When it comes to the Animal Crossing series, I was never really a fan. There was one game that I played years ago that I liked and then I tried to get back into the series last January with New Leaf but I couldn’t get into it. I was only able to play at night and there wasn’t much to do in the game at night and I never cared for changing the clock. As such, I was never able to progress the story past the first couple of things.

So literally only a couple days after I bought it, I traded it back in. Even the day New Horizons came out, I had no intention in buying it because I thought it would be the same thing. But the day after it came out, that Saturday, I went with my friend to pick up a copy for his girlfriend and we were talking about the game for a couple hours so it was fresh on my mind.

I still wasn’t too interested, but the next day, Sunday, was the first day of the lockdowns in NYC, and Gamestop was set to close indefinitely. I was worried about all my pre orders and whether or not I would lose all of them if the stores didn’t open in time or at all. So I went and cancelled all of my pre orders and I was intending on replacing one of them with Dragon Quest 11.

I was on the line for a while, so I eventually decided that I’d grab a copy of New Horizons too, just for the sake of it and I ended up being really glad that I did. I can’t say this for everyone, but I’m 100% sure that this is the best Animal Crossing game by a lot, like 10 times better than whatever game is 2nd best. In the end, I was really glad that I picked a copy and that I was able to be a part of the experience that came afterwards.

I remember all the news that followed the game for its first couple of weeks. Things like how it broke all sales expectations within a couple weeks, how it helped millions of people throughout all the different lockdowns, and how it created one of the biggest and busiest communities in a video game ever. To top it all off, it ended up being a great game in its own right, not because of circumstance.

GRAPHICS: 8/10

The graphics of New Horizons are pretty good. They aren’t perfect, they aren’t going to win any awards, and they aren’t anything close to what you see out of the other big games, but they are perfect for what we want them to be. There are so many characters and they all have their own good looking designs. Your island always has so much color and life, especially when you fill it up with a lot of stuff, then visually it can be beautiful.

There’s just so much color and life to the game and it’s pretty smooth because of how simple the game is. You can have a bunch of characters on screen and you’ll be doing a task, and you won’t see any lag or issues with animations. The game is just so charming is really a treat to look at. My grade for graphics is going to be an 8 out of 10.

SOUND: 9/10

There’s a lot going on in the sound department when it comes to New Horizons. First off, you have the obvious aspect of sound that stands out, and that’s the iconic Animal Crossing voice. I’m not even going to try to understand what it is or how it works though. You also have regular sounds that you will hear with every action that you perform throughout your exploration of the island.

Beyond the voice and sounds, the biggest aspect of sound is the music, which I divided into 3 small categories. First of all you have the actual music of the game, which itself has become iconic very fast, especially when it comes to the main theme song that plays as you’re starting up the game. It became iconic because so many people were playing the game so often when it first came out. In just its first month, millions of people must have heard it dozens of times and it was quickly embroidered into their brains.

The next aspect of the music section is the ability to create your own town tune. It’s very simple and there aren’t really a lot of options to choose from when making your tune, but there’s still thousands of unique tunes to make, with each persons island having their own flare, which I thought was cool. The last aspect of music is KK Slider. This is an intense section right here because not only does KK Slider have a couple of his own songs, but he went on to create his own genre and trend of music on Youtube and other places.

The trend ended up being pretty crazy too. I remember that after like a month of the game being out, people started making remixes of a lot of different songs in the style of KK Sliders voice and songs. I thought that was pretty cool, you could just go on Youtube and see hundreds of remixes in that style. In fact, I didn’t even know that was a thing until one of my favorite TV Show composers did the same thing for his own songs for his Youtube channel.

He wasn’t a random person making a KK Slider remix of a random song. He redid the theme songs for Gravity Falls and Star vs the Forces of Evil, which he created, in that style, and they were great. I thought it was epic that this character and style had such a big influence on other music her in the real world.

There’s a lot going on when it comes to sound and my overall grade for this section is going to be a 9 out of 10.

ADDICTIVENESS: 10/10

I’m not going to go into the addictiveness aspect of New Horizons too much here because I end up going into a lot of detail on what you can do later on in the depth section. But let me tell you this, the game is so much fun. Even if you don’t like putting in hours at a time, it’s an easy enough game to just jump in for 30 minutes to an hour every day and you’d still be able to get a lot out of it.

