[AC Improvement / Suggestion Thread] How to contact the AC development team in Japan?

[MeetThyReaper]

Hi gang,

I'm curious if any of the Nintendo of Japan development team actually comes to these forums. It's doubtful, but you never know! I came across an interesting page on reddit that detailed a list of suggestions that could improve future Animal Crossing games and I wanted to share it with the development team.

For those curious, here's the url: http://www.reddit.com/r/AnimalCrossing/comments/1itj5r/new_leaf_improvement_suggestions/

and the transcript:

Inspired by this thread. It's wishful thinking to expect Nintendo to actually patch some of this stuff, but I thought it would be cool if we could get an improvements/suggestions jam going. Here's some improvements I think/wish could be made:

Nintendo items: you should be able to trade in winning tickets for a random piece of regular furniture if you want. I have like 4 Super Stars and Midna's Masks.

Fruit AUTO-STACK, Bell bags automatically go into your "wallet" if it's not full

Balloon items: using different slingshots changes the possible content of the presents. Normal/other tool-- balloon furniture items; Silver-- random furniture; Gold-- random furniture plus random spotlight items

Villagers moving in: when a new villager arrives, Isabelle tells you to meet them at the train station. You walk around with the villager (plus Isabelle/Tom Nook?) and help them choose a plot for their house. No more destruction of your stuff. Villagers might express a preference for their house location (e.g. near stores, near ponds, near the beach) to make it feel less like you're railroading them.
Beautiful town ordinance should make grass only deteriorate if you run/Grass should just straight up not deteriorate unless you run. I never run in my town and it's going to look like Fallout 3 by winter.

More ordinances: maybe a pair of ordinances that remove the bottom 10% most common fish/bugs, but penalize you by removing the top 10% most rare bugs/fish. Might be handy if you're gunning for a certain rare fish/bug and are tired of sea bass and horned dynastids. Maybe a northern/southern town ordinance that lets you plant pine trees in the south of your town/plant palm trees in the south of your town (not just the beach). Maybe an ordinance that gives you southern hemisphere weather (!) (pretty complicated).

Multiple ordinances active: at a certain level of town development, you should be able to activate more than one ordinance at a time.

More weather + effects: One thing I miss from WW was that sometimes it would be foggy/misty really early in the morning. I'd like to see more types of weather like fog, wind, rushing clouds, etc. and more environmental/villager effects due to weather-- I'd like to see flowers/trees dripping water in the rain and the water on the beach getting more rough. When it's thunderstorming out, I'd like to see my villagers all head indoors and lights come on. Only I am (or at least not ALL of my villagers are) crazy enough to walk around in a lightning storm carrying a pointed metal object above my head.

More villagers out, fewer in strange places on Main Street where I can't always find them. I think this was limited in WW because too many characters onscreen made the game lag, but the hardware must have improved by now.

Let the megaphone work in multiplayer.

Wearing swimming items (e.g. snorkel mask, goggles, add a flippers item) increases your speed and time underwater when diving.

Activate a placement "advanced mode": Use the touch screen and a grid format to place new buildings, public works, etc. and to place furniture in your house. Currently the trial and error mode is such a timewaster.
(Probably an idea for the next game) Different biome towns: be able to pick different biomes/climates for your town, like a more northern colder town, southern warmer town, levels of dryness/wetness, etc.

Mayor-created holidays: the villagers remark that you should make up holidays when there isn't an in-game one coming up. This is just empty conversation, but why not for real? It would have to be from a template: you could pick a date and time and then pick the type of celebration (fireworks, lights, etc.), pick an item for Isabelle to hand out (ice cream, tweeter, balloon, etc.), pick a special visitor to invite who might also give out an item etc.

What are your suggestions?

That's a really great list! I actually want to add my own input:

Add gloves! I want to look like Jack (Azzie made some really awesome designs for his robe, but my hands don't match the costume and never will! XD)

Introduce some racial diversity for character choices? It would certainly be nice to be able to choose and customize your character a little more. I'm Caucasian, but it would be nice to have some skin color choices!


Folks can feel free to add their own ideas in reply.


Of course, the other reason I am posting is because I'd really like to contact the Animal Crossing Development Team in Japan and SHARE these ideas with them! It would be mighty nice if these discussions actually made a difference in the shape of games to come.

I tried doing some research and I did find some names:

Aya Kyogoku, veteran of the Animal Crossing series. Credited in 4 games. Director of New Leaf

Isao Moro, developer

Koji Takahashi, graphic artist, developer

Sadly, I cannot locate any e-mails or means of contacting any of them. If anybody knows how we can share suggestions with the actual dev. team, please let me know!

Thanks gang!

Sincerely,

MTR

 

[Feraligator]

Wow, that is a great list. Nintendo almost never take ideas into account though, but it's worth a try.
I wish we could visit dream towns with friends. Just imagine exploring a horror town for the first time with friends?

 

[MeetThyReaper]

Actually, I have some more ideas:

Holiday public works projects. So Halloween is coming soon? How about building a graveyard or a pumpkin patch! Christmas rolling around the corner? Ice skating rink or, perhaps, a GIANT Christmas tree! I'd also like to see things like a Ferris Wheel, the Cabazon Dinosaurs, and GIANT letter signs to spell out your town name like the Hollywood Hills sign.


The Cabazon Dinosaurs! I'd love to build these in my town! Some folks may recognize them from Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

Learnable Joke Book / Emote inventory items from fortune cookies, holidays, etc. So we can look like Mario or Link, but why can't we get some emotes to perform an action like them? Like we could get something like a TM from poke'mon, where we can "use it" to learn the ability.

Purely for aesthetics, but how cool would it be to do this!

Special exterior house renovation items! Okay...so we have carpets and walls for inside the house, right? How about SPECIAL items (not from Tom Nook) that you can use to apply to your house. Winter is rolling around: let's put up holiday lights around the rim of our roofs! 7-11 promotional item: an item that make your house look like an actual 7-11!

These are just some other ideas.

What does everybody think?

-MTR

 

[MeetThyReaper]

I thought more folks would want to chime in on these. XD

 

[Gandalf]

I think they should add fruit hybridising so we can have peach bananas.

 

[Horus]

I just want some ****ing bananas.

 

[Justin]

You have some nice ideas, but you might want to lower your hopes of contacting the developers a little bit. I'd say the best hope you would have for that is through Club Nintendo survey remarks. I'm sure some of the information collected from those get passed down to them in some form, or they'd be rather pointless to have. You're not going to find a direct contact.

 

[Jake]

If they put everything in one game, what do they have left to put in future games? It was their first revamped game in a while, obviously they were going to get things wrong, Hopefully they'll fix up a few things in future games, though.

 

[DJStarstryker]

I do want to point out that even if you find a direct way to send them a message, you really need to write it in Japanese. Despite every Japanese person taking English as a mandatory thing in school, the English classes they have are really bad. And most Japanese people promptly forget a lot of their English after high school anyways. They won't understand much of your letter/email/whatever if it's in English.

I'm an American that lives in Japan. For people who live in my area, I only know 1 Japanese guy who's almost 100% fluent in English. All other Japanese people that I know speak little to no English. The Japanese people who translated Animal Crossing live in the US and work for Nintendo of America. That's why they're fluent in both languages.