Entertainment

Animal Crossing Preview

By Reporter Destini Baccus

For seven long, agonizing years, there hasn’t been a mainstream Animal Crossing game since New Leaf. But Nintendo has answered our prayers. They finally are releasing a new Animal Crossing game titled New Horizons. This has left many devoted fans and hardcore players of the series to jump for absolute joy for some colorfully charming villagers to pal around with. Fans are eager for what could be the best in the franchise.

Thanks to the new console the game is being released on the Nintendo Switch. This led to Nintendo being able to update the graphics and subsequently make the game look ten times more beautiful. With these new graphics, details in the clothes, futuiture, environment, and even the weather itself are brought to life. The shadows are well animated and reaslistic, the oceans and rivers to appear choppy when it is storming or windy, and the tree's leaves to russell and move around when it’s windy as well.

New additions and features have also been added to the game: one of which being that you can craft tools, furniture, and objects by gathering resources around the island. This feature is unprecedented and exciting for fans of the franchize. The new crafting ability had also paved the way for new furniture, decorations, accessories, and even ways to change/upgrade said certain furniture and objects with one of the confirmed personal head accessories and house decorations being a flower crown/reef to add more color and pizzaz to things.

Another new feature in the game is what appears to be a fruit/stamina meter that, based on the trailers, seems to go down a number when doing certain types of hard labor and can be replenished by eating fruit or food. The new game also gives the option of being able to customize your character instead of being asked a whole lotta questions that determines the appearance of your character. The original “customization” of your character is neat but many players and fans have wanted the ability to make their character exactly how they desire, and can even make an in-game version of themselves now.

For years many Animal Crossing has struggled with a problem that has plagued all console video games--when the video game dies on you before you can save your game and lose whatever data you manage to accumulate. When this happens in regular games this is either ranges as annoying to infuriating. But in Animal Crossing this is not only annoying or infuriating, the game outright abuses the player. For many years, there has been a character known as Mr. Resetti, a mole who’s purpose is to chastise the player for resetting in the 3DS instalments of the game. Resetti would give you a long speech and force you to type it back to him word for word until you got it correct and in certain versions he would scream at the player. So, to everyone’s relief, New Horizons has done away with the dreaded Mr. Resetti and replaced him with an auto-save mode.

All in all, the game is beautiful and has many exciting new features. I would highly recommend the game when it comes out on March 20th, 2020.