 When Nintendo first announced that an Animal Crossing game was coming to the Switch, this was my reaction. Okay. I have never actually played through an Animal Crossing game before. I mean, sure, I've watched my friends play the GameCube version in the past, and yeah, maybe when they got up to use the bathroom I went around cutting down all their trees, but it's pretty safe to say I've never fully understood the widespread appeal of the Animal Crossing series as a whole. We're perfect! We're perfect! I always thought that the animorphic human-like creatures looked less like adorable Nintendo characters and more like those weird mismatched stuffed animals that kids designed for Ikea. Ultimately, I just didn't understand what you were supposed to do in these games. You know, other than treat trees like your own personal shape-weights and enabling a small raccoon's insatiable addiction to buying bugs and fish. I've been trying to tell you why Animal Crossing games are so fun. I'm very excited for this new one. Because I've played all the other ones, and it looks like New Horizons has added a ton of new features to make the adventure even more interesting, and at the very least the graphics are going to be better than whatever this is supposed to be. Oh yeah! Yeah, it's fair, but I was always going to give Animal Crossing a chance to impress me, so... So, this isn't just Wood's review of Animal Crossing New Horizons. It's what it's like for him to play an Animal Crossing game for the first time while Kim just lives her best island life. This video is sponsored by a satisfied 35% off stuck-at-home sale. I pre-downloaded my game the day before its release, so that I didn't have to go into GameStop and pick it up in person, because of virus. I gave these tiny furballs my name, date of birth, credit card details, and social security number, and they let me pick my new home's location out of four randomly generated islands. I chose the one that had a little heart-shaped pond up top because, well, I wanted to leave me alone, and off I flew to a small patch of grass with rocks and middle-aged ladies' exercise equipment to begin my life being stuck on a series of tiny islands. As expected, I didn't really know what to do at first. While Kim seemed to already know exactly what to do, I ran around trying to catch all the animals and discovered that they don't much care for that, so I turned my focus to fishing. That's much better. That's going to be one of those kinds of games. So the trees in my game are cherry trees. I figured this was normal for everyone until I glanced over at Kim's game and noticed that she had orange trees, definitely a lesser tree, and I quickly learned that island life was like a box of chocolates. We did it dad, ice cream. There's fun to be had in just finding different fruits on other islands and growing them at home on yours. On top of that, you also start with two randomized villages, or the islanders, I guess. I have a goat and a squirrel who sorely needs me to build her a salon rather than a museum, but one day at a time. I can only squeeze so much iron out of these rocks. Oh, hey, they put me in the game. As I sat there exploring my island that first day, the sun began to set over the beautiful and somewhat barren island known as Wood Isle. Yes, I self titled my island. Hey, at least I didn't go with island mups. This was my first experience with New Horizons in sync with the real world day and night cycle. Just like in real life, the stores close way too early. Normal people with real jobs who aren't YouTubers are awake only during the day. And as soon as it gets dark, giant spiders roam the land. Oh, I'm sorry, my nookie ear is ringing. Doing nothing but playing Animal Crossing over the last few days, the in-game sunsetting has become somewhat of a rude awakening that I should probably get up and eat something or, you know, take a shower. But, you know, I just want to get everything done before the in-game day ends. And, you know, there's no other way for me to do it without cheating. You see, the game gives you a series of tasks to complete each day. Those task actors are way to push along, I guess, what you could call the main story, whether it's gathering resources, planning out where to build new homes or making a pretty new wardrobe. But Taskmaster Nook will only give you certain things to do once a day. Those things might take you a few minutes or possibly days, depending on how much time you have to play. When you do eventually finish a task, you might need to wait a day or even two before you can start the next thing. Buildings can take days to get built, trees won't spring up overnight, even small things, like ordering Cornu items in the mail take a day or two to get delivered. I mean, you are living on an island. What did you expect, Amazon Prime? You've got mail. Oh, okay, well, all right then. So, there's this guy, you know, waiting patiently to get his shiny new Sambarero in the mail, and then I glance over at Kim's game once again. And animal crossing is just how some people play the game. If you can only play the game at night, for example, you'll miss out on whatever's happening during the day, like any of the fish or the bugs that you can only catch during the daytime. I mean, you could create your own backyard sea world while you wait for the stupid owl to finish the museum, or you could just skip ahead a couple days. All right, well, it is time to be real with you folks, because my first day on the island wasn't exactly all peaches and gravy. And once I completed everything for the day, and I was just stuck waiting for both the museum to be built and my home to become, well, less like a tent, I dabbled with the idea of cheating and just skipping ahead as well. In my defense, you can't store anything anywhere until you've built your first house. So I'm just out here with pockets full of critters, materials, and furniture. All I could do was throw everything out in my front yard like I was having the world's first crappy island garage sale. I even tweeted out to ask how you guys felt about it, to see if date skipping was just a part of the animal crossing culture. And while most