Meh. New Leaf remains the most transformative and fulfilling Animal Crossing game.
My main issue with New Horizons is that it isn't as relaxing as previous installments. Chilling out fishing? Whoops, let's break your fishing rod. Now you've got to go through the bore of chopping wood and crafting a rod through the tedious mechanics of crafting. You can't do what you want to do without interruption anymore and that's a problem.
Don't get me started on the missing content. We're paying £50/$60 for this game, give us more than enough in the base game, Nintendo. To echo what others have said, it's like they took a masterclass on how to release a game Sims 4-style (which is horrible).
I don't dislike the game, I'm just a little underwhelmed. They're definitely catering to a more casual audience who will play the game for a couple of months and then retire it indefinitely. I'm sure they'll add plenty of content through updates, but I'm still underwhelmed.
The villager dialogue is abysmal. Shame.
This is why you can't really give a game like Animal Crossing an accurate review score without having played it for a few months. Animal Crossing isn't a short experience.
Oh well. I'm staying optimistic and there's still plenty I do like about the game.
Okay, I will say that I do disagree somewhat with your rating of the villager dialogues -- Bob has said some very silly things to me and it is very cute -- but I see what you mean.
As for the rest of your argument, I couldn't agree more.
I don't mind spoilers, and I've been very keen on inquiring about a few features I've been looking forward to unlocking from a few people I know who time travel like crazy. Some of them are already in the summer. And yet apparently, Label will only visit your town to do fashion contests about 6 times with no Gracie update or anything as a result. The Nook's Cranny upgrades once. Kicks never sets up shop and is always a vendor that appears very irregularly.
It's going to hurt my heart if I can never buy Gracie furniture. I honestly really do not appreciate the way they are handling content. I am assuming they'll post it in a DLC pack later on, but how much later do we have to wait? I understand the pressures of releasing it, but this feels so incomplete. I feel like they're trying so hard to expand their demographic of active players that they've forgotten about a few things that their already established fan base would hate to go without.
I understand that, allegedly, Blathers and gyroids will make a return in the future. I can only pray that Redd and his art, Gracie and her furniture, Pelly and Phyllis and their EXTREMELY nostalgic post office, and et cetera will do as well. And I hope they do it soon. I know it's going to take me a ****load of time to get to the point of unlocking them, but knowing that they aren't even there is just kind of depressing.
And the tool breaking feature, I mean, really? What are we in, Minecraft? I liked the flimsy tool version at first because it forced you to craft, and since I'm not used to that feature yet it really got me a little more familiar with it. But I really hate going on a fishing spree only for my rod to break when I'm all the way across the island. Same goes for shovels when they break after hitting rocks. I lost my little hit streak when trying to mine for iron because of it and it was so grating. I've read that golden tools even break. What's the point of them then!
The furniture is really cute in the villagers' homes but I have no idea how we possibly are able to get it in the store or anywhere else because the only things that ever appear in Nook's Cranny are traffic cones and kitchen knife wall sets! There's not even ROOM for a double bed or a couch on that furniture pedestal. I doubt I'll be able to craft that pretty leather couch like Ed has in my town too. What would I use to do that? Leather?? Lmao there's no way to get leather in this game so I guess I'll just have to admire it from afar.
I feel like it's premature to judge it fully, but with the insight given by the people who are breezing through all of the updates, I feel like they're discovering the essence of incompletion that Nintendo would've really appreciated nobody to see.
Not to mention the fully upgraded house results. Apparently you can't expand the left/right/backside rooms at all. They're just going to be eternally tiny. I haven't discovered this for myself, but grr, it makes me mad to think about!
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk lol.