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MISHAWAKA – Yet another review of Animal Crossing is on the horizon, as that is all I have played in the intervening week of self-isolation.
Yes, I am still playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and still having a great deal of fun doing so. Keep your eye-rolling and condescending glares to yourself; every time the screen goes black, and I see those eyes reflected in the TV that are having way too much fun with a game that is ostensibly for kids, whatever self-respect I had left dies.
It’s not all existential crises in loading screens, though. Whenever I am contemplating a new addition to my island, like a bridge between the two halves of my island separated by a river, I look at the hundreds of thousands of bells it costs, and I ask myself, “Is fishing for an hour and a half so I can pay this off REALLY worth it?” That thought is then discarded as quick as all the college letters showing up in my mailbox that don’t include scholarships.
My fledgling town, Palaven, has recently had its Resident Services building upgraded; where a tent once was, now stands an actual Resident Services BUILDING. This is undoubtedly my most prized achievement thus far, as with the construction of this fine structure, comes Isabelle, the greatest Animal Crossing character of all time, who now runs the building alongside Tom Nook.
Isabelle takes care of issues concerning the residential affairs of the island, functioning, for all intents and purposes, as the Shawn Holtgren of the community, only, impossibly, more loveable. She’s there to help you change the island’s flag, theme, and/or residents. Though I changed the first two the second I had seen her move in, I have yet to see what happens when I request to remove a villager. This isn’t for lack of undesirable neighbors, but because I don’t want to have to make my way through the many menus it takes to remove them, especially when I can dump all the furniture I don’t want and can’t sell onto them.
Thanks to the help of Isabelle, Tom Nook is more than willing to spend his newfound free time helping you with construction projects around the island, so long as you’ve the cash to make it happen. Say you want to build a bridge, as I mentioned earlier. The cheapest option, a log bridge, is four logs of wood spread across a river no more than five feet wide, the original version of which Tom Nook has you build on your own. If you want to install that bridge now, it’ll run you well over sixty-thousand bells, which takes about twenty minutes to accumulate, as opposed to the previous building cost of a few planks of wood you can find in five minutes.
I will now be in the process of flying to all my friends’ islands to steal all of their fruit, as that is one of the fastest ways to make money in this game, to pay for the numerous construction projects that my island will soon be undertaking. It’s either that and all the dodging of fruit police that comes with it, or risk life and limb, or a bruised ego, whichever comes first, to catch a tarantula and sell it for eight-thousand bells. I’ll take my chances with the fruity five-oh, personally.
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