of you preferred not to cheat, there was still plenty of you that would happily step into a nookaloring and on a one-way trip the next week. But I decided to be a good little villager and the next morning I awoke to a gleeful tom, greeting me into a new wonderful day on Wood Isle. And as I took in the sights around me and looked at everything that was built while I slept and I checked my mail for that hat I ordered, perfect, I began to work on a new day's worth of activities and it all finally hit me. The animal crossing experience, the day to day of it all. Putting in a hard day's work to improve your town, saving up your bells to buy fun new things and then cram them into your house, a spot of fishing to wind down the day before staying up way too late exploring randomized islands for new creatures and resources. Each and every new real-life day I woke up excited, rushing downstairs like a kid on Christmas to grab my switch and see what was new. And just like that, like a ton of bricks, like getting slapped in the face. I get it now, I understand, I see the light. Have you seen? And able to put animal crossing down, the more I experience, the more I become engrossed in my little adorable world. These characters are no longer mismatched stuffed IKEA animals to me. Now I see them as Billy and Hazel, my lovable fellow islanders going about their day as much as I am mine. I sell my goods to these little nooklets, I work away at my home loan debt and I dig up dinosaur bones for this weird owl. Last Sunday, a lady sold me turnips and next Sunday, I'm gonna stock up on a few more. I have no idea what this game has in store for me each day and the changing weather and seasons bring new life to my island all the time. So you know what, Sean B? And bring it on. Within four days, I went from not being sure how anyone could be addicted to animal crossing to staying up all night, chopping down every tree and pulling every weed out of a random island so that I could force the game into only spawning eight-legged nasties that for some reason sell for 8,000 bells each. Not that I'm complaining because my entire house was paid for in spider money. You know, I honestly think the only complaint I have is that I can't move the camera around freely. Being forced to only look in one direction can be very frustrating at times, especially when you have this stunning island and you can only explore it from one point of view. You know what I think? Yeah, it's gross. Why are you eating it? It was here. Unlike the previous games, the story in this one feels a lot more immersive and it has me wanting to know what the next project I need to work on is. I'm enjoying being able to build up my island the way I want and the graphics are so much better in this one that I'm honestly really attached to my little villagers. So much so that I've started doing fan art of them. But if you could just hurry up and give me my Isabelle, that'd be great. Thanks. I really like the new animal crossing. Oh, what's that? Why? Animal Crossing New Horizons greatly rewards patients by hooking you up to an IV full of morphine and slowly drip feeding you fun new tasks that have you building up an empty island with nothing but a couple of tents into a fully functioning populated island village. What you do around that in your free time is completely up to you with constantly rotating little tasks that will earn you nook miles and a huge diary full of much larger tasks that keep track of your progress essentially acting as an achievement tracker rewarding you with even larger amounts of miles the more you complete. So even if you're technically done fulfilling the wishes of the islanders for the day, you can still spend hours stacking up miles and bells to buy yourself new clothes, DIY plans, warpapers, postcards to send to friends and so much more. The collectible nature of the game from the aforementioned achievements to the large catalog of items can be addicting in itself but the impressive wildlife glossary alone has a Pokemon-esque draw to it that really makes me wanna catch them all. The incredible museum will house all of your findings around the island and showing them off in such a marvelous way and then you can invite your friends over and show off all your cool new stuff or you scare the crap out of them with your brand new spider house. Oh my God! Animal Crossing New Horizons finally gave me a reason to charge my Switch since Pokemon Shield, so thanks. Animal Crossing New Horizons gave me a reason to shove a store into this cantaloupe which is not how anyone drinks a cantaloupe. No! Oh! Bye. Oh wait, subscribe. Now bye. No! No! No! Oh no, no, no! Thanks for watching. I wanna give a huge thank you to girlfriend reviews for having that little cameo that started this video. Their channel is one of my absolute favorites to watch right now and it clearly inspired the way I edited this video as a whole. It just means a lot to me and it would mean a lot to me if you went and checked them out. So thank you again. And if you've ever seen a more perfect sponsor in a video, Kim and I only play Animal Crossing in handheld mode because hard toy. And I wouldn't be able to do that if it wasn't for the satisfied grip because it's extremely comfortable. I've talked about it a bunch of times before. This little boomerang slides right onto the Switch with rubber inserts so it won't scratch your Switch in any way, shape, or form and it just turns the Switch into the most comfortable feeling thing you could possibly imagine. And right now there's like a 35% off stay at home sale that Satisfy are doing. And if you use code beat em ups, you get another 10% which is pretty much half price off grips. And if you're thinking Kim, oh well I only play with my Switch Lite which is a light. I can see it right here that you play with that. But I still have you covered anyway with the little boy which is the Switch Lite grip which is cute and it's white and adorable. And so yeah, whether you're playing in the big boy or the little boy Satisfy has you covered. They also do cases and a bunch of other stuff that you can go and get like 45% off right now. Now link below. That's it. Thanks Satisfy.