Highlights

  • Animal Crossing: New Horizons toned down the diverse personalities of its villagers, making them feel too similar to each other.
  • Villager hunting became popular in New Horizons, and a future Animal Crossing game could make it more exciting by introducing shiny variants of villagers, similar to Pokemon.
  • Adding shiny villagers could effectively double the number of unique villagers in the game, but there may be hurdles to overcome, such as creating re-colored models for all existing villagers and dealing with third-party markets.

While the Animal Crossing series has always featured its villagers as a central part of its identity, villagers in Animal Crossing: New Horizons were somewhat controversial among longtime series fans. Past entries in the Animal Crossing series have had diverse personalities ranging from sweet and friendly to cranky and rude, but Animal Crossing: New Horizons toned down these personalities and made them feel too similar to each other to stand out. However, if the series wants to continue this trend, a future Animal Crossing game could make villagers more exciting by borrowing a popular mechanic from the Pokemon series.

Villager hunting became a popular pastime in Animal Crossing: New Horizons thanks to the ability to find and recruit new villagers from Mystery Island Tours. Although villagers in past entries would move in randomly when the player had an opening in their town, Animal Crossing: New Horizons players could go on a Mystery Island Tour and have the chance to come across a random villager camping on the island with the ability to invite them to their island. A future Animal Crossing game could make this process even more exciting by giving these villagers a small chance of having an alternate color palette, much like shiny variants from Pokemon.

RELATED: The Case For Random Personality Types in The Next Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing Could Introduce ‘Shiny’ Villager Variants

In the Pokemon series, creatures have a very small chance to appear as an alternate color version of themselves known as a "shiny" variant when encountered in the wild. While nothing is different about these critters from a gameplay perspective, their incredible rarity has made shiny hunting a very popular activity for Pokemon fans to participate in. With the way that hunting for players' favorite villagers exploded in popularity with the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the next Animal Crossing game could lean into this aspect of the series and add the chance to find a shiny villager to the villager hunting mechanic.

Finding a shiny Pokemon is already quite a rare occurrence with the base odds being 1/4096 in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and these games allow players to see multiple critters on the screen at a time due to mons appearing in the overworld while players are out and about. These same odds would make finding a shiny villager in Animal Crossing much more difficult as players only have the chance to find one villager at a time on a Mystery Island. To remedy this issue, Animal Crossing could decrease the odds to a more appropriate level or allow players to encounter more than one villager per Mystery Island.

Pokemon provides players with other tools to help increase their shiny odds such as the Shiny Charm which increases the odds to 1/1366, and the Masuda Method of Pokemon breeding which increases the odds further to 1/512. Animal Crossing could do something similar and offer players a special reward for having a perfect island or town that increases the rate of a shiny villager showing up. There could even be a new NPC introduced to the Animal Crossing series that teaches the player about shiny villagers and offers to increase the odds of finding one for a price.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons contains 413 total villagers that players can invite to their island. If this number carries over to the next game, the addition of shiny variants could effectively double the number of unique villagers in the game, bringing the total up to 826.

There may be some hurdles the next Animal Crossing game has to overcome to include shiny villagers in the game, with a major one being creating re-colored models for all 413 Animal Crossing villagers, assuming no new ones are added in the next title. Additionally, the game would have to find a way to deal with third-party markets for buying and selling villagers that developed around characters like Raymond in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. However, the fresh gameplay opportunities that shiny villagers would bring to the series may be worth tackling these issues.