Animal Crossing is a very relaxing series that really only demands from the player what the player wants to put into it. While Wild World expanded the scope of the series with things like new characters and online play, City Folk’s attempt to add the fabled “City” to the series was received a gigantic sigh from its’ audience. Then along came New Leaf which added new items, a new mayoral system and changed how older mechanics worked, specifically special visitors and how certain items are collected. However, the world of Animal Crossing is still not ideal, with many problems old and new plaguing it that need to be addressed for the series to improve, as well as desires from myself that I’d consider a major step forward for the series.
Fixes
Online Play
- Opening/Visiting Towns
Ever since online play was implemented into Wild World, players have had to suffer through the arduous task of having to open their gates, be notified that someone was coming over to visit, the game saving, watching a slow animation of players passing through the gate and then finally regaining control. This process repeats every time a player enters or leaves a town. While New Leaf allowed hosts to end a multiplayer session, having players leave en mass, there’s still a lot left to be desired about the series’ online functionality. There needs to be an option to allow players to start games with their gates open so players can come and go as they please. Saving every time someone enters/leaves a town needs to stop as well. The game should save in the background, and not impede the gameplay of people already in town, as how it is currently dissuades people from playing online.
- Safety from Trolls/Thieves
Another issue that dissuades players from playing online is trolls and thieves. When a player enters your town, they can do anything you can do in your town, including running over flowers, chopping down trees, and taking items that lay freely on the ground. While it’s recommended that you don’t allow these people into your town, you never really know who you can trust or when accidents may happen. To remedy this, visiting players need to be restricted from destroying flowers, chopping down trees and picking up items unless they are in a designated area of some kind. While it may “restrict” some of the fun players can have visiting peoples’ towns, it still allows people to get items from different towns as well as shop, talk to villagers, catch bugs, fish and visit the island. Ultimately, this doesn’t really take away anything from anyone.
Inventory Management
- Tools
Tools are a staple to the Animal Crossing series, as well as to any player’s inventory screen, which is exactly the problem. Tools give you the ability to cut down trees, uproot fossils and gyroids, catch fish and bugs and shoot things out of the air. In New Leaf you are only allotted 16 item slots, and with new tool additions such as the Wet Suit and Megaphone to go along with the Shovel, Net, Fishing Rod, Axe and others, your inventory becomes limited very quickly. As much as 10 inventory slots can be taken up by unique tools overall. Additionally, your Tools aren’t granted protection like some items, which means they can be sold accidentally to Re-Tail and lost forever, which is painful if you accidentally sold a Gold or Silver item. So what’s the solution here? Some items in New Leaf are granted what I call “protection,” meaning that they can’t be sold, traded or let go of, like the Bingo card during the winter months. My suggestion here is that Tools and items like the Bingo card be allotted their own inventory screen so they don’t take up regular inventory space and can’t be lost by accident. They’re staple items, and should be treated differently from regular inventory items.
- Money/Fruit Stacking
In previous entries, Animal Crossing allowed you to stack money that you accumulated over 99,999 bells in your inventory space up to 99,000 bells per space. New Leaf took this a step further by allowing you to stack fruit so you could carry more. The major missing component here is that these do not stack automatically has to be done so manually, which is a chore and cumbersome to do every time. This needs to be addressed going forward by automatically stacking fruit up to 9 pieces in one slot as well as bells. This would immensely help minimize item management.
Public Works Projects
- Police Station
There are two types of PWP’s. Ones that are received by performing a set of various in-game objectives and those received at random. The ones received from objectives are special ones, such as the Dream Suite, the Reset Center and the second floor of the museum. Like these, the Police Station share the same restriction that they can’t be demolished once built. However, this one can only be received as a random request from a villager. The question is why? It’s the bane of many New Leaf players that haven’t received the request to build this, despite having played for months. It needs to be unlocked in a special way like the Museum’s second floor, the Café, and the Reset Center instead of being rewarded at random.
- Katrina’s Shop
Katrina’s Shop is earned by visiting Katrina’s Tent in the town plaza of your own town 20 times you’re your playable residents. Considering that Special Visitors in New Leaf are not on a strict schedule like in previous games, this is a major pain. It can be months between Katrina visits in your town, delaying how often you can get psychic readings from her. The fastest way for you to get her shop is to visit Katrina 5 times with 4 different playable villagers and the last visit being with your Mayor. The number of required readings needs to be reduced, Katrina needs to be put on a set schedule (like other visitors) or the chances of her visiting goes up once you’ve gotten everything from all special visitors that come on a schedule (Redd, Gracie, Gulliver, etc.)
