With the Nintendo Switch 2 update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I can finally return to the island I created during the pandemic: New Jersey. Was the title a stupid idea? Yes. Was every decision I made during the early days of the pandemic a stupid idea? Yes too! Back then, I was so bored that I staged a fight between various spice bottles, so naming a fake town after a Kevin Smith state didn't seem so far off the beaten path. Either way, we're back to digging up priceless fossils and selling them on the black market!
But there is one problem with returning to this island after five years. Not giant cockroaches in my house. I grew up in Florida. This is built into the agreement. No weeds everywhere. Collecting them makes me feel like I've accomplished something in my life, and yet I've accomplished less in my life than I have in the last ten years.
What really gets me—something I've forgotten from other Animal Crossing games—is that every single person on my island knows I've been gone. When I saw them again, many people had a variation of the same response: “Wow! You've been gone four years and ten months!” Fortunately, my town looks the same as before, as I assume my disappearance sent the town into a state of shock.
They left my bedroom looking exactly like when I left, crying emoji, praying emoji, crying emoji. That said, I'm pretty curious what the other animals/people/fictional characters on my island thought was going on while I was gone for five years. And I have a few theories:
I was dead
This is the most obvious. We live on an island surrounded by the ocean. Even worse, half of how I make money is going to the deepest parts of the water, diving and fighting to catch octopus swimming as fast as I can. They knew I drowned while fishing. Or maybe a tree fell on my head and Tom Nook didn't need the attention of the cops for some work he was doing under the table.
An animal once gave me a gift for another animal and I opened it anyway and stole the contents. I would kill someone for that. Maybe they murdered me. I could see suspicion running around the island, everyone blaming everyone else—until my triumphant return, that is!
I had a secret family on another island
Fun fact: my grandfather did the whole 'go get a pack of cigarettes' thing when my mom was ten. And yes, he never came back. So maybe the animals on the island saw the darkness in me. God knows I'm hurt! God knows I have problems! I spent a lot of time around these people, so maybe when I started visiting the island less, they started making assumptions.
Highguard failing shouldn't matter that much
Highguard has become the main theme of the game's art, instead of just a generic shooter that isn't as good as Apex Legends.
Where else would I go if I'm not living in a house that I can decorate like an underwater paradise or an Egyptian tomb? Meeting other animals that I like more on other islands. But that wasn't true either. And I hope to mend the relations with the animals that assumed it.
Witness Protection Program
The whole town lives in fear of Tom Nook. We all know that. 68,000 bells for a guitar? 1,800,000 bells for a slightly larger storage unit? It's all graft, all the way down. Tom Nook fills his pockets with jingle bells that I had to pull from the tree myself. Why doesn't he have a home on the island? where is he going
Since I was the only person on the island who had ever flown anywhere, they might have thought I hacked Nook from the cops and was hiding before I got a freshly made stone ax in the back of my head. That would make sense since Nook seems to have kept his head down while I was gone. But I'm here and there's no judgment, no matter how much the raccoon threatens me.
I joined a cult
I saw animals that thought I had joined a cult and got kicked out. Call it a Cult of the Lamb situation. And hey, I had a pentagram designed in the middle of my island for a while, so maybe they accidentally took some bad information from that. And because of my real life schedule, I tended to do most of my game fishing and yard work at night. And to paraphrase the Severans, the idea of a night watchman is a bit suspect.
Planting flowers at midnight has an entirely dark ritualistic mass quality. Or maybe they thought I'd joined some weird sex cult that ended in a mass casualty. That would explain why no one entered my house: They thought it was cursed. The cautious way the animals talk to me and all the gifts since my absence makes me think they believe I harbor a dark power. Which, as far as deleting the entire game, I do.
I got bored and moved on with my life in the real world
The scariest idea of all is that everyone in Animal Crossing understands that I'm just a human being pretending to be a human being, pretending to be friends with animals, so they give me new t-shirts. They know they're about as real as most of the characters in Expedition 33. They knew I'd eventually get tired of digging up sacks of gold and shaking trees for fruit. He feels the painful gaps between awakenings.
The moment the system shuts down is equivalent to death for them. Every time I press the select button, they know that everything they love and cherish will disappear and be sent into oblivion. Maybe for the next five years. Maybe forever. Frozen in time. Trapped. Ones and zeros that felt love, need and desire. Begging the little boy-shaped abomination not to send them to a cornfield forever like in It's A Good Life.
This is actually the one. I don't like it. It's scary, but this is the real reason. But at least that means this scene will take place at the next town celebration. KK Slider points at me and says, “You monster, you. You dirty little monster. You murderer. You're thinking of me. Go on, Drucker. You're thinking bad thoughts about me. And maybe some animal in this town square, some animal with guts, someone who's sick enough to live in a place like this and is willing to risk the end and one day something heavy sneaks up behind you and sneaks up behind you.”
In response, I point and say, “You're a bad person. You're a very bad person!”. And then I shut down the system and everything goes off.
- Released
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March 20, 2020
- ESRB
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All / Comic book mischief, mild fantasy violence, user interaction, in-game purchases
- Developers
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Nintendo EPD
- Publishers
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Nintendo
- Engine
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Havoc
- Multiplayer
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Online multiplayer, local multiplayer
- Cross-platform play
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no
