Animal Crossing is one of Nintendo-owned franchises that were usually well-praised by many players in this forum, more notably Animal Crossing (GCN) and Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Unfortunately, there are recurring flaws that really need their attention for the future games to improve on it.
Obstrusive interface
Yes, Animal Crossing should improve the interface. Most of the time, they do their job, but I feel that in some cases, they're potentially hindering. This can be especially aggravating if you need some concentration, such as playing tours on the Island on Animal Crossing: New Leaf. The timer and stats HUDs are too big and distracting, which can hide certain things from far away with the rolling log display. Even dialog boxes are still appearing ad infinitum, constantly breaking the flow and wasting your precious seconds. Why can't they relegate them to the lower screen, let alone rework the interface for these situations?
Unlike ACWW, most of the gameplay happens on the upper screen. We normally expect to be able to use the inventory without interrupting your character, but they skipped this easy opportunity. Until they fix it, it will be possible to miss some bug just because you didn't swapped tools fast enough.
The "rolling log" effect and and top-down perspective camera
If I was feeling a bit more mischievious, I could add a "t" next to "rolling". So, you just happen to miss the elusive tarantula as you were walking toward south. You claim that you didn't got enough time to react because it just appeared. Why is that happening? Well, because the camera is always fixed on a top-down perspective ? la Legend of Zelda, and your character is too close to the bottom of the screen. That gives you little to no reaction time whenever you walk down on any direction beside North. Chasing for certain bugs and fishes can be a nightmare when you often have to anticipate the area that is covered. Additionally, all buildings (including Public Works Projects) always had to face on south, and obstruct a part of the playground. Is it too much to ask for more control on camera? A first-person view would eliminate almost all of the problems specific to the top-down perspective. Or at least, let us turn the camera on every angle like ACNL did with the interiors.
Sure, the hide-and-seek minigames would be affected if top-down perspective aren't forced, but the developers could easily work around by having them to hide in different ways. For example, they can be hiding in a tree with subtle visual cues and you have to shake it to make a villager fall off.
Short pockets
The developers seem to be too stubborn to implement a better inventory system. In every other Animal Crossing game, you were strictly limited to 15, plus 10 from your letters. ACNL did improved it very slightly by only adding one more slot! That obviously doesn't solve that egregious recurring flaw in the franchise. More often than not, your pocket can be easily filled within 10+ minutes of gameplay, even if you use the letters to store more items. I always had to worry about dropping items off from my pockets countless of times, therefore wasting too much time than I should. Why in the world they had to artificially pad the game by implementing such an archaic inventory system?!
Speaking of the tools, they still take a valuable space off from your inventory. The developer could let the players automatically place them in separate slots specifically made for them. That could save us from a lot of problems while managing the inventory.
Too much of support NPC dialog
ACNL did cut some of the dialogs on certain characters, but there's still too much of dialog to wade through, constantly having us to mash the B button whenever they appeared. One could even end up buring their thumbs. The first times we are greeted, support NPC dialogs are a nice thing to have. They tend to wear their novelty once we begin doing the same things over and over again. Blathers still take too long to get your fossils to be appraised, and Lloid's way too mouthful for such simple purposes like borrowing tools.
Couldn't they replace repeated lengthy dialogs with streamlined menus whenever it is appropriate to do so? That would be a lot quickier and convenient.
So-So Loading time management
Since Animal Crossing: Wild World was released, load times are persisting on every iteration so far. They're at least bearable and reasonable, since they're not causing any trouble beside draining a very little bit of your patience. ACNL doesn't handle the loading screens as they should be. They aren't glitchy, it's about on how poorly placed are they. They actually waste you at least 5 seconds (or longer if there's a lag going on) every time you enter in a house, and that can be somewhat devastating when playing on certain Island Tours.
The way loading works on every iteration since ACWW is clunky ; it should load the required assets and things on-the-fly rather than load an entire area every time you enter/exit. Future Nintendo gaming consoles should be able to do that, especially considering that the franchise isn't known for mind-blowing graphics.
Questionable Online Assets
Each iteration improves the online functions that were already existing. However, there are certain assets that are so poorly done I can definitely say it's archaic.
First of all, every time a guest comes in your town, everyone in there is forced to watch the arrival of that guest and it lasts a long while. Considering it's just an exchange of a few kilobytes of data, this is unacceptable. Why can't we continue our activity while the guest is arriving? I've seen some games that handles it much faster and more seamlessly.
Then, there's the "An error has occurred." message appearing whenever someone's Internet decides to break out, beaming everybody back to their town with lost progess since their last save. But, what kind of error is it? Is Nintendo afraid of revealing who actually disconnected first? Nobody will be offended if it precisely tell exactly what happened. There's no reason for a error message to be this vague, which isn't really helping to those who are resolving the problem. This also applies to Club Tortimer in ACNL, which is very annoying whenever someone disconnects himself on purpose. Let us continue playing online even if some fool decides to disconnect!
Also, why isn't the progress saved after being disconnected? If they left that to let players protect their town to a certain extent, they could've bothered including customizable visitor rules (e.g. no axes, no shovel, inability to pick items, etc.).
Whew... The Animal Crossing staff still got a lot of improvements to be achieved. Seriously, Animal Crossing could be easily the best game, as long as they decide to fix those persistently recurring flaws. I'm surprised that many of you never told (or weren't aware of them in first place) about most of the franchise's glaring flaws.
