Animal Crossing: New Horizons hit the market at a time when the world most needed a cozy world to get absorbed in. However, even with the massive sales numbers the game boasted, Animal Crossing: New Horizons still received some criticism from longtime series fans due to its lackluster villager personalities and missing content at launch. The next entry in the series already has the perfect blueprint to remedy many of these issues, all it needs to do is keep the best aspects of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and combine them with a particular feature from Animal Crossing: City Folk.
Released for the Wii in 2008, Animal Crossing: City Folk built upon the formula of its predecessors by adding the ability to travel from the player's quaint village to the City, where all kinds of shops and activities were available. In addition to unique shops and venues, special characters like Animal Crossing's Phineas and Kicks had a chance of showing up in the city on any given day. Elements of the City returned with Main Street in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, but did not require the player to travel to a separate area to access. While absent in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a future title could include the City along with the improvements from the games since its introduction.
A New Animal Crossing Game Could Apply New Horizon's Customization Features to the City
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Arguably the most popular features introduced in Animal Crossing: New Horizons were the island customization options available to players. Getting to decide where to build villager homes and other important structures, along with terraforming options and the ability to place items outside the player's home made this game the most customizable entry in the series. However, being limited to an island meant that players didn't have many customization options outside the basics of a typical Animal Crossing town.
These customization options should return in a future title, but including the City as an additional zone that can be customized seems like a logical next step for the franchise. Having the player help build the City, choosing which buildings to build and where, would only add to the customization options already present in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This customization mechanic could even affect what Animal Crossing villagers players' cities attract, similar to how villagers not native to a player's town could be encountered in the City in Animal Crossing: City Folk, and help shape more interesting villager personalities as a result.
The series already has another established formula it could incorporate into the base game to help with these City customization options. Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer for the 3DS and the Happy Home Paradise DLC for Animal Crossing: New Horizons both emphasize designing and customizing buildings and houses to fit the needs of certain characters. Having the mechanics from these games built into a new Animal Crossing title from the start would not only make this popular feature more accessible, but naturally fit into a city-planning aspect of the game.
As the Animal Crossing series looks to innovate, iterating on past mechanics from Animal Crossing: City Folk and the Happy Home Paradise DLC from Animal Crossing: New Horizons may be the way to incorporate the best of both games into a new title. Outside of a full-blown remake of the Wii entry, having a game centered on the theme of city planning would be a great way to reintroduce players to the City of the series' past. With the future of the franchise still unknown, it's hard to tell which direction a new title will take, but building upon these popular past mechanics could coalesce into the game of many fans' dreams.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available now for Nintendo Switch.
