Are ya'll serious? I mean is nothing on this green earth of ours sacred? Clearly not if there's a budding review bombing being conducted against Animal Crossing for certain 'anti-consumer practices.' Where have the days gone when we could all just relax and play a silly game about a raccoon turning us all into debt slaves? Gone with the public's blind trust in Nintendo products it would seem, as this isn't the first time that Nintendo titles have fallen under scrutiny for glaringly flawed and/or archaic design choices. It's one of the few lingering issues that holds the Nintendo Market back from feeling as vast and adaptable as almost every other game market out there today, and I feel like people are starting to get sick out it.
The situation to which I refer is of course the great `limited saves' debacle of 2020, or as I like to call it; how to learn nothing from the evolving industry around you, featuring; whichever Nintendo branch made this. At it's core the situation is this; 'Animal Crossing: New Horizons' features restrictions that prevent players from having more than one island to explore on. This is regardless of how many profiles you create on that Switch or how many copies of the game you buy, whenever you load in it will be on the first island created using that Switch. The only way for a new island to get involved would be if you have an entirely separate Switch to play around with, and that's just not really practical, now is it? Now from the get go this may not seem like quite a situation to great upset over, I mean sure it's annoying, but is it review bomb worthy? Well, let me assure that there's a couple big issues that such restrictions introduce.
Firstly; these saves come with that most annoying omission which is becoming a habit for Switch titles of late; a lack of Cloud saving or save transferring. This essentially means that the Switch you first launch the game on will become the arbiter of that game until it's death, so if anything should happen to the system (i.e. it's gets damaged or stolen) you can say bye-bye to all of your progress as it disappears with the Switch. Honestly, it's somewhat galling that this is even an issue we see in modern day gaming given the apparent proliferation of Cloud saving technology. Nintendo launched their Switch without the feature and turned around to charge us all for the privilege tying it in with their online package. Now they're making so many exceptions and omissions to their own Cloud saving coverage that one can't help but wander if Nintendo even wanted to pursue these ventures in the first place. Heck, even in my 'Pokemon Sword' copy there's no cloud saving; that's literally a collect-athon title Nintendo, why won't you let me preserve that data?
Secondly, this limits the extent to which the title can be shared due to a checking system that Nintendo borrowed from their last 'Animal Crossing' title; (which was for the 3DS handheld) called first resident. As I've heard it explained; Animal Crossing allows up to eight players to co-exist on the same island as inhabitants, but only the creator of that island (the 'first resident') is given the honour of making the real choices on that island. That is to say, all of the building upgrades, handed objectives from Tom Nook, choosing where villagers live, and basically all of the basic things that push the story forward, are all locked from other players who are only allowed to earn money and buy stuff. They aren't even allowed to pick where they live on their island, as the main player has to do that for them. It takes a lot of the fun out of sharing the island life with a partner and pales in comparison the original Animal Crossing that permitted all those things I just mentioned without any issues.
So what is the problem with the Animal Crossing devs? Why have they thrown such wild and odd restrictions forward in a situation where they were not required and actually feel quite detrimental to that beloved lazy Animal Crossing experience? Well I've thought through that and my first conclusion was that this is some anti-cheating measure that got a little overzealous. I thought that perhaps Nintendo worried about players creating multiple islands in order to maximise their daily resource acquisition. (Because that would be the end of the world, now wouldn't it?) But then I realised that players would need a second Switch in order to move those resources into their main title anyway, so the 'one save per switch rule' would be redundant. Not that my explanation would have justified such a weirdly archaic design flaw, but it would have at least made some sort of perverse sense.
Instead I believe the real reason might have come from the perception of developers who worked on this title as though it were a another handheld entry, and thus decreed that it should be privy to the same stupid rule set that their last handheld was. I hinted before about how Nintendo have struggled with the perception of the Switch as "Just another handheld", when they have put their full force behind it being their main console for many years now. This was to the point where they halted the development of a Pokemon mid-gen title in order to make Gamefreak start completely fresh with a new title that took advantage of a lot that the Switch had to offer. In my mind, I believe that the development cycle for 'New Horizons' must have begun not long after the last game, 'New Leaf', had dropped; and Nintendo had no reason to believe that they had to significantly shake up the formula. This train of thought likely persisted even as the Switch began seeing significant success and it became clear that this console was being treated as a fully fledged home console, but development was too far along to update these basic systems.
Yeah, that's a pretty flimsy excuse, but it's all I've got; because 'New Horizions' feels like a title that gets so much right aside from some of the most basic elements of a video game. In terms of content, scope and variety, I hear that 'New Horizons' is one of the best Animal Crossing games to date; but what good is any of that when you so tragically misjudge your core target audience? These sorts of games are often beloved social experiences that bring together groups of friends and families, so why wouldn't they be the sort of people that 'New Horizions' is laser focused to cater towards? Or is this particular branch of Nintendo so out-of-touch with the market that the don't know people don't carry three Switches in every household like they would a DS? (Even then, the 'first resident' thing is still stupid.)
Ultimately, these seems like one of those blunders that reinforces the long-held stereotype that Nintendo represents the out-of-touch folks who find themselves incapable of keeping up with the demands of their market. (Even though, as I stated, the original game was more accessible to group play.) Nintendo have this stellar reputation for making consistently high quality first party products and ensuring that their name mostly goes on only the best of the best, but they always seem to be behind the curve of everyone else in terms of technology or policy and it's starting to get ridiculous now. There's no longer any need for Nintendo to be dragging behind freakin' Google Stadia, (They offer Cloud saves, at least) so why are we here, Nintendo? Alas, it's just one of the many mysteries of the world that I imagine shan't be unravelled till our last twilight. (And even then the answer will probably be "Oh! We didn't even think about that...")
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