tldr; 500 hours in, New Horizons is soulless, and the more i play it the more disappointed I get.
Biggest complaint:
Interacting with villagers consistently gives me nothing. For a game where the villagers are the main point, it’s unacceptable.
The dialogue is awful. I am best friends with most of my villagers, and their initial greeting is very sweet. However, ALL of them say something akin to “why are you still here?” after the first talk. They still take 3-5 repetitions of this before I get a chance at having one of them say something I didn’t hear yesterday, or the rare chance of them asking me to do something. Dialogue is the easiest feature to add and they hardly did anything with it.
They don’t visit your house anymore. Nintendo had SO much potential to expand upon this (HH Designer, anyone?) and they didn’t bother to take it.
Why not give us a menu option to ask to help? Why not an option to invite them for a treasure hunt, hide and seek, home visit, tea party, anything like that? Why is the only option to talk to them, when they put SO little effort into the dialogue? Cool that i can build a waterfall, but i can’t have a decent conversation with my BFF?
Aside from the villagers, the way you obtain items in the game also just sucks. We have a customization system, why do i have to show up every day to tom nook’s for an entire year to MAYBE have a chance at seeing a different color of imperial furniture (or any other similar styles)? Why can’t you get the type of furniture item and then customize it to be the other colors? Does paint not exist? We get a fraction of the furniture customizable and the rest we have to pray we get it at some point or we’re forced to try to trade someone else for it. There’s a reason most show-worthy islands are hacked.
A complaint from my partner that I agree with: The crafting system is a big chore for the first part of the game. As annoying as it is to be forced to stop progression through buildings (understandable still), you’re also forced to make no progress because resources on your own island are limited, and a pain to get. They give us no way to order materials, we have to visit nook mile islands to get more materials (spendy when you’re first starting out) so again it’s like they’re forcing you to show up every day. Not because you want to, but because you won’t get to any of the decent features of the game if you don’t. It’s not enough to just keep fishing or catching bugs for bells, you won’t continue to get more requests from your villagers, you can’t sleep to end the day like any other game with crafting would have, it’s overall a bad system.
I used to play every day, up until a month ago. Even though they come out with new events, there was hardly any point for me to load it up every day. Hundreds of days with my villagers saying the same exact thing as they said yesterday, little to do to enjoy any of the enormous amount of work I put into the island (and still an enormous amount of work to put in), it all felt pointless.
