On March 20, 2020, one of the most anticipated AAA titles of the generation finally released… oh and [Animal Crossing](https://youtu.be/Ie4WZCLbtVs) came out that same day too I think. Bad jokes aside, New Horizons was a real lightning-in-a-bottle moment for the Nintendo Switch. In a time when everyone was miserable and stuck in their homes all day, New Horizons came out at just the perfect moment to help people cope with not being able to go outside and socialize for the foreseeable future.
And me personally… I just watched it unfold from the sidelines. I’m not an Animal Crossing guy, mainly due to the shenanigans with the real time clock. It’s just not the kind of life sim for me given my IRL schedule. I mainly stuck to Xenoblade Definitive Edition and Fire Emblem Three Houses for my pandemic coping sessions. But I have heard Animal Crossing fans complain about several key things in this game. Namely the durability on your tools, bland villager dialogue, cumbersome menuing, and limited online options.
This game was also a victim of the “free updates” model that Nintendo loves doing with their multiplayer games. Wherein they put out a new entry for full price that’s considered half-baked compared to previous installments, and hope players keep playing long enough to download the free content updates whenever Nintendo decides to finally put them out. Remember Froggy Chairs? Nintendo eventually did.
Thankfully the free updates, infrequent as they were, did apparently add enough substantial content back into the game to satisfy longtime fans. All of this culminated in the Happy Home Paradise DLC in October 2021, which is also available for NSO Expansion Pack subscribers as well. I’m sure this was a magical game for a whole lot of people, and no one should take those memories away from you. But now that the world has returned to some semblance of normalcy, I thought it’d be a good time to look back at this game a bit more critically.