the alien princess essays

I have 1795 hours in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons. That’s equivalent to approximately 75 days. I constantly complain about the game’s mechanics, UI, and content, yet I keep playing and I have no plans of stopping anytime soon. Why is this?

I argue that New Horizons, in attempting to appeal to a wider player base, alters the core gameplay of the Animal Crossing franchise without accompanying alterations to the user interface or game mechanics, resulting in a discordant gaming experience for every type of player.

I was introduced to the Animal Crossing series by City Folk for the Wii. In City Folk, as in previous titles, the player arrives in town broke and must perform indentured servitude to secure housing. After Tom Nook sets the player free, the core gameplay loop consists of catching fish and bugs, digging up fossils, talking with your neighbours, and decorating your house, all while earning money to pay off your mortgage. It’s a cute and charming life sim that, while simple, offers a ton of replay value.

Animal Crossing was created by Katsuya Eguchi, who was inspired by his experience of moving from his hometown of Chiba to Kyoto to work for Nintendo:

“Animal Crossing features three themes: family, friendship and community. But the reason I wanted to investigate them was a result of being so lonely when I arrived in Kyoto! Chiba is east of Tokyo and quite a distance from Kyoto, and when I moved there I left my family and friends behind. In doing so, I realised that being close to them – being able to spend time with them, talk to them, play with them – was such a great, important thing. I wondered for a long time if there would be a way to recreate that feeling, and that was the impetus behind the original Animal Crossing.” [source]

The original Animal Crossing was initially developed for the N64, but ended up being released on the GameCube in 2001. At the time, a game with no ending or story was a novel idea. The developers had some trouble classifying its genre for marketing, eventually dubbing it a “communication game.”

Those core gameplay elements of catching fish and bugs, unearthing fossils, talking to your neighbours, and decorating and upgrading your house, were all designed to facilitate human connection. In a 2003 interview with Nintendo Online Monthly, the devs explained:

“Nogami: Ultimately our gameplay ideas derive from that theme [of communication]. Let's swap furniture from our houses! …that was another way of connecting people.
“Interviewer: Yeah, but there's some people who just like to fish by themselves, and others who just want to collect a bunch of furniture. (laughs)
“Nogami: This is true. (laughs) That's why we made fish that can only be found by people who obsessively fish, though. And for those furniture collectors, there's some pieces that can only be found by dedicated collectors. I like to think of the conversations that two collectors will have when they encounter each other and see unique pieces in their collections. That's another opportunity for communication.
“Nogami: We also wanted players to talk to each other about things the animals had said. (laughs)
“Eguchi: Yeah, I hope players talk with each other about what the animals said, what they were thinking that day, what they did… and hey, we can't help it if these cute animals just say cute things! (laughs)
“Nogami: But there are also some that say scary things. (laughs)
“Eguchi: Yeah, it's like, if a small child is playing and an animal says something a little difficult to him that he doesn't understand, I hope he'll then go ask his Mom about it.
“Nogami: That's also part of the ‘communication’ we were after.”

This philosophy formed the foundation of the following games in the series. As they built on the original formula, the scope of the game and the player’s range of gameplay options widened. By the time New Leaf was released for the 3DS in 2012, the player had graduated from being a broke child to becoming the mayor of the town, able to enact ordinances and develop land. This laid the foundation for New Horizons, giving the player expanded customizability.

New Leaf also built upon the core “communication” aspect of the game with its increased customizability in mind, introducing the Dream Suite. In previous titles, if you wanted to visit a friend’s town, you both had to be playing at the same time. The Dream Suite allowed players to visit dreams of each others’ towns, uploaded to the internet as a snapshot of the town at a particular date and time. This created an entire new dimension of gameplay: customizing one’s town expressly to be visited in a dream, such as the infamous horror dream town of Aika Village.

This feature has become the core gameplay loop for most New Horizons players in 2025. New Horizons heavily expanded upon the customization aspect of Animal Crossing; instead of moving to an established town, you are now responsible for colonizing an entire island. You have almost complete control over the island, including the locations of the shops and who the residents are. Bug- and fish-catching, identifying fossils, and chatting with your neighbours are secondary activities next to the game’s focus on developing one’s island. Nearly five years after the game’s release, the remaining playerbase has abandoned the core gameplay mechanics that once defined Animal Crossing in favour of developing an island for a dream address release, then resetting and starting over.

Why this shift? Why will the legacy of this game include the coining of the phrase, “Animal Crossing burnout”? Because long before the fans abandoned the game’s life-sim aspects, the devs did.

The life sim aspects of New Horizons, once the franchise’s engaging core gameplay loop, fall to the wayside in their mediocrity. The fishing is easy, the museum’s fossil section is quick to complete, and the villagers have been neutered – they never show any emotion besides unaffected cheerfulness. In previous games, villagers could get angry, depressed, shocked, and other negative emotions. They could move away from your town with little warning and no way to stop them. In New Horizons, villagers can’t leave until you give them permission. They don’t feel like characters anymore, just props for whatever aesthetic your current island is.

I hang onto chatting with my island villagers out of nostalgia, but I’ve abandoned the life sim aspects in favour of treating New Horizons as a decorating game. And while this makes the game more engaging, it also makes it much harder.

