8 Things That Make No Sense In Animal Crossing Games
Animal Crossing has repeated questionable situations that gamers can’t help but notice in the agricultural simulation franchise.
Animal Crossing is a farm simulation game with a twist: gamers can gather Villagers to dwell in player Villages, with each Villager having unique personalities and the ability to communicate with one another. Between hurrying to gather crops and erecting building modifications, Villagers are now getting into mischief and even bickering with one another, making Animal Crossing a pretty unique experience among farm sim aficionados.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons provides fans with a fresh perspective on the Animal Crossing experience, complete with new Villagers and the opportunity to customise products and decor. Despite the fact that New Horizons has become everyone’s comfort game amid the COVID-19 pandemic, some observant fans may detect some inconsistencies in the franchise that just don’t make sense.
Only One Human In The World
Perhaps the fundamental appeal of the Animal Crossing series stems from the notion that the farm simulator is more than just players managing a farm they’ve inherited. Rather, the minigame-like element of interacting with Villagers with distinct appearances and personalities makes the game more enjoyable than users anticipate. With older Animal Crossing games offering stranger Villager oddities and dialogues, the franchise easily establishes itself as a player favourite.
However, one peculiarity of the series as a whole is the absence of other humans in the game other than the player characters. When they first begin the game, they appear to be the only human character for miles until they encounter other humans via multiplayer. While it’s always possible that huge communities of humans exist elsewhere, the depiction of players as the sole humans in the globe might rapidly become lonely.
The Fourth Wall Scare
Given how hard and time-consuming caring for a town can be in any Nintendo Animal Crossing game, reconstructing one’s island through resetting can become a crucial decision for the dedicated player. However, what’s even funnier about this situation is that the game keeps track of your choices. When players exit the game without saving or do a certain number of resets, a repairman-looking mole named Sonny Resetti appears.
Resetti almost always appears with a lecture on properly saving the game or taking care of one’s progress. Resetti will become frustrated with the player if the game is reset several times. While this detail makes Resetti’s appearance more charming, the rest of the game may become uneven as a result of this Fourth Wall-breaking trivia. After all, if Resetti lives on a player island, who else knows they’re in a game?
Birthdays, With No Age
One of the appeals of the Animal Crossing franchise, like other life sims, is that players can get close to their Villagers through talks and gifts. Players and Villagers are so similar that they both have birthdays, requiring players to research what kinds of things Villagers enjoy in order to serve as gifts. This is where something strange happens: while Villagers celebrate their birthdays year after year, they don’t appear to age.
While villager ageing isn’t necessarily a terrible thing for players because it means they’ll be stuck in their villages forever, it is a letdown for those who wish to roleplay in the game. Not to mention that this opens up a slew of story holes for characters like Tom Nook, who has Timmy and Tommy as youthful proteges. If humans don’t necessarily age in the game, Timmy and Tommy may never grow up.
To Dress Or Not To Dress
Almost all Villagers in Animal Crossing wear some form of clothing, whether it’s a shirt, a top and bottom, or even simple body-covering accessories like aprons. With players able to give them clothes to wear, it’s clear that clothing is an important aspect of a character’s creation. As a result, it’s extremely startling when some people appear in hardly or no clothes at all.
K.K. Slider, the guitarist dog that is well-known among Animal Crossing fans as the games’ resident celebrity vocalist, is a prime example of this. K.K. Slider performs his songs while wearing nothing but his guitar and his faithful chair. While K.K. Slider’s attire should be fine because he is an anthropomorphic dog, they are a blatant discrepancy when compared to his fellow Villagers.
Plants Follow But Also Break Nature’s Rules
One of the more endearing aspects of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing games is its devotion to some kind of natural order – plants grow and renew according to a calendar, and fruit-bearing trees yield fruits on specific days. Furthermore, many plants and fruits are only available in certain hemispheres, making multiplayer extremely important in games like New Horizons.
However, when it comes to the availability of some objects, the game does not always follow nature’s norms. Cherry and orange blooms, for example, bear fruit on a schedule if they are planted on the player’s island. They may be more difficult to obtain at first, but planting them provides players with a constant yield. The problem is that cherry and orange flowers cannot yield fruit in cold areas, which is a strange inconsistency for a game that tries to follow a fundamental sense of weather and temperature.
The Animal Versus Anthro Problem
When players have had enough Disney, they may wonder why Goofy the dog can talk but Pluto the dog remains Mickey’s pet. Such an incidence occurs throughout Animal Crossing games, as food items caught by players may correspond with certain of the game’s Villager species.
When fishing, for example, players can catch sea creatures such as frogs and octopi. Some Villagers, such as Puddles and Octavian, are modelled on frogs and octopi, respectively. Furthermore, one of the game’s products is a cooked turkey, which is unsettling given that the Thanksgiving mascot Franklin is also based on a bird. In certain rounds, Mayor Tortimer even intimated that he intended to devour Franklin for supper!
Conveniently Free Of Crime
One of the more striking aspects of Animal Crossing as a life simulator is its intriguing perspective on crime – in that it doesn’t exist. Given the oddball nature of most of the early games, it makes appropriate to include a criminal feature in which players who aren’t careful may have their stuff taken from them. This aspect, however, is mostly absent from the series, making it a breath of fresh air for players who simply want to relax.
While not necessarily a “inconsistency,” the lack of crime – and hence law enforcement – on the island does not appear to be consistent with Redd’s existence. Redd the fox stands in opposition to Tom Nook’s raccoon. Redd, who is also a seller, isn’t as “honest” as Tom Nook. In fact, in some games, Redd would sell fakes to players until they can detect the “real deal.” The fact that Redd is a con artist, combined with the reality that there is no law enforcement in Drive Mad game, can bode tragedy.
The Money Tree Occurrence
With a game franchise as consistent as Animal Crossing in its approach to biology, flora, fauna, and other gameplay features, the novelty of being able to plant a Money Tree is a somewhat inconsistent take on legend. To be sure, the Money Tree does not constantly produce Bells, therefore players cannot literally “farm” them. Regardless, the option of having a forest of Money Trees can undermine the player’s desired immersion.
Of course, given that this is a gaming franchise in which everyone but the player is an animal, the existence of a Money Tree could be excused. However, because the Money Tree is one of the few (if not the only) “unrealistic” plants in the game, including it in a player’s island can undermine the suspension of disbelief.
