The latest installment is breaking expectations at all levels. We review your passwords.
The latest installment in the Animal Crossing saga, New Horizons, is breaking all expectations. Although it has only been on the market for two months, it has already sold 13.41 million copies, making it the sixth best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch. Given that it is surpassed by games that were released years ago, such as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe or The Legend of Zelda: Breath, of the Wild, and the pull that the latest installment of Animal Crossing is having, it would not be strange if it ended up becoming the console best-selling game.
What is the reason for this success? There is no doubt that the global crisis caused by Covid-19 has had a lot to do with it. The confinement that most of the world has faced has made many people have much more free time and a smaller range of leisure options. Interestingly, this has caused sales of the Nintendo Switch to skyrocket, to the point where demand is already higher than supply and Nintendo has been forced to increase the production of its hybrid console by 10% for the rest of 2020 And Animal Crossing: New Horizons is largely to blame, as Nintendo itself explained in its Reviews of financial results for the fiscal year ending March 2020:
“The release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons drove hardware sales greatly, with console sell-through for the week of release reaching levels above weekly sell-through during the holiday season.” —Fiscal Year Ended March 2020 Financial Results Explanatory Material
Back to the outside world
It would be naive to ignore the effect that the quarantine has had both on lifelong players and people who have just entered this world. Subscriptions to streaming services like Netflix, Disney + and Amazon prime are in the air, and video game sales are not far behind. We are at a time when it is necessary to escape from the crisis we are experiencing, in which we miss the outside world more than we did when we were free to come and go as we pleased. And in the midst of that panorama, Animal Crossing: New Horizons offers us to return to that world that has been taken from us.
Social gatherings have moved to Discord and Skype; those of work, to Zoom and Teams; we see our relatives through the screens of our mobiles and computers. But the Nintendo game allows us to go further: it offers us a stage, our islands, in which we can meet our friends, in which we can talk and interact with them, in which we feel closer than we have been in weeks. It is not the same as face-to-face contact, but it is better than just sending messages through a chat.
And what about exploration? Not only can we tour our own island from cover to cover, but we can also visit those of our friends or travel to other remote ones thanks to the Nook miles coupons. This provides us with a feeling of exploration, of return to the outside world, which helps us to reduce the anxiety we feel when confined in our own homes. This factor should not be underestimated, as it is this desire for discovery that drives love for RPG and open world games, such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Now, more than ever, we need virtual worlds to escape to.
Countless customization options
But neither can we attribute all the success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons to the current issue. Ultimately, the game was planned long before this health crisis erupted, and the developers had already set out to make this the best title in their saga, creator Aya Kyogoku explained.
And they wanted to make the game full of content, a goal that they have fully met. In previous installments you could already decorate your town and your house with endless options, but these have increased exponentially in the Nintendo Switch title thanks to new features so well integrated that it seems that they had always been there. A clear example of this is the DIY workshop, which allows us to make tools, furniture, clothing, walls and floors, etc., through the materials we collect on our island or those we visit. In addition, it also offers us the ability to customize them, changing the color or adding the designs that we have created through the pattern creation application.
If we take into account that, in addition to furniture, these patterns also allow us to decorate the island and our clothes, we will see that the customization options are almost endless. Especially creative players have achieved all kinds of effects, such as recreating the world of Final Fantasy VII or entire routes of Pokémon games. And the best thing is that this is not only for us to have the satisfaction of having a beautiful island or reach the long-awaited five stars, but we can also invite friends to show off the fruit of our efforts.
And if the amount of objects and events that we have so far seems little to anyone, Nintendo has ensured that they will continue to release updates for Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the next two or three years, adding endless customization options and new situations of the ones to enjoy that will give new life to this title.
A vibrant community
This installment is not only played with friends. And it is that the ability to obtain new furniture and recipes is limited, since we can only obtain a handful a day through the stores and the projects carried out by our inhabitants. Therefore, if we want to complete a certain collection (such as bamboo furniture or cherry petals, for example), it will take us a long time to gather everything we need, even if we receive help from our friends. Or maybe we want to get a certain neighbor out of the almost 400 available, an authentic odyssey very difficult to achieve traveling from island to island to see if we can find it.
