Animal Crossing 15th Anniversary | Reflecting on Animal Crossing

I really would've liked a main series game on Wii U. Maybe we'll get lucky and NX will launch with one.

Wild World was my only AC game, but me and my sis shared a file in the same way. We naturally just grew tired of it eventually, but it definitely got a lot of use out of us. It's funny, she was talking about playing it again recently, and wanting to start a new file, but I wonder if it will end up with the same feeling as you had, where it's just not the same as your old town and those memories you had.

My sis isn't really a big gamer, but she was really excited at the news that Nintendo would start making mobile games, and after being disappointed with Miitomo (it is a pretty boring thing tbh), she was saying how much she wanted AC on smartphone. And I agree. I think Nintendo could tap into a large portion of players that have either moved away from the DS/Wii era or find people that would never have considered buying a DS/3DS before with a game like AC. It's still got that social theme, and making it easy to jump from your own town to your friends' Miitomo-style would be a big benefit.

That's where the future of AC can and should go: mobile. Still have a new AC game on the NX or next Nintendo handheld, but do one for mobile, too. Either make an entirely separate brand-new game, or a F2P version of the next NX/handheld one that would bring all three platform userbases together to travel and trade - that would be cool.

( Edited 17.04.2016 14:27 by Azuardo )

You know, to be honest, I just never 'got' Animal Crossing. Whilst I could spend weeks on end tinkering with SimCity back in the SNES days, the concept of AC didn't quite gel with me. Then Happy Home Designer came along and... no, it didn't change my mind - it actually put me off the series even more. Horrendously tedious and basic.

AC isn't something I'd go back to. Wild World was the only one I'm likely to play. The series is very much a case of once you've played it, you've played them all. The little things they add to each game aren't tempting enough to draw me back in. It was a nice time waster back in the day, but they need to push new ideas into it, more things to do, better ways and reasons to interact with your friends and visit their towns. I think a mobile-console-handheld triple release that allows all users to interact and travel to each other's towns is one step towards bringing more people together, but there needs to be reasons to do so and a lot more to do (unlike Miitomo - there is feck all point in travelling to someone's house in that).

I think it's something Nintendo fails to do in a lot of their franchises. They don't seem to get the opinions of fans on how they want to see series pushed forward. Too many games are copies of the last ones, with very few additions or new things to do, but AC doesn't seem to have progressed much at all from its very first outing. Someone can try convince me otherwise, but I haven't seen much evidence of it being worth buying New Leaf over Wild World.

( Edited 17.04.2016 15:26 by Azuardo )

Within the past month I've gotten really back into Animal Crossing again and have been playing a lot.

Overall I definitely prefer Animal Crossing as a handheld game over a console game. I generally play in short bursts and it makes it easy to check in on things when you can basically do so from anywhere instead of having to be at home in front of the TV.

My main problem with the series is that it never expands much. From the very first one to New Leaf, there's barely much change, really. There's been no big progression. Sure, they change things here and there, but for me, I've grown a bit bored of the formula, you basically do the same thing over again in each version. They're fantastic games, and really lovely to chill and play, but there's not really any reason for me to buy a new version unless they do something a bit more drastic in terms of changes.

I always felt the series had real potential to expand into other gameplay areas or maybe for more social features. I definitely feel an Animal Crossing application or game could work well on mobile, for sure and I'd bet it would sell a lot, too.

Sonic_13 said:

Overall I definitely prefer Animal Crossing as a handheld game over a console game. I generally play in short bursts and it makes it easy to check in on things when you can basically do so from anywhere instead of having to be at home in front of the TV.

Add to this the unfulfilled plans of actually being able to send emails/messages to your Animal Crossing town through your phones (it's difficult to find quotes on this now, since this was during the Revolution reveal about 10+ years ago), and clearly Nintendo knew it was logical to bring the use of phones into AC.

I think Nintendo could get away with basically porting New Leaf to mobile platforms, but they definitely have to and need to take it to new and better, more fun, places if creating a new handheld game (I agree it works best as a handheld title, but if they do another console edition, it has to be a dual release so that owners of both editions can interact with each other, a la Monster Hunter 3, Smash Bros U/3DS etc).