Animal Crossing: New Horizons is celebrating its 5-year anniversary today, March 20, 2025. Below, we reexamine how its unprecedented flexibility may have made the series less engaging by presenting fewer problems to solve.

In the original Animal Crossing, you are an outsider: A human living in a town populated with creatures and critters, where time keeps passing even when you turn the game off. There is a sense of distance between you and the town’s various inhabitants. They lived here before you. They’ll get on just fine without you, even if they might resent you for not dropping by and picking some weeds. These friction-filled touches give these games a unique texture, even in the now-crowded “cozy” genre. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released a whole five years ago in 2020, is the franchise’s most popular game by orders of magnitude, selling 43 million copies as of November 2023. Its coincidental release at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic made the game a cultural and critical powerhouse. But years later, it’s hard not to characterize New Horizons as a disappointment. Its island paradise setting is customizable and accommodating but it lacks the friction that made Animal Crossing a classic in the first place.

In part, this is the result of a difference in theming. Unlike every game prior to it, New Horizons positions the player as a settler on an uncharted island. To start, you are the island’s resident representative, chosen to be the village’s primary decision maker. You build out the town and pick more of its populace as you go. With every new building, you choose its location on the island. You can freely place furniture items out in the world (more on this later). With these systems, you can structure the town to maximize efficiency. Eventually, you gain terraforming tools to mold the island’s layout completely to your whims.

In prior games, the town could change, but it took a lot of time. You could only build another bridge in the original Animal Crossing once your town reached the maximum number of residents. If your town’s randomly generated layout was tricky to navigate, you would have to wait a while for it to get easier. You couldn’t just buy a bridge and plop it down where you please. This waiting made Animal Crossing feel a little more like building a life, however miniature and exaggerated.

To be fair, it takes lots of days for all of New Horizons’ features to show themselves. Since you start without most buildings, you have to invest plenty of time and money to make your town feel complete. But New Horizons introduces each of its features in a steady drip, with announcements and clear goals. The NookPhone turns the game’s free-flowing tasks into a pre-made checklist. In the original Animal Crossing, I first heard that Nook would upgrade his shop if I spent enough money there in conversation with another villager. The progression is slow and not out in the open. It will not show itself to you without input.

New Horizons’ predecessor, New Leaf, added features that anticipated its sequel, as the player character becomes the town’s mayor upon arrival. Thematically, the mayorship is an accident and feels a little like an imposition, rather than a granting of power. Similarly, projects like bridges and new shops require money and time. The village can change far more drastically than prior games, but it is still a place that existed before you arrived and there are limits in how much you can change it.

This extends to your relationship with Animal Crossing’s titular NPCs. The animals in the original game can be jerks. They’ll make fun of your clothing and your home decor, get annoyed if you promise to complete a job and then don’t, and speak frankly about their lack of confidence in you. In short, the inhabitants of Animal Crossing’s towns are not invested in you by default. You have to prove yourself to them before they will express affection and care. This is far from a complex relationship model, but it does have an arc to it. But importantly, that arc lacks many of the regular video game signifiers. There is no way to assess your relationship to any villager, except by how they talk to you. Under the hood, Animal Crossing is crunching numbers just like any other video game. But on the surface, there is just the fuzzy interactions of neighbors.

The emotional arc of New Horizons feels different, because you are the community to start. Nothing existed before you arrived and thereby there are no pre-existing social structures to acclimate to. Tom Nook is still an economic overlord, but here he feels more like a tech mogul than a local business owner. In the games prior to New Leaf, villagers will move out without player input. But New Horizons’ network of Amiibo cards enables you to craft the exact population you want; you can even insist someone stay if they tell you they want to leave. Little is left out of your hands.

The Animal Crossing games, especially the original incarnations but up to New Leaf, emphasize daily tasks. You play these games in short spurts–sometimes more, sometimes less. Once you’ve done a few chores and talked to all your friends, there is not much left to do. Come back tomorrow. New Horizons maintains a lot of that structure. However, the ability to completely uproot and reshape the island means that it’s hard to run out of things to do on any given day, at least once the game’s engine is fully revved up. In its original incarnation, Animal Crossing was a game that respected your time, even that valued brevity. New Horizons aspires to be like a part-time job

With New Horizons’ kaleidoscopic success, it is hard to imagine that any future sequel will not take a similar tack. Yet, I am hoping against hope that Nintendo takes the franchise back to its more intimate roots. I appreciate many of the quality-of-life changes that New Horizons brings and value especially its robust character creator. I hope those things slide back into a game that dares to be smaller and knows that the only way to build a life is the friction of living with others. It turns out that it is lonely to be the only one making the rules.