- Dream Suite
The Dream Suite is unlocked by visiting Isabelle after a few days of playing the game where you find her asleep at her post. This place allows you to visit copies of player’s towns at the exact moment of them being uploaded and updated with the exception of Main Street, in-town shops which are closed, and villagers which still roam freely around town and can interact with them. While the concept of the Dream Suite is nice, and being able to see a large portion of villagers you may have never seen before, the one problem here is the process. Your dream town, which if damaged won’t affect your regular town, is assigned a dream code. Now if you don’t update every couple of days your code can change. But the question is why? The old code still remains, and can still be accessed by players, but can never be updated, nor are they deleted like the game says. This needs to be fixed. When your town is assigned a Dream Code, it needs to stick. It shouldn’t be change, regardless of how often you update your Dream Town. It’s a hassle to change dream codes, it causes confusion for people who want to visit the same town multiple times and it follows the same stigma of friend codes, which are simply unintuitive.
Grass Wear/Animal Tracks
Animal Crossing City Folk added a new mechanic to the series that quickly became a bane to most players, known as Grass Wear or Animal Tracks. This mechanic slowly wore down grass so dirt paths were now present between common paths players and villagers took in each town. In City Folk, the mechanic worked too quickly, making it very easy for towns to become a barren wasteland where no grass was in sight. While New Leaf improved greatly on this mechanic, it’s still nearly impossible to re-grow grass, even in matters where the best player knowledge comes into play. There’s no specific in-game trick, tool or device to allow players to grow or maintain grass levels. The fix here is simple: Get rid of the mechanic entirely or give players a tool to allow them to maintain grass levels. One thing is for certain though, grass wear is not a mechanic many players enjoy and needs fixed.
Tournaments
Every few weeks or so on a Saturday, your town plays host to a Fishing or Bug-Catching Tournament. The rules are just like you think, with limitations some of the time on what can be entered. The big problem here is that there isn’t a scoreboard available for the Tournament. You can only receive your current standing when you talk to the Coordinator, and he’ll vaguely tell if you’re first, second or third. There needs to be some kind of visible scoreboard available at all times to give you an indication of where you stand against other competitors throughout the day.
Wants
Expanded Able Sisters
The Able Sisters throughout the history of Animal Crossing has been the primary place where you purchase clothes. While the series has secondary ways to acquire clothes and City Folk introduced Gracie’s shop in the City, New Leaf brought a lot more purchasable clothes in all forms, in addition to new forms of clothing such as pants, socks and shoes. While Kicks is a place to get Socks and Shoes as well as accessories from Labelle, you’re still severely limited to the amount of shirts/bottoms you can normally obtain from the main Able Sisters shop. While Nookling Junction has been expanded many times, the Able Sisters haven’t. I think it’s a good time for this to happen, allowing you to buy even more Shirts, Dresses and Bottoms than you can normally.
Bigger Town
Animal Crossing has over 300 unique villagers. In New Leaf, at any one time, you can only have 11 (10 villagers and 1 camper) villagers in your town. Players of the series can play day-in, day-out for months and not see a single new character if they don’t play with others or visit other peoples’ towns via the internet in some way. Animal Crossing needs to expand by allowing players to have more villagers, perhaps in the form of districts where more villagers could make residence in each one. Doing so would allow people to meet more villagers and have an expanded view of what the series has to offer to fight off repetition.
Item Bank
Animal Crossing has always been notorious for item collection. It’s also been notorious for having a low amount of inventory space in each game. With the increase of items in New Leaf, as well as ones that can’t be re-purchased, item space became even more premium. One of Nintendo’s recent releases is Pokemon Bank, which allows players to transfer and keep Pokemon from older games and be able to transport them for use in newer games. The concept would be similar for Animal Crossing, but for items and clothes. It can take years for players to obtain a complete Catalog in a single Animal Crossing game let alone multiple versions. Why not allow loyal players to keep their item collection for years to come? It would definitely cut down on some of the monotony of daily window shopping and allow players to concentrate more on their town and villagers.
Statistics
New Leaf introduced the concept of Badges as proof of your accomplishments in-game. One thing that’s missing however is the simple understanding of how close you are to achieving certain goals for them. New Leaf allows you to see the number of people who’ve visited your town, but beyond that, there isn’t much. Luna should be able to tell you how many times you’ve dreamed, Leif should be able to tell you how many weeds you’ve picked, flowers you’ve planted, etc. etc. etc. It may not seem like much, but it will make those seemingly unobtainable goals seem much closer than you think they are, encouraging players to keep going.
Animal Crossing is a great series, and New Leaf is arguably the best entry in the series to date after offering a fresh entry into a series that was getting stale. In order to prevent it from getting stale in the future, these fixes need to occur, and I hope the things I want get added to the series in the future so I can continue coming back to my town for years to come.
