For the purpose of this discussion, I think it's first and foremost important to define your terms. Cheating can have a variety of meanings depending largely on what the game is and how the element in question is used. For example, using unlimited ammo and invincibility in a game like GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 would be considered "cheating." In fact, they're literally listed as "Cheat Codes" in the game menu when you unlock the ability to use them in game. But as a result, in non-competitive play, you would be hard-pressed to find anybody who takes serious issue with it. But there are a number of known exploits in something like Pokémon that don't involve any kind of third-party trickery and are still widely considered, at the very least, dishonest. So in order to properly frame this argument, I'm going to offer a few different definitions of cheating, since I don't think one definition is going to cut it. The question, then, should be is time traveling in Animal Crossing...
1. ...using a method of play that is beyond the intention of the developers in order to gain rewards that others would have to work for?
In this regard, time traveling is definitely cheating. I'm aware that Nintendo has commented on this before, stating that they don't consider it to be, but I feel the framing of that statement was more to do with the freedom of players to play the game in their own way, rather than whether or not that it violates the integrity of the game. Otherwise, if Nintendo saw it as an intentional feature, I think they would find a more organic way to implement it into the game itself, rather than forcing you to fiddle with the console's back-end functions in order to accomplish it.
2. ...offering an unfair advantage in competitive play?
Animal Crossing is not a competitive game, so no.
3. ...having a tangible impact on the way other people experience the game?
This is where things get rather murky for me. Animal Crossing may not be a competitive game, but the difference between someone playing the game as intended and someone using time travel can be two completely different experiences. As a result, the latter could easily have an impact on the former when taking online functionality into account. Things that are not intended to be unveiled until a certain date are, for lack of a better word, spoiled for people who may have wished to see these events unfold throughout the course of a year instead of immediately.
I would argue that this is an inherent risk of connectivity, even in offline mode. In the GameCube days, this could happen if your friend simply had set the calendar on their console wrong, and I know many people who bought their console secondhand and never bothered to re-adjust the date and time, so it wasn't unheard of to just bare with (or even enjoy) events being out of season. And Animal Crossing isn't a narrative heavy game anyway, so I don't really feel like seeing the holiday events ahead of time would actually spoil anything. But I do empathize that there is a huge disconnect in terms of playstyle as a result. If one wants to play the game as intended--which includes the use of online play--they'll have to compete in that space with people who haven't, creating a noticeable impact on in-game economy and general understanding of the game by the wider community.
It creates a similar problem to Pokémon. I'm not unfamiliar with the amount of vitriol the fandom hurls towards players who use external applications to alter a Pokémon's stats in single player mode, but perhaps naively, I choose to believe the majority of people don't have a sincere moral dilemma about how people choose to experience the single player campaign of a game intended for children. Where things become problematic is in the global trade system, where hacked Pokémon are often traded as legitimate with-
A) no way for a layperson to immediately identify a hacked Pokémon from a real one.
B) no way for a layperson to immediately know that a hacked Pokémon is something they should even have to worry about receiving in the first place.
Pokémon, of course, is a different can of worms. Namely because it is a competitive game, so the consequences for using hacked Pokémon are far different than someone adjusting their clocks to manipulate in-game events in Animal Crossing. But my point is that--even for less harmful purposes--these differing playstyles are at odds with each other, and as of yet, there's not really been a comfortable solution to making it so that these discrepancies can remain more or less self-contained.
I've toyed with the idea that of having a voluntary marker that players can use to indicate whether they have used extra measures to achieve certain in-game feats and thus can be filtered out of search results for players who wish to opt out. The obvious problem with that, of course, is that not everyone's going to use it--whether because they simply didn't think to do so or because they're just outright dishonest people. But the bigger problem, in my opinion, is that in doing so, it creates a division within the game's community, which is not something I imagine the companies behind these properties would want to foster.
So to make a long story short, while time traveling in Animal Crossing may not have any competitive advantages, it does--in its own way-- have an impact on how others may play their own game.
The problem with the scope of this question is that cheating has a variety of meanings, each with different levels of impact. If anyone actually cares that I'm using cheats (that I emphasize, again, are unlockable in the actual game) to allow me to dual wield rocket launchers in GoldenEye because all I want to do is have fun blasting through levels and watching a series of loud, colorful explosions destroy everything in sight, or to use the infinite staircase glitch in Super Mario 64 because it's unbelievably entertaining to watch that game implode on itself because it was built on such a delicate framework, then... well, frankly, I don't give a toss. Those kinds of people are typically not arguing in good faith anyway.
And that, for the most part, is where I categorize time traveling in Animal Crossing, even if it does have an impact on online play however small. It's "cheating" but also I'm not sure why I should care. I personally don't time travel in Animal Crossing, not because it's dishonest or because it's cheating, but because I like the sensation of opening the game up and having something new to look forward to every day and to see the characters all celebrating Easter in their own adorable way on the same day as me. I also just like immersing myself in the characters having lives independent of my play schedule. To me, that makes the world of Animal Crossing a little more engaging and time travel would rob me of that.
But not everyone is like that. Some people don't have the time or patience for that sort of thing, and that's okay. But I feel like even that justification isn't really sufficient to explain why people might be drawn to playstyles that might be considered cheating anyway. One of my favorite things to do with games is to take a peek behind the curtain and see how the AI react to things far beyond what they're expecting, to see how difficult it is for them to adapt to something beyond its parameters, and simply to see how the game differs when you don't have the usual restrictions in place. It's just fun. And that's what games are designed to be at the end of the day.
In short, do I consider time traveling cheating? Yes. Do I think that's a bad thing? No. But nor do I consider it to be something that is completely self-contained or without external consequences.
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