Expanded Horizons: A Return to Animal Crossing
Ever since I clocked the full four season loop of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I’d been pining for a more substantial update than the regular, charming, seasonal features being added every few months from Nintendo. I’d expected a big Year 2 update when the anniversary of the game’s release came around, adding in a whole ton more features to renew interest in the game, but that anniversary came and went.
But then came the wonderful Animal Crossing Direct in October 2021, revealing not only a whole bunch of new features, characters and services arriving in the big 2.0 final update, but there was also a paid DLC expansion coming in the form of Happy Home Paradise, a sequel of sorts to the 3DS spin-off Happy Home Designer. Absolutely delightful! Nintendo had successfully rekindled interest in the game for those of us whose attention had drifted elsewhere.
And, despite the 500-600 hours I’d already plumbed into the game, I couldn’t wait to get back to my island!
A few days before the 2.0 update dropped, I decided to check in on my island, squash the cockroaches in my house, finish arranging my Super Mario themed area from a recent special in-game event, and clear some space to accommodate some of the new features coming:
I cleared a lovely plot of land to serve as my fields to grow my various crops.
I made some space down by the beach to become a Gyroid symphony area.
I created a pathway to the dock so I could take regular boat trips with the Kapp’n.
And I created better access to my museum to allow for more frequent visits to The Roost now that Brewster was returning.
Nintendo surprisingly released the 2.0 update a couple of days earlier than anticipated, which I was glad of, because it gave me a few days to really explore these new features before the DLC released, and I was surprised at just how quickly and easily I was sucked back into my daily Animal Crossing routine. Although ‘sucked’ feels like the wrong word, because it wasn’t against my will, it wasn’t a consuming obsession, it’s simply the returning of absolute delight into a small portion of my day.
I’d boot the game up, do a lap of my island finding the fossils and the recipe in a bottle, I’d pop into the museum to allow Blathers to assess my fossils, pick out a few weeds and scan the island for visitors. And now, adding to this routine, I would take a trip to a mysterious island with Kapp’n, dig up some gyroids, maybe source some new crops to grow, I would go and have a coffee in The Roost, and I would fly out to Harv’s Island where he is building a sort of co-operative community to create more permanent homes for regular island visitors such as Savannah, Kicks and Redd. You can only finance one of these developments a day, which beautifully brings back the slow pacing of the game, making you excited to pop back in the next day to see what was new and what you could develop for the following days. It gave me particular joy to bring Tortimer back to Animal Crossing, the lovely elderly tortoise from the older Animal Crossing games. He now delights in dressing up as an acorn and assuming the moniker Cornimer, and gives you acorns for your crafting every day! What a wonderful way to spend retirement!
One of the biggest joys I got from jumping back into my island, was being able to visit friends’ islands again. And not just old friends’ islands to see how they had developed, but visiting the islands of friends I’ve made along the way in the intervening months since New Horizons’ original boom of activity. Once again, I was looking for inspiration in their designs, trading recipes and using their different hemispheric location to catch some out of season sea creatures - so lovely!
The game still continues to blow my mind with it’s extraordinary level of detail, and I will go to my grave declaring that it’s one of the best looking games of this generation! It may only run at 30fps, have performance dips and pop-in when there’s lots of stuff around, but the art direction and the lighting in the game is absolutely second-to-none, which means making full use of the enhanced in-game photo options, just an absolute artistic joy, which you can tell from the numerous snapshots I’ve included here!
The gentle rolling out and development of features in the 2.0 update alone provided a wonderful reason to log in every day and reestablish my daily Animal Crossing routines - having a coffee every day with Brewster deepens your friendship with him allowing you to bake Brewster shaped cookies in the new cooking feature, learning new haircuts every day on Harv’s Island, slowly cultivating my new gyroid collection - utterly wonderful!
And then came the DLC!
I feel that the DLC has been unfairly overlooked since it was bundled in with the announcement of the Nintendo Online Expansion Service which boasted a less-than-desirable higher price point, and an even lesser-than-desirable quality of emulation for the included N64 games. But your subscription also covers the DLC for New Horizons, which is a strange new way of essentially ‘renting’ the DLC. But it could prove to be an innovative new way of rolling out DLC if they continue to add expansions to its library for other Nintendo games.
You can of course purchase Happy Home Paradise on its own if you don’t have interest in the rest of the offerings of the NSO Expansion, or you want to feel a proper sense of ownership of the new Animal Crossing content.
