Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Highlights A Major Issue With New Horizons’ Insufferable Villagers

The villagers in Pocket Camp are superior in every way to their counterparts in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This is primarily because the Pocket Camp villagers have fuller and more realistic personalities than in New Horizons. On top of that huge difference, players are able to interact with their villagers in far more unique ways than in the Switch game, which mostly limits players to having repeated conversations every day and exchanging gifts.

Pocket Camp’s Villager Interactions Are Less Tedious

More Variety And Personality

The biggest issue with the villagers in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is their repetitiveness. Speaking to any random villager will likely give the same dozen or so conversations, especially if they’re in the same or similar personality types. Not only are the conversations a little more varied in Pocket Camp, but there are far more ways to play with villagers on an everyday basis. Pocket Camp players can speak to villagers, give their advice on clothing or gifting options, dress up their villagers, complete requests, and find lost items. While some of these interactions - like finding lost items - are available in New Horizons, they're less fleshed-out, can take too long, and can be more repetitive than in PCC.

There’s simply more to do with Pocket Camp beyond just having the same interactions and giving gifts until they hand you a framed photo like in New Horizons. The villagers in Pocket Camp have more life in them, since players have to earn friendships by speaking to them daily and help them around the campsite. While the animals in PCC are all nice, it's worth pointing out a flaw of New Horizons as a mainline AC game: it's the first mainline entry where every single villager in that game is nice from the first introduction. None of the sass or plain rudeness from earlier games is present, which makes for a less meaningful experience, since none of the friendship is developed over time.

You