Despite its focus on customization, New Horizons is still very much not designed to be a decorating game. Making infrastructure changes on your island takes one day of real time, unless you time travel, and the slow loading screens make this a tedious process. Collecting DIY recipes, one of the two ways to get items, is severely unoptimal. You can find two per day, one in a bottle on the beach and one from one of your villagers, but they’re random and duplicates are possible. You can even get duplicates of recipes you’re guaranteed to get at the beginning of the game! As for buying items, it’s abysmal as well — there’s only one renovation of the shop, as opposed to the multiple from previous games, giving you a max of six slots of furniture items to buy. Compared to the final upgrade in New Leaf, which gave the player three floors of products to peruse, it’s laughable. In order to change the colour or upholstery of certain items, you need to use consumable items called “customization kits,” sold in the store one apiece or “in bulk” of five. But when it takes seven kits to customize one item, five is not bulk.

New Horizons is so annoying to play this way that most players in 2025 take advantage of “treasure islands,” hacked islands that allow players to visit and grab any item they want. The need for extensive modding to make the game feasible to play in a way that has longevity is a little sad to me.

However, I do enjoy playing this way. There’s something so charming and adorable about the art design in this game. The items in-game were very thoughtfully designed to spark the player’s imagination, utilizing a concept called the “imagination gap.” The fact that imaginative visual design is the dominant way to play now speaks to how much this concept succeeded. Despite the large amount of criticism this game has drawn from longtime fans of the series, it garnered high praise in the industry and drew in a massive new audience. Whether we like it or not, customization is the way the series will continue.

I have high hopes for the next installment in the franchise. With the recent shutdown of the AC mobile app Pocket Camp, Nintendo could be consolidating its resources to work on the next game in the franchise. With New Horizons’ 2.0 update adding Brewster’s coffeeshop in the museum came an additional wave of dialogue for characters when you find them having a coffee. I discovered this when I encountered Celeste, my favourite Animal Crossing NPC, there on my first island, Bajor. The surprise and magic in that moment brought me back to why I fell in love with Animal Crossing in the first place. This, along with all the dialogue they wrote for the villagers’ letters in New Horizons, proves to my mind that the Animal Crossing team still has the sauce to make their characters memorable and fun to interact with.

I’m hopeful that the next game will strike a good balance between old and new Animal Crossing gameplay styles. Most of all, I hope it banishes the term “animal crossing burnout” to obsolescence forever!

A difference exists between beauty and aesthetics. It is the same difference as between fashion as self-expression and fashion as trend-following or fitting in, and between makeup as artistic expression and makeup as conformist patriarchal bullshit. “Beauty” describes a patriarchal mode of objectification, while “aesthetics” describes a way of interacting with the world.

“Aesthetics” can encompass not only visuals but sounds, textures, flavours, experiences, contexts, locations, connotations, narratives, and even violence. It encompasses the sensual and conceptual and binds them together. It is a constructed essence of something, a “-core.” Put “core” after any word into a Pinterest search and you’ll see what I mean.

Aesthetics is about pure pleasure: what appeals to one sensually and what that signifies emotionally. People often follow established aesthetic “cores,” such as cottagecore, or create their own through moodboards, playlists, curated blogs, etc.

A necessary caveat: because patriarchy developed beauty as a mode of controlling women, the ideas of what is aesthetic, beautiful, fulfilling, and pleasurable will be influenced by patriarchal ideals. In aesthetics, however, women (and others, but primarily women) develop their own ideas of what these things mean. Sometimes they line up with patriarchal thinking, but oftentimes not.

Practising aesthetics comes with a myriad of benefits. Surrounding yourself with things that give you visual pleasure is good for your mental health. It is a form of creative self-expression. It enables you to be fully present by appreciating the present as the present aesthetic. (Example: right now¹, I’m sitting by the river in a cute outfit, smoking and writing. This is aesthetic. This says something about who I am: cosmopolitan outfit, intellectual pursuits, an appreciation for nature and slowing down and disconnecting.) It is a consistent practise of worlding and meditation.

Beyond this, beauty, sex appeal, and cuteness are all mechanisms programmed into us as a social species and need an expressive outlet. They have been manipulated to bad ends, but are capable of recontextualization. I call this recontextualization process “progressive aesthetics.”

Progressive aesthetics recontextualizes sensual signifiers, modifying their signifieds or replacing them with something else altogether. Cottagecore does this with many traditional signifiers of patriarchal wifehood, motherhood, and femininity. Princesscore does this with female power and vulnerability. Coquette as an aesthetic movement aims to reclaim girlhood from its patriarchal fetishization in our pedophilic culture, and the rise of “horror coquette” or “mystical coquette” (see films like Jennifer’s Body and Ginger Snaps) aims to express a coquette sexuality separated from pedophilic patriarchal ideas.

In this way, aesthetics is reality-bending: information comes to us first through our five senses. By reprogramming what pleasurable information means we can curate our reality; we can live in our own life’s “narrative genre”, in a sense. It is a way of living intentionally, of being present and appreciating Being. It is a way of moving through life with a purpose, which is a sense we are all seeking.

¹Here, “right now” refers to the time of original writing. In the actual right now, I'm preparing to post this on my website, which is also an example of aesthetics.