This is why online communities have been created that allow the traffic of objects and inhabitants. Examples of this are Nookazon, a real black market where you can get everything from furniture to clothing, villagers, fossils or recipes, or the Discord channels that Twitch youtubers and streamers offer their subscribers to exchange everything they need. These platforms have become narrow user communities that start with material interests, but end up developing true friendly relationships.
Another aspect in which players come together for the common good is the turnip market, much like the investment exchange. Through social networks and chat channels, people announce at what price you can buy turnips on their island when the price is low, as well as warn when they can be sold at a high price in their stores. This helps people who would never have interacted in any other way get to know each other and be able to interact through the integrated chat, and why not visit their islands and enjoy the gaming experience even more.
Thus, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, despite having an online game mode that lacks simplicity and very unreasonable loading times, has managed to create communities that are narrower and more complex than those of other better-oiled games, enhancing the social aspect of this franchise.
Return to natural life
"We need the tonic of the wild … At the same time that we strive to explore and learn all things, we need them to be mysterious and unexplorable, that the land and sea are indefinitely wild, unknown and unfathomable for the mere fact of being. We can never tire of nature. ” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden
However, in last point, I think that the appeal of the Animal Crossing saga lies, in large part, in that it offers us something that has almost been forgotten: a return to nature.
We live in an age dominated by technology, surrounded by devices that allow us to achieve a superficial knowledge of almost everything. If we want to inform ourselves about something, we just need to look for your Wikipedia entry, a YouTube tutorial that explains it, a course on some online teaching platform or a detailed explanation in a specialized forum. This has made us more efficient people than ever, but more ignorant than we have ever been. But Animal Crossing, a technological and virtual product, has offered us, ironically, a return to a fuller life, a life in which nature, knowledge, personal relationships and social skills make sense again.
And it is that in New Horizons they throw us to a deserted island along with two other neighbors, all in tents, with very little instructions on how to advance. Little by little they teach us how to collect resources, they give us recipes to learn how to make new furniture and buildings, they send us to look for new neighbors, to build stores, to build bridges and ramps to expand our world. And so we are turning the raw material of the island into a reflection of our preferences, of the kind of world in which we would like to live.
Despite everything, many things are still unknown to us. Unless we read the official guide, or search for data revealed by dataminers, Animal Crossing: New Horizons presents us with a long and difficult learning process to master. And it will take a long time to discover how the flowers hybridize and in what combinations, or to find the patterns of collection of furniture and wasps shaking trees, or in what area live what fish and what bugs. Two months after its launch, there are still many unknowns that only the most seasoned players have discovered, as if they belonged to the highest echelons of a mystery cult.
Collect materials from nature, contribute to the discovery of the flora and fauna of our island, interact with the citizens we have chosen and establish relationships with them … All this reminds us of life in a small community in a natural environment where everyone it is known, where everything flourishes from the earth and returns from the earth. It presents us with an idealized vision of an idyllic world that few of us already know and that many long for in an increasingly depersonalized and inhuman society.
A little world all for me
In short, Animal Crossing: New Horizons allows us to escape into a community built by ourselves through a long process of learning, trial and error. Little by little we are shaping the home of our dreams in order to compensate ourselves for the dissatisfaction of our current life and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. It gives us both the appropriate process and the necessary tools so that we feel that we really are the engineers of this new world, of this community where both the aesthetic elements and the islanders who inhabit it are in tune with ourselves. And, once this is achieved, it launches us into an online world where we can meet other people and teach them everything we have achieved.
This, without a doubt, is a very necessary function and by no means negligible given the uncertainty in which we live. My only hope is that this game will teach us to value nature and outdoor life once we can get back to it, and that we will be able to enjoy that world as much as we have its virtual equivalent.
