Turning Over a New Leaf in a Wild World.
Animal Crossing is one of Nintendo’s biggest Franchises by far, appearing on every single console since it originated on the Gamecube in 2001. Since then Animal Crossing has become one of Nintendo’s biggest modern hits. Not many games have resonated more consistently with audiences around the world over every single iteration. This is why many people are so excited for this new generation of Animal Crossing and what it will bring. The game has evolved and become subtly more in depth as tome has gone on and the developers are constantly finding smart, new ways to expand the gameplay while not losing what makes the game so unique.
Animal Crossing at its core is a game about making the mundane fun. Which is why the improvements to living life in town, culminating with New Leaf have been so fun to learn over the years. Traveling to new places, making decrees over the town, traveling to a tropical paradise, these are all different yet ingenious ways of giving players a break or making the game more accessible to newcomers. The trend can be expected to continue, but it will be in an all new way.
What comes next truly is a mystery, if the team was being ambitious and a bit risky with this game, it could potentially be fun if many of the pat elements of the game returned in some fashion. Imagine being the mayor of your starting town but having the ability to go to a city, or beach at any time and have new things to do there. That is quite the undertaking though, as developing the singular adjustments to the game take time and lots of effort, making so many different set pieces and the required NPCs to fill them would be very taxing on the development team.
The much safer option would be to follow the format of the previous games, keep the smaller changes, reset the world and add a new main feature to the game that provides fresh life to a series that would otherwise become dull. Due to the nature of the switch, it would seem safe to assume that this new feature will inadvertently help with the transition between a console game and a handheld game. For some small things that could be added, true character customization could be a nice small feature added that seems long overdue, being able to customize how a character looks, while not necessarily changing clothes but the overall look of the player character. A bigger map with more houses would be really nice for the game, but it also needs to ride a fine line and not be too big for players who will be playing in handheld mode.
At the end of the day it doesn’t particularly matter what we think Animal Crossing should do next, the development team on this game knows exactly what Animal Crossing is and what it should be in its simplest form. They have done an excellent job cultivating a loyal fanbase with high hopes for another consistently good game. And, even though we have seen literally no footage of this game since it was announced in November of last year, there is still plenty of faith that this game will be everything the fans hope it would be. What comes next for Animal Crossing is a mystery but we should know more info soon enough, with E3 less than a month away, and an announced release date of 2019, news should be coming any time now.
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