well, where both of this probably only got added for the new hotel DIY deliveries. But better late than never...
The megaphone, which is exclusive to the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, is absolutely horrible, though. It rarely ever works, where it just calls Kapp'n most of the time for some reason. Maybe he's the fallback, but why would they make a character who always sits in the same place the fallback? And when the characters are inside buildings, they won't respond anyway, so it won't help you with villagers lost inside the museum. At least the loading times on Switch 2 are faster, so a restart (which resets your villager's positions) isn't as annoying as it used to be.
The Hotel
Your residents won't be the only ones lost on your island after this update. Easily the biggest change comes with the new hotel, which is ran by Kapp'n's family. At least now when he's sitting at your dock all day long, he's basically home...
This is a smaller version of the paid Happy Home Paradise expansion, except that this is properly integrated into the actual game and has a real impact on your island. In the expansion you were making these vacation homes for individual characters and there was no real reason to ever revisit them once you're done. It was its own little cosmos, where your villagers can appear on your island and in the resort basically at the same time...
But the hotel and its rooms, of which there are eight fixed ones in total, become essentially a part of your main island. As a result tourists will now arrive as guests, in addition to the rare person on the campsite. And unlike the campers they will freely wander around, where they even can go into shops and the museum, which completely changes the feel of your island, which used to be a fairly exclusive place. It now truly becomes a resort, whether you like it or not.
You can also visit the tourists in their rooms, which gives you an incentive to actually make these rooms look nice. However, without the Happy Home Paradise DLC you will be missing a number of design options. This isn't just about items, like the partition or the pillars, because you won't be able to change the size of the room or their soundscape, for example. And this makes the hotel feel like another hook to get you into buying the expansion if you hadn't already.
Luckily, it doesn't seem like you can make a bad job here. The Happy Home Paradise had this awkward scoring system, where you have to spend at least 20 minutes designing a home. That's not the case here, so you can just quickly throw something together and get your 200 or 300 hotel tickets out of it.
And then there is the question whether you even want any of this to begin with. Maybe you have a themed island and carefully curated villagers, where you don't want any tourists running around. In that case your only option is to forever ignore the hotel, which will lock you out of many of the new furniture items, including the retro Nintendo systems.
At least you can provide your unwelcomed guests with clothing matching your island. In my case I went with the outfits of Tulin and Mineru combined with Majora's Mask and Tri. Both headpieces glow in the dark, which make them quite the eyecatcher.
But there also isn't really much to do with these tourists. If you happen to run into one of their former residents, they will remember you for some heartfelt moments. Tourists that have visited your island before will also remember you, where you can learn the names of everyone over time. But here's a missed opportunity by not letting you do more.
First of all, they only ever stay for a single day, which certainly should have been longer to make it seem like they are actually on a vacation and not just some randomized game feature. It especially makes putting any effort into the VIP rooms completely pointless, because you will be designing them for a single night. It would have been much more realistic and dynamic if the tourists were staying for a random number of days, arriving only when there are free rooms.
And if the tourists were to stay longer, this could have allowed the player to form a bond with them, maybe even in the form of some activities, like different games. At the end of their vacation they then could send you a letter with their photo as their thanks. Now, that would be truly engaging! I have never considered collecting the photos of all possible villagers as a realistic goal, but if it was working like this, then I would certainly attempt it and have a reason to play much more from now.
Retro Gaming
As a reward for doing all the stuff around the hotel you can order some new furniture items, as well as a series of new special items around Nintendo. These include the NES, Super NES and Game Boy, which even let you play a game on them, just like in the classic Animal Crossing games.
However, this is by far the biggest disappoint in this entire update. There is only one given game for each system and it's probably not the one you would pick. The NES lets you play Ice Climbers, for example, yikes...
No Awakening for Link here
And despite this massive limitation, they still had the audacity to ask for a Nintendo Switch Online membership in order to start them... Plus, the systems only really cover the basic subscription and not even all of that. There is no GBA, no N64 and no GameCube for you to enjoy here. In the very least they could have added a Game Boy Pocket and Color.
I'm not expecting them to give you access to the entire library here, but they could have made this a bit more playful. You should be able to customize the systems to swap their cartridge from a selection of eight different games. Let me pick The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, please.
Slumber Islands
The other big new feature next to the hotel is the ability to create your own dream islands. They are just not called "dream islands", because that was already a thing to share your main island at any time. But it uses the same entry point: any bed, where you will be greeted by Luna in your dreams, who will guide you the whole thing.
You get save slots for three additional islands, which you can delete and restart at any time. You can pick between three sizes: small, medium and large. The small one has the size of the little islands that you can reach via Nook Miles and large is the same size as your main island. You're also given one of four different patterns for how the Slumber Island can look like.
And then you're free to change the landscape and decorate as you please, where you can use anything from your catalog (making cataloguing everything quite valuable) and even summon any villager you ever had before on your island. Your house will also be there, which can be fully changed and redecorated from scratch.
This is huge... at least to me. Over the years I had a couple of ideas of what I could do with my island, but which would have turned into a massive waste of space. One of those ideas always has been making a gallery of all the insect and fish models, which I have all collected as one of my previous goals in this game, only to put them into my storage at the end. But there is simply not enough space to display them all on my island, especially since I like to keep things more practical and gameplay-oriented.
However, here I can now design a whole insect and fish island and take all the space I'll need for this. Sadly, you can't invite special characters to these dream islands via amiibo, so that I could have invited C.J. and Flick.
Another idea I had was recreating some island from The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, because the Nintendo DS Zelda games feel quite similar to New Horizons with how the landscapes are structured and with how you move around. For example, you can jump across gaps on elevations. That basically invites you to remake something for the fun of it. And the best candidate seemed to be Maze Island, because it's square-shaped and only uses simple elements, while the idea itself isn't a stranger to Animal Crossing either. Of course you wouldn't want your main island to be a maze, but it's the perfect thing to built for one of your Slumber Islands. So... that's what I did:
It took me a whole Sunday and getting this right came with some frustrations, but I had fun in the process and I'm proud of the end result. I will show this off in greater detail at a later point, together with my updated main island.
The Slumber Islands are also great for simply prototyping. Maybe you have an idea for a change on your island, but you want to see how it looks first before you invest the time, effort and Bells to make it happen on your real island.
Wishes for Further Updates
The golden rule of Nintendo is always to leave something to be desired. And should they eventually give their customers what they desire, this shall still leave new things to be desired. It has always been like that... But they are not completely deaf to feedback and maybe we will be getting a version 3.1 in the near future, which may address some of the aforementioned issues:
- Let tourists stay longer and give us new interactions to obtain their photos.
- Let the player decide whether tourists are allowed on their island or not.
- Expand the Legend of Zelda collaboration to bring back Epona, Ganon, Medli and Wolf Link as villagers and the Treasure Chest, Princess Zelda Dress and Wig as items, plus the Sheikah Shrine Wall and Floor as new items.
- Expand the Splatoon collaboration to bring back Inkwell and the Spawn Point.
- Let the players swap the games of the NES, Super NES, Famicom, Super Famicom and Game Boy systems via customization.
- Add Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64 and Nintendo GameCube.
- Allow to summon characters to Slumber Islands via amiibo.
Those are really just small suggestions that would make the recent additions a bit more wholesome and polished.
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