Summary
While theAnimal Crossingseries has always featured its villagers as a central part of its identity, villagers inAnimal Crossing: New Horizonswere somewhat controversial among longtime series fans. Past entries in theAnimal Crossingseries have had diverse personalities ranging from sweet and friendly to cranky and rude, butAnimal Crossing: New Horizonstoned down these personalities and made them feel too similar to each other to stand out. However, if the series wants to continue this trend, a futureAnimal Crossinggame could make villagers more exciting by borrowing a popular mechanic from thePokemonseries.
Villager hunting became a popular pastime inAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsthanks to the ability to find and recruit new villagers fromMystery Island Tours. Although villagers in past entries would move in randomly when the player had an opening in their town,Animal Crossing: New Horizonsplayers could go on a Mystery Island Tour and have the chance to come across a random villager camping on the island with the ability to invite them to their island. A futureAnimal Crossinggame could make this process even more exciting by giving these villagers a small chance of having an alternate color palette, much like shiny variants fromPokemon.
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Animal Crossing Could Introduce ‘Shiny’ Villager Variants
In thePokemonseries, creatures have a very small chance to appear as an alternate color version of themselves known as a “shiny” variant when encountered in the wild. While nothing is different about these critters from a gameplay perspective, their incredible rarity has madeshiny hunting a very popular activity forPokemonfansto participate in. With the way that hunting for players' favorite villagers exploded in popularity with the release ofAnimal Crossing: New Horizons, the nextAnimal Crossinggame could lean into this aspect of the series and add the chance to find a shiny villager to the villager hunting mechanic.
Finding ashiny Pokemonis already quite a rare occurrence with the base odds being 1/4096 inPokemon Scarlet and Violet, and these games allow players to see multiple critters on the screen at a time due to mons appearing in the overworld while players are out and about. These same odds would make finding a shiny villager inAnimal Crossingmuch more difficult as players only have the chance to find one villager at a time on a Mystery Island. To remedy this issue,Animal Crossingcould decrease the odds to a more appropriate level or allow players to encounter more than one villager per Mystery Island.
Pokemonprovides players with other tools to help increase their shiny odds such as the Shiny Charm which increases the odds to 1/1366, and theMasuda Method of Pokemon breedingwhich increases the odds further to 1/512.Animal Crossingcould do something similar and offer players a special reward for having a perfect island or town that increases the rate of a shiny villager showing up. There could even be a new NPC introduced to theAnimal Crossingseries that teaches the player about shiny villagers and offers to increase the odds of finding one for a price.
Animal Crossing: New Horizonscontains 413 total villagers that players can invite to their island. If this number carries over to the next game, the addition of shiny variants could effectively double the number of unique villagers in the game, bringing the total up to 826.
There may be some hurdles the nextAnimal Crossinggame has to overcome to include shiny villagers in the game, with a major one being creating re-colored models for all 413Animal Crossingvillagers, assuming no new ones are added in the next title. Additionally, the game would have to find a way to deal with third-party markets for buying and selling villagers that developed around characters likeRaymond inAnimal Crossing: New Horizons. However, the fresh gameplay opportunities that shiny villagers would bring to the series may be worth tackling these issues.
