3 Animal Crossing: New Horizons Takes you Must Avoid
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is finally here and, unsurprisingly, it is very good. Who knew that exploring the spaces of video games with questions like "What if we made a game that has no conflict" or "What if we made a game where everything is nice, you have animal friends that are chill and cool" or "What if we made a game that you actually don't have to play in huge chunks" would receive such praise from not only lifeless automatons such as myself, but actual, normal human beings?
Unfortunately, due to the nature of the hobby many of us choose, we are surrounded by incredibly bad opinions. In the past few days, my timeline has been assaulted by many denizens wielding their takes like a lumberjack who needs exactly 30 of each type of wood to construct a shop. It is imperative that we are vigilant for any signs of bad takes and shake our heads sternly at them where we can. Here are a few examples of Animal Crossing: New Horizons takes you must avoid.
1. Tom Nook is a bad person
Okay, we get it. Tom Nook forces you to buy a house, amassing you a debt of hundreds of thousands of bells, in some titles even enlisting you in slave labour to pay off what is a tiny fraction of the amount. For years, we have been tormented with the idea of Tom Nook conning you into extra space you don't really need, or selling essential medicine for the ridiculous price of 400 bells. But I say this smear campaign of Tom Nook - an honest, hard-working family man - ends here.
Working selflessly through the night
Tom Nook provides you with a place to live and a loan with ZERO interest. When was the last time you were given a loan with zero interest? (Students, don't answer that one) "But what about the ridiculous prices?" I hear some of you dullards cry in the back. Don't you realise how expensive houses are? The cost of labour in building an entire house overnight alone should explain it, not to mention the materials. Instead of cutting every tree down he sees like some people, Tom Nook uses ethically produced, sustainable trees which magically grow the next morning as soon as he cuts them down. And does he do this for the money? No. Tom Nook is a family man, who works day and night to provide for his two adorable children, Timmy and Tommy. Not only this, but Tom Nook is a man of the people too. No way can buying piles of fish and fruit be finically viable. He simply sees a poor villager in need and decides that they could maybe do with some bells while adding the 3405th Sea Bass to the pile.
Tom Nook is an incredibly upstanding Tanuki, and I won't hear a single bad word against his name.
2. Animal Crossing Makes you Think you can buy a House
Look, while I think it's cool that we're finally thinking about the impact that video games have on people beyond the easy questions such as "do they cause violence?" or "are they addictive?". But come on. Aside from a few issues, Animal Crossing is one of the most ethically sound games out there. It encourages you to replant trees that you cut down; don't trample on flowers, check up on your neighbours and make sure they're okay. But yes, in Animal Crossing New Horizons, you do own a house - something that a lot of us my age probably won't be able to do in their lifetime.
I have two points here. One is that Animal Crossing is an idealistic game. The original concept of it was a way to escape city life: a place where you knew everyone that lived there and where life was simple. This is something that the game carries throughout. In the same way that you're not thinking about becoming a fisherman or bug collector because of Animal Crossing, I don't think many of us see Animal Crossing as a realistic view into home ownership. In addressing the elephant in the room that Animal Crossing targets kids as well as adults, I'd say it's actually a pretty mature look into the matter. The debt from your house is the one constant looming over you as the major goal in the game.
This leads into the second point: The house is really, really difficult to pay off. In the three games that I previously played (I never got around to the GameCube one), I never once fully completed my house. Juggling the need to buy things while also remembering you need to pay off the house can be a nightmare at times. If Animal Crossing was meant to be a pro home-ownership game, you'd think it'd paint it in a more positive light.
Don't get me started on the pro-capitalist takes either. Any game where you forgo profit in favour of filling a museum with sharks is not pro-capitalist. That's just how it is.
3. Animal Crossing is the Escape we Need Right now
I swear all of the games press assembled together in their inner sanctums to push this narrative in their reviews at the moment and to me it makes no sense at all. We are all going through incredibly bad times right now, with many of us self-isolating due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Animal Crossing can be an excellent way to connect with people both real and virtual and its routine can bring a sense of calm.
But there's a strength that Animal Crossing has that means that this take does not ring true for me. It's not a game you're playing for long periods of time. While other games demand hours upon hours each day, Animal Crossing doesn't demand anything really. It's one of the few games that feels like it has a responsibility to not keep you hooked for a long time. In fact, it's quite boring if you treat it like that. I'd much rather plant a few apples and oranges and wait a few days to pay off my house than fish until the stocks run empty.
So if you're not playing Animal Crossing all day, then what are you doing? How can it be an escape? Apparently, my answer was "write about Animal Crossing" so maybe I'm wrong on this one.
If you are enjoying Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I highly, highly recommend to not read the terrible opinions of people writing about it (mine is an exception, because my opinions are good). I'd go as far as to say the same thing for any video game really. It's much cooler to look at the screenshots of stacks and stacks of fish and bugs that people are leaving for Blathers the night before the new museum opens than reading some words like some kind of super nerd.