Animal Crossing is 25 years old today but Pokémon Pokopia has eaten its lunch

Pokémon Pokopia is the one really celebrating at the moment (Metro)

Nintendo’s beloved cosy game is celebrating a major anniversary but with still no sign of a sequel it’s in danger of being overshadowed by Pokémon Pokopia.

It’s the 25th anniversary of Animal Crossing today. Originally released on the N64 in 2001, and making its first appearance in the West via a GameCube port the next year, the series started out as a very low-profile experiment. It’s what is now regarded as a cosy game but at the time there was nothing else quite like it, with the game featuring no violence, no goals, and only a gentle encouragement to interact with the other villages and human players of the game.

Each new Nintendo console saw a new entry but none of them were ever blockbusters, even as the series quietly grew in stature with each new iteration. However, all that changed with 2020’s New Horizons, thanks to the happy coincidence of it coming out in the middle of lockdown and being by far the best entry in the franchise.

As such, it racked up 49.32 million copies sold and became the second-best selling game on the original Switch, behind only Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Naturally, Nintendo was over the moon and did the only obvious thing in the circumstances: cut support for the game peculiarly early and never even hint at a sequel.

Many fans theorised that they ended support early to make sure a sequel would be ready for the Switch 2 launch but that never happened. Instead, Nintendo released a barely altered Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of the game this year, which implies that no sequel is planned for some considerable time.

All of this is textbook Nintendo oddness, but whatever plans they might have had for the series would have been thrown into disarray when Pokémon Pokopia became a surprise hit earlier this spring. It’s very unclear how well Nintendo expected the game to do but it’s apparently given a major boost to console sales, while making the Ditto protagonist an internet darling.

Pokopia has several elements with no equivalent in Animal Crossing, and vice versa, but the two games are very similar in terms of their general vibe and the ability to customise your own village and create and furnish the homes within it. Strangely, the emote system is almost identical, to the point where it uses exactly the same sound effects for some of the gestures – so clearly the similarities were not lost on Nintendo.

Nintendo makes plenty of games that are within the same genre, most obviously its myriad platformers, including Mario, Yoshi, Kirby, Donkey Kong and other even more obscure characters. But Pokopia and Animal Crossing are so similar it leaves a major question as to where the latter has left to go now.

One of the few complaints about New Horizons is that the personalities of the villagers you interact with have slowly been getting less interesting over time. In the early games they could be surprisingly acerbic at times but in New Horizons they’re all uninterestingly nice whatever you do, to the point where even Mr Resetti is now a shadow of his former angry self.

Reversing that trend is one obvious area where the next Animal Crossing could differentiate itself from Pokopia, since all the pokémon only have a very limited set of dialogue and personality types. However, we’re very doubtful that Nintendo has it in it to make its characters sassy again, since the increasing blandness of Animal Crossing’s villagers is very much part of a general trend to sand the edges off their various mascots.

But if they don’t do that, what need is there for a new Animal Crossing? Pokopia is such a surprisingly good game that it’s hard not to just wish for a quick sequel (or, more likely, extensive DLC) for that rather than a new Animal Crossing.

Animal Crossing has a greater breadth of options in terms of furniture and clothing, and the customisation of that, but mechanically there’s a lot more going on in Pokopia. It could be argued that’s the appeal of Animal Crossing, since it’s so laidback it makes Pokopia look like a survival horror, but beyond changing the villagers there’s nowhere else obvious for it to go.

The online options could certainly be expanded on, and made easier to access, but that’s also not the Nintendo way. Of course, they could also come up with interesting new gameplay mechanics that nobody can currently imagine, although that’s not really been an Animal Crossing tradition up till now – especially since New Horizons’ biggest new idea was crafting.

It’s always hard to tell whether Nintendo’s actions are borne of genius or foolhardiness and while it usually turns out to be the former it’s a particularly hard call to make when it comes to Animal Crossing. What they’re planning for the franchise, and when they might tell the rest of the world about it, is a complete mystery, but the one thing that does seem fair to say is that they have not taken advantage of New Horizon’s unexpected success in any obvious way.

Whether their long-term response to Pokopia’s popularity will prove as baffling remains to be seen but this is an awkward anniversary for Animal Crossing, when it’s in danger of becoming only Nintendo’s second most popular cosy game.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons – here’s to another 25 years, hopefully (Nintendo)

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