It’s been awhile! I ultimately opted to not continue my monthly retro game post as it wasn’t flowing with the way I was playing games this year. But I would like to post more at any rate…

Anyway, I’m trying something a little different today. I was writing a thread on Bluesky and I thought - why not just make this a blog post?

I played a ton of Animal Crossing when the update dropped earlier this year, and I’ve been keeping up with mostly daily checks since then to try to finish some remaining goals I had. I could see them letting this be the Animal Crossing game for awhile longer but I have to imagine one is on the way.

It’s interesting though, I think the “issues” with New Horizons have been discussed, a big one being: swapping out longer development achievements (more store upgrades) for focusing on more customization via the town stuff, that’s gonna be hit or miss for people. Also there’s other stuff, like some tedium that can drag (airport conversations for example), some NPCs that people miss, and certainly the “too nice” villager problem. But it feels like the peak of the series despite all that, like the furthest the games have come, & I think that’s hard to debate.

So with that being the case, I think there’s room to fix those problems, but I assume if we are to get another Animal Crossing on the Switch 2 itself, then it’ll probably be a radical shift from this one again, but still without abandoning what the series is (I assume).

I think of today - I picked up the game and Isabelle let me know that Redd was in town. It’s time for the familiar grind of checking each piece of art against the iOS app I use to track my in-game art collection and check what real vs. fake looks like. But how long do we repeat this same grind? Animal Crossing is a series with features that longtime fans don’t want to see go away, so ultimately I wonder what that means for the next entries to come. They’ve always managed to surprise us so far, perhaps save for City Folk which was the least radical change game-to-game, and I think Nintendo will be conscious of the fact that there will be 2 entries playable on the Switch 2 (assuming this even happens), so I’m really curious to see how that plays out.

I promise this isn’t going to be an Animal Crossing blog, I just wanted to share these thoughts and figured it was better to do it here than on socials.