I’ve been an Animal Crossing fan since the GameCube days, renting it so often from Blockbuster that my parents eventually just bought the game to save on the rental fees. I was on a bus trip out of town when New Horizons was announced, using the Wi-Fi at a rest stop to watch the Nintendo Direct. I even wrote a featuredoing an apples to oranges comparison between New Leaf and New Horizonsto figure out which one I thought was best. To say I’ve crossed an animal or two in my day is an understatement.
While I’ve loved each game in their own ways,New Horizonscouldn’t have come at a better time. Somehow it feels like the spring of 2020 happened both yesterday and also in another lifetime, but I know I’m not the only one who got through the pandemic by relying on the colorful critter pals we met on our islands.
Home from work for months, I had almost nothingbuttime to ship off to a deserted island with Roald and Cheri, plop down a few tents near the beach, and curse at Zipper for puttingso many goddamn eggs around my islandwhen everyone was trying to get their starting resources.
Starting Over Is Hard When The End Takes So Much Work
It was on Isle Delfino (which did eventually get some Mario decorations!) that I spent most of my time in quarantine, sprinting around and exploring everything there was to see. My real-life friends visited from time to time, chatting with my villagers and sharing their native fruits in exchange for a few pears from my trees. I could terraform my island, move villager houses, and choose who to invite to move in if I had enough Nook Miles Tickets to go exploring – Isle Delfino was finite in space, sure, but its possibilities felt limitless.
I’ve always been a huge completionist when it comes to games, though, which feels like a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it’s made me uniquely good at writing game guides for a living – someone has to find all the stuff you look up in a resource guide, and luckily, digging in every corner of games is my bread and butter. On the other hand, sometimes I’ve dug so deep into these games that I can’t really see the surface anymore, and that’s where I am right now with New Horizons.
I would love to start from scratch on another profile, go back to roughing it for a few months, but with how far I am on my main game, I can’t justify letting it go. I was meticulous about collecting everything in that save – every piece of clothing in every color, every bit of furniture, as many villager portraits as I could for an odd stalker room in my house with the camera wallpaper and somecomputer monitors for island surveillance. I have all the collectibles from each of the holidays, and my island is terraformed into clean-cut neighborhoods with scenic spots making use of the bulk of myhybrid flower breeding rejects.
Sure, it’s just pixels, and I know it doesn’t actually mean much to real life outside the game’s world, but I love Isle Delfino as it is, and you can’t make a new island on your Switch without deleting the one you already have.
2020 was one of the weirdest times in the global collective’s lives, and hosting real-life friends on my island that I hadn’t seen in months was just as amusing to me as stopping my villagers for a chat. Kabuki ismy favorite villager, and he lives right next door to me with a bonsai garden between our yards, in which we share a table with a cake on it. And yes, I do sit down and take a photo anytime I see him there. It’s just how I wanted it, and I have everything there is to have – there’s nothing left for me to do there, and that’s part of why it’s so special to me.
Will Switch 2 Change The One Island Per Console Rule?
I’m not made of money, and even if I were, a second copy of the game on the same Switch loads up your main island, anyway. I even made a second profile on my console before the expansion for more in-home storage a few years ago, I had so much stuff in my possession! Unless I make peace with erasing a four-digit number of hours’ worth of progress and everything I had to show for it, I’m between a (carefully manicured and fully decorated) rock garden and a hard place.
Will the one island per console rule change when the Switch 2 launches later this year? Maybe, with the introduction of the digital ejection to move eShop games between systems, since that’s technically a completely different console, but part of me is hesitant to hope. I love Nintendo and I have since they were my introduction to video games as a kid in the late ‘90s, but it’d be naive to think there’s not a way for them to make some extra money in making that an option for us.
I guess only time will tell what happens when the Switch 2 drops, but I would love a chance to safely play the game from the start again without losing everything I have to show for having done it already. Until then, I guess I’ll just be here pacing around Isle Delfino for the next while, like a ghost lost in a beautifully decorated purgatory of my own creation.
