Old vs. New: Animal Crossing

[cycnoches]

At the beginning of this year, I started to replay one of my favorite childhood DS games, Animal Crossing Wild World. It was a game that I had missed for a while, and thought back on often during both my New Leaf and New Horizons days. I greatly missed the days I could wander around my town looking for acorns in the fall, be bullied by the horrible giraffe woman who'd come to my town and make fun of my fashion sense, and I even missed my brief stint as a delivery man for Tom Nook himself. Most of all, without a doubt, I missed the ability to wander into Celeste's tiny area of the museum, and create my own constellations.This was by far my favorite part of the game, and I still look at the screenshot at the top with a sense of great wonder and delight, relishing in the rough gradient of the sky and the twinkling, pixelated stars.

When I began to replay Wild World, I really did expect to enjoy it for much longer than I did. I made some constellations, a few snowmen since it had been early in the year at the time, paid off a few loans, and eventually I realized that there really wasn't much to do in this game, is there? Sure, I could fish, or go catching bugs, but I found that unlike my usual self, I really just didn't feel like it. Surprisingly, the whole experience really made me miss my then-abandoned New Horizons island. This surprised me because for a long time, I had really convinced myself that New Horizons had been lacking that real, Animal Crossing feel, and that it was arguably a worse game than the previous entries.
In a lot of ways, I do understand where I was coming from. Obviously, the decision to not re-implement the constellation making features of Wild World is one I will never understand, and always resent. The bland, repetitive sayings of the islanders makes it easy to miss the days when you had to truly work for a villagers love, lest they start calling you mean names and planting pitfall seeds outside your door. The game itself, of course, feels sterilized compared to the older games, although that seems to be more of a statement on things in general now, and less so Animal Crossing specifically.

It's a very standard thing, isn't it, to complain about the new, and insist that the past was better. It's something every generation has gone through, and will continue to go through, for what I can only imagine will be until humans as we know them no longer exist, and maybe even long after that. One day, not too long from now, people will be expressing pity for the generations after them, claiming Skibidi Toilet was the absolute height of cinema, and everything has gone downhill since. It's practically human nature at this point, to hold an unwarranted amount of fondness for the world in our past, and an unwavering hatred for the world in our present.

After a few months of getting bored with Wild World, and beginning to miss my beloved villagers that I knew were waiting for me in New Horizons, I've recently started playing the new game once again. In my recent terraforming escapades, I've found that really, it isn't a bad game at all. Of course, I never really thought it was bad per say, having spent hundreds of hours playing the game throughout quarantine and after, but I've begun to notice that there were many aspects to it that I never fully appreciated as much as I should have. The biggest example I can think of would be the villagers. While yes, they're eternally doomed to be unrelentingly kind and happy, and are forced to recycle the same 5 phrases between themselves like a torturous game of hot potato, the game does seem to make up for this in it's own way. The villagers sit and eat underneath trees, they sing to themselves in the plaza, they follow bugs with magnifying glasses and they fish together by the lakes! While talking to them may not always be the most fruitful of ventures, I'd consider it wrong to say that they feel without personality, even though that is exactly what I would have said just a few years ago.

New Horizons was never going to be Wild World, it never could've been, and if it had, I wouldn't have enjoyed it. Of course, like everything, there are things I would change about it if I could. But the thing is, is that I can't. There are a lot of things I can't change. This isn't to say that all distrust of newer things is bad, far from it. I still own a flip phone because of my vehement hatred of smartphones, despite the multiple, daily inconveniences it provides me with. I still keep to unknown, unpopulated websites in place of social medias. Honestly, there isn't much I mean to say with this post at all haha. Really, I just wanted something to post so my account wouldn't be empty when I went to look at other people's profiles, and so I started to talk about what was on my mind, Animal Crossing :P If there is anything to take away from this, maybe it's that while a distaste for the present/future seems to be normal, sometimes it may be good for you to give things a second chance, maybe even a third. We all grow quite quickly, and seem to change our minds at the drop of a hat. Brains are like tongues I think, in that in some ways your tastes change as time goes on, and so even if there was something you disliked a few years ago, it may be right up your alley now.

Toodles, Tree :>