It’s Time For Animal Crossing To Tell a Proper Story

Highlights

• A future Animal Crossing game could introduce a true narrative while still maintaining the cozy life simulation elements that fans love.
• By deepening the characters and incorporating a cohesive story, Animal Crossing could address one of the main critiques of New Horizons—the lack of interesting villager personalities.
• Drawing inspiration from other games in the genre, Animal Crossing could include more distinct narrative elements, such as in-game goals and objectives, or even incorporate RPG elements to refresh the gameplay.

The Animal Crossing series has always been about building a cozy life in a town filled with animal villagers, and as such, has lent itself to a style of gameplay that is very open-ended without a real plot to speak of. This design philosophy allowed Animal Crossing: New Horizons to offer players an unprecedented amount of creative freedom when it came to designing their perfect island life. However, a future Animal Crossing game could refine its scope and trade the open-ended gameplay of the series for one that focuses on a true narrative while maintaining the cozy life sim elements fans have come to love.

One of the main critiques of Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the lack of interesting villager personalities, which had been a mainstay of the franchise that fans had come to expect. The Animal Crossing series could overhaul the identities of villagers and deepen their characters by having them play a role in a more cohesive story told in a future title. With the wide cast of fan-favorite characters contained within the series, it’s surprising that Animal Crossing has never developed a game with a dedicated narrative.

RELATED: How Animal Crossing Villagers Could Benefit From a Beloved Pokemon Feature

How the Animal Crossing Series Could Incorporate a Story Mode

While the series may not want to stray too far from its core open-ended gameplay, there are a variety of ways a future Animal Crossing game could include a more distinct narrative. Other games have incorporated elements of different genres in a life sim game that tells a cohesive story while still giving players the freedom and creativity to build the kind of in-game life they want. Animal Crossing could look to these games as inspiration when designing a new entry that tells its own unique story using the series’ established world and characters.

Arguably, the two biggest games in the life sim genre, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Stardew Valley, share a lot of similarities. However, one area in which they differ is the way they present in-game goals and objectives, with Stardew Valley containing more narrative elements surrounding the rebuilding of Pelican Town’s Community Center versus expanding JojaMart’s presence in the town. While this is a relatively simple plot, it’s an effective way of giving players a path to follow when building their farms, and a future Animal Crossing game has all the tools necessary to make a narrative like this happen.

Animal Crossing Could Incorporate RPG Elements

Although Animal Crossing has always been billed as a peaceful series, the inclusion of characters like Villager and Isabelle in the Super Smash Bros. series shows that the franchise has the potential to be more violent. As such, a future Animal Crossing game could incorporate RPG elements similar to games like Harvestella and the Rune Factory series. While this style of gameplay could limit the creative freedom of Animal Crossing players, it might also serve to refresh the gameplay of the series by splitting in-game activities between the life sim elements and the RPG elements.

Players often use their creativity to design islands in Animal Crossing: New Horizons around a theme or story, but the characters and themes already present in the series warrant an original story told by the series itself. This type of game doesn’t necessarily have to be a mainline Animal Crossing title, since a game like Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer has shown that a spin-off game can lean into one aspect of the franchise and still be successful. However, with the greater Animal Crossing series in need of fresh new ideas to keep gameplay interesting, taking a page out of other entries in the genre and designing a cohesive narrative may be the way to go.