I'll leave the first post as it is, just to generate some discussion down the road. This apply to all iterations of Animal Crossing since Wild World, even though I tend to talk a lot about New Leaf.
Obstrusive interface
Yes, Animal Crossing should improve the interface. Most of the time, they do their job, but I feel that in some cases, they're potentially hindering. This can be especially aggravating if you need some concentration, such as playing tours on the Island on Animal Crossing: New Leaf. The timer and stats HUDs are too big and distracting, which can hide certain things from far away with the rolling log display. Even dialog boxes are still appearing ad infinitum, constantly breaking the flow and wasting your precious seconds. Why can't they relegate them to the lower screen, let alone rework the interface for these situations?
Unlike ACWW, most of the gameplay happens on the upper screen. We normally expect to be able to use the inventory without interrupting your character, but they skipped this easy opportunity. Until they fix it, it will be possible to miss some bug just because you didn't swapped tools fast enough.
The "rolling log" effect and and top-down perspective camera
If I was feeling a bit more mischievious, I could add a "t" next to "rolling". So, you just happen to miss the elusive tarantula as you were walking toward south. You claim that you didn't got enough time to react because it just appeared. Why is that happening? Well, because the camera is always fixed on a top-down perspective ? la Legend of Zelda, and your character is too close to the bottom of the screen. That gives you little to no reaction time whenever you walk down on any direction beside North. Chasing for certain bugs and fishes can be a nightmare when you often have to anticipate the area that is covered. Additionally, all buildings (including Public Works Projects) always had to face on south, and obstruct a part of the playground. Is it too much to ask for more control on camera? A first-person view would eliminate almost all of the problems specific to the top-down perspective. Or at least, let us turn the camera on every angle like ACNL did with the interiors.
Sure, the hide-and-seek minigames would be affected if top-down perspective aren't forced, but the developers could easily work around by having them to hide in different ways. For example, they can be hiding in a tree with subtle visual cues and you have to shake it to make a villager fall off.
Short pockets
The developers seem to be too stubborn to implement a better inventory system. In every other Animal Crossing game, you were strictly limited to 15, plus 10 from your letters. ACNL did improved it very slightly by only adding one more slot! That obviously doesn't solve that egregious recurring flaw in the franchise. More often than not, your pocket can be easily filled within 10+ minutes of gameplay, even if you use the letters to store more items. I always had to worry about dropping items off from my pockets countless of times, therefore wasting too much time than I should. Why in the world they had to artificially pad the game by implementing such an archaic inventory system?!
Speaking of the tools, they still take a valuable space off from your inventory. The developer could let the players automatically place them in separate slots specifically made for them. That could save us from a lot of problems while managing the inventory.
Too much of support NPC dialog
ACNL did cut some of the dialogs on certain characters, but there's still too much of dialog to wade through, constantly having us to mash the B button whenever they appeared. One could even end up buring their thumbs. The first times we are greeted, support NPC dialogs are a nice thing to have. They tend to wear their novelty once we begin doing the same things over and over again. Blathers still take too long to get your fossils to be appraised, and Lloid's way too mouthful for such simple purposes like borrowing tools.
Couldn't they replace repeated lengthy dialogs with streamlined menus whenever it is appropriate to do so? That would be a lot quickier and convenient.
So-So Loading time management
Since Animal Crossing: Wild World was released, load times are persisting on every iteration so far. They're at least bearable and reasonable, since they're not causing any trouble beside draining a very little bit of your patience. ACNL doesn't handle the loading screens as they should be. They aren't glitchy, it's about on how poorly placed are they. They actually waste you at least 5 seconds (or longer if there's a lag going on) every time you enter in a house, and that can be somewhat devastating when playing on certain Island Tours.
The way loading works on every iteration since ACWW is clunky ; it should load the required assets and things on-the-fly rather than load an entire area every time you enter/exit. Future Nintendo gaming consoles should be able to do that, especially considering that the franchise isn't known for mind-blowing graphics.
Questionable Online Assets
Each iteration improves the online functions that were already existing. However, there are certain assets that are so poorly done I can definitely say it's archaic.
First of all, every time a guest comes in your town, everyone in there is forced to watch the arrival of that guest and it lasts a long while. Considering it's just an exchange of a few kilobytes of data, this is unacceptable. Why can't we continue our activity while the guest is arriving? I've seen some games that handles it much faster and more seamlessly.
Then, there's the "An error has occurred." message appearing whenever someone's Internet decides to break out, beaming everybody back to their town with lost progess since their last save. But, what kind of error is it? Is Nintendo afraid of revealing who actually disconnected first? Nobody will be offended if it precisely tell exactly what happened. There's no reason for a error message to be this vague, which isn't really helping to those who are resolving the problem. This also applies to Club Tortimer in ACNL, which is very annoying whenever someone disconnects himself on purpose. Let us continue playing online even if some fool decides to disconnect!
Also, why isn't the progress saved after being disconnected? If they left that to let players protect their town to a certain extent, they could've bothered including customizable visitor rules (e.g. no axes, no shovel, inability to pick items, etc.).
Whew... The Animal Crossing staff still got a lot of improvements to be achieved. Seriously, Animal Crossing could be easily the best game, as long as they decide to fix those persistently recurring flaws. I'm surprised that many of you never told (or weren't aware of them in first place) about most of the franchise's glaring flaws.
I'll leave the first post as it is, just to generate some discussion down the road. This apply to all iterations of Animal Crossing since Wild World, even though I tend to talk a lot about New Leaf.