I was absolutely thrilled to see that the Happy Home Designer concept had not been forgotten by Nintendo. It was a delightful game on the 3DS, streamlining the interior design aspect of Animal Crossing: New Leaf and basing a whole game around it. It was liberating to have such immediate access to such a large library of furniture, wallpaper, flooring, items and knick-knacks to fulfil the requests of a huge array of villagers and visitors. But it makes so much more sense to have that content integrated into the main game to have a deeper coalescing of the features to spill out into your island as you unlock them.
Happy Home Paradise has a more definitive concept than Happy Home Designer with Lottie, the lovely otter setting up shop in archipelago of conveniently assorted islands covering all the different seasons and setups that you see across the game, from mountains, deserts and valleys to icebergs, steppes and beaches. And you serve as the designer to help clients build their perfect vacation home. Each customer will have a theme you have to fulfil and a few required items you need to incorporate into your designs. And then you are left to your creativity, and you start from the outside in, as you’re now able to fully customise the surrounding area around the house, and the house exterior itself, before moving inside and having a growing library of assets to build your designs with. This library grows steadily with each design, and ends up with a frankly overwhelming size that means no concept is off-limits to what you can create!
As is the case with the main game in Animal Crossing, the DLC is absolutely what you make it to be. If you want to just plonk the required items in a bland, empty room, you will fulfil the contract and you can move on to the next. But where is the joy or the satisfaction in that?! I revelled in every nuance and every detail in each design I created, crafting the perfect atmosphere for each client, and taking full advantage of all the cool features that you unlock along the way, from custom lighting and soundscapes, to determining the time of day and the season of the home and releasing butterflies and insects to flit and fly around their locale!
Dotted between commissions are the establishment of various facilities on the island, which are a joy to bring to life from the school and the cafe to a restaurant I delighted in calling The Covered Hen, bringing to reality a concept me and Minty had long chuckled over!
An aside…
During the first lockdown in 2020, when my wife was pregnant with our daughter Nora, my Danish aunt Kis passed away. It was a passing that I felt very deeply. I was so sad that my daughter wouldn’t get to meet her, but I found comfort that the developmental week in the pregnancy where the baby could now hear music coincided with the date we held a virtual funeral for Kis, and so Nora was able to hear the Danish hymns to say hello and goodbye to her beloved Great Aunt. Nora came to bear the full name Nora Kis Dunn in remembrance of her.
This was also during the harmonious months that so many of us spent taking solitude in Animal Crossing. When my aunt died, I made a small area on my island to pay memory to her, placing a white gravestone overlooking the sea and surrounding it with flowers.
When I came to build my hospital as a facility in my Paradise Planning island, I built the St Kis Hospital.
The final facility I built was a clothing shop entitled Collins & Gabriel, an allusion to the two Genesis front men who hold a huge place in my heart, and I also used the Genesis ‘logo’ as a custom design (made for me by the significantly artistic Mrs Minty) to adorn various items scattered throughout the archipelago!
The Animal Crossing Amiibo have always been delightful collectibles. Despite launching alongside the best-forgotten Animal Crossing Amiibo Party game on the Wii U which I never owned, I fell into the habit of collecting my favourite characters and enjoying their lovely faces adorning my bookshelves! By the time that Amiibo functionality was integrated into New Leaf, I had cleared my save file and donated it to Mrs Dunn to help her through a rough period with her mental health, and so my collection of Crossing collectibles have largely lain dormant. Until their wonderful inclusion in the Happy Home Paradise DLC, whereby you can use the Amiibo to summon their in-game counterpart and then design their own special vacation home on the archipelago!
You’re not short of clients by any means, but being able to bring these special characters and construct for them a personal habitat was such a lovely experience, that felt almost like a gift to them for them providing such a joyous service in the game. I made a family home for the Kapp’n family, and a delightful vacation home for Isabelle which I entitled ‘A Well-Earned Rest’. I even made a twin’s paradise for Tommy & Timmy, the Nooklings with a mirror imaged vacation home, but with a shared space where they can come together and play video games!
The gameplay loop of this DLC is such a perfect distillation of what makes Animal Crossing so charming to play, and so addictive to keep playing. It gives you all the tools to let your creative mind run wild in an incredible sandbox. The progression you make through the campaign on Paradise Planning Island is whimsical, satisfying and utterly delightful, and it left me with one of the most jaw-droppingly gleeful moments I’ve ever experienced in a video game, and it’s one that only Animal Crossing could deliver!
I can see myself happily logging in every day for several more months and fully enjoy everything that has been included in this update and the DLC with pure, pure joy!