If you play the game by yourself, you’re going to have a lot of fun, even after the first 100 hours have gone by. You’re going to put so much effort into making your island as good as it can be and you’re going to have so much fun and with the inhabitants of your island. But if you play with other people, the entire experience becomes 100 times better easily. You can visit your friends islands. Heck you can spend dozens of hours visiting hundreds of random peoples islands.

You can also obviously have all your friends and other people come to your island for a party and the online community will make you keep coming back for more. I’ll talk more about the community later on, but if the online aspect of the game really hooks you in, you’re going to easily spend hundreds of hours just doing online stuff like visiting islands, trading items, and selling all them turnips.

If you’re the kind of person who is impatient and can’t wait for the next day to come in order to progress, you can always change your clock forward a day or two and then keep playing. I don’t know why there’s so many people who complain about this and say that it’s cheating when it’s a video game that’s mean to be fun. If you do this, you can play and do everything you can that day, then you can change the clock forward and get right back in and play some more.

You’ll obviously run out of things to do in the game quicker if you do this, but you’ll still be able to get 10 hours a day out of the game if you’re really into it. I don’t think I have to do anymore explaining as to why this game is so much fun and my grade for addictiveness is going to be a perfect 10 out of 10.

STORY: N/A

Well, there isn’t really a story to Animal Crossing. In New Horizons you’re given the task of being in charge of a vacation island and you want people to move to your island. Your only real goal is to make it as beautiful as possible and to get a 5 star rating. That’s really it, there’s no story here and 99% of the game is just gameplay, creativity, and online communities.

DEPTH: 10/10

Oh boy is there so much to do in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. You can do pretty much anything that you want on your island to make it as good as it can be. For starters, there are millions of possibilities on how your island can be generated. No two people are going to start with the same island layout. The islands are pretty big too, so there will be lots of ways to customize them to your liking.

You just won’t really have that much room at the start because of water and cliffs. But later on you can build bridges to cross the water or you can use your endgame tools to lower the mountains, raise the seas, or build stairs. There’s also a large cast of characters, each with their own different personalities and designs, but you can only have so many on your island at once.

There’s also a ton of items that you can use, collect, or craft on your island with more being added all the time with constant updates and events. Plus when you add the online community to the mix, the number of things you can place on your island increases by 10 times and I’ll get to that in a little bit. Right now, let’s talk a bit about what I think are the three biggest aspects of New Horizons when it comes to depth.

TURNIP RUNNING

One of my favorite things to do in the game was kind of a minor feature of the game but became one of the biggest phenomenons because of the gaming community. The turnips. I remember during the first 2 weeks or so after release, people were blasting Twitter talking about Daisy Mae and all the prices that they were getting. You couldn’t go 10 seconds without a tweet of someone posting what their prices were.

Then websites and Facebook groups started popping up for people to find people with low buy prices and high sell prices, and then they would go to each others islands and make millions. Then even more websites started popping up including some to predict how much they would sell for later in the week. It was insane and those in the biz would call it Turnip Running and you didn’t even have to change the clock to get the best prices.

I loved it. On a Sunday, I would put a couple million bells into turnips. The price wouldn’t matter because I knew that I would get a lot back. I would buy multiple inventories worth of turnips and I would just leave them all over the island. Then starting on Monday’s I would go to all these websites and search for people who had high prices and I would go to their islands to sell all of my turnips, which would usually take multiple trips or multiple islands.

As a result, this took a while but it was worth it and so much fun meeting all sorts of new people. I would mostly look for people who had sell prices above 200 and I would usually get lucky since there were lots of options, and I would offer like 10% of the bells for allowing me to use their island. In the end, one trip with a full inventory of turnips would cost me around 400,000 bells and I usually made back more than 1.2 million each time.

On average I was pulling in a profit of more 4 to 6 million bells per week for maybe an hour or two of work and meeting a handful of new people. Sometimes if I had a lot of bells to spare and a lot of time and space on Sunday, I would buy so many turnips and make a profit of 10 to 20 million bells in a week.

But I would do things the other way around too. If I saw that on my island you could sell turnips for 400 to 600 bells, I would post my island and a handful of people would try to come to my island and that was just as lucrative. Sometimes I would have a 600 sell price day and a bunch of people would do 5 or more trips each. On days that people offered 10% of their profit, I could easily get a million bells or more per person that day.

I was living the good life and it was so much fun, interacting with a great community and making so many new friends, and also getting 10 million bells or more each week just from Turnip Running alone.

ITEMS

But what to do with all those bells? Well you know how there’s so many different kinds of items that you can buy and place in your house? You know how each day you get to buy different items? Well the community took care of that too. Since each day and each account has access to different items, these websites also features thousands of users posting items for sale or looking to buy items.

This included everything from seeds and flowers to items that they already have to some really rare and valuable items. If you went to one of these websites looking for a specific item that you thought would cost you like 100,000 Bells, you might end up walking away having spent more than 2 million bells and thousands of miles because of all the awesome things that you can find for sale.

I’ve done this plenty of times too in order to get rare or unique items that made my house look even better. I’ve spent my fair share of bells in the in game stores but I’ve also spent tens of millions of bells on items that belonged to random people and it was an awesome experience.

CREATION

Easily my favorite aspect of New Horizons is the creation aspect and no, I’m not talking about raising seas and destroying mountains. I’m talking about your ability to create and share all sorts of designs. You can create designs that can be put on the floor or ground, which can help you create things on your island that wouldn’t have been possible with the vanilla version of the game.

In addition to tiles on the ground, you can also create all sorts of designs for walls, clothing, and more, which really opened up the floodgates for creativity in the game. Once you created something, you could share it with the world and they get the ability to use your designs anywhere on the island or wear the clothes that you created.

This is something that I loved and I was heavily involved with the process for like a weak near the start of April. I remember I would get into the pattern creation tool and spend like an hour or two making one outfit that would come out pretty nicely. I would create like 3 outfits a day and went on to create stuff that I was really proud of or stuff that became popular and used a lot in the game by other players.

Some of the best outfits that I created were based on TV shows like Stranger Things, Danny Phantom, The Dragon Prince, She Ra, and Glitch Techs. I also browsed thousands of creations and found some really good ones from Pokemon, Voltron, Fairy Tail, and hundreds of other shows and movies. By now there has to be millions of great clothing designs and wall/floor patterns.

All these aspects make it very apparent why the depth category of Animal Crossing: New Horizons easily gets a perfect 10 out of 10, maybe even a little extra credit to to along with it too.

DIFFICULTY: 1

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was never meant to be a difficult game, at all. It’s supposed to be calm and relaxing where you get to build your own island in any way you want. It’s supposed to be lots of fun without any stress. Honestly the only way you can get stressed out is if you lose millions of bells at once because of turnips or you spend hours trying to get a tarantula island (Or the tarantulas don’t like you). But that isn’t really something that has to do with difficulty and challenges, it’s more of luck and stress.

If you find that the game is too hard, I don’t really know what to tell you. You could always try changing the pace and doing things slower or trying to speed things up if you need something done quickly. On that point, like I mentioned before, you can always change the clock time if you’re having difficulty with something and need it to be the next day. Other than that, the game isn’t hard or challenging, at all.

OVERALL: 9.4/10

Overall, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is such a blast. The game is so much fun and you can easily sink 100 hours into it if you’re playing by yourself and you have no friends. But if you add a couple friends into the mix and start getting involved with the community, then there’s no doubt in my mind that you can easily sink 500 hours or more into it. You’re going to get drawn into your island and put so much work and effort into it.

I don’t think I’ve seen any sales where the game has been below $60 and the way things have been, I don’t think the price ever needs to drop. Just during the first month that the game was out, I put in more than 100 hours and easily got my moneys worth out of the game. But I didn’t stop, I kept playing for many months and put many more hours into the game. I’m sure that if you get the game and pay the full $60, you will easily get your moneys worth too.

If you already have the game and put hundreds of hours into it, reading this will probably make you think of the game a lot and make you want to play it all over again. Overall the game is just too much fun and gets a great 9.4 out of 10 from me and probably ends up as one of my favorite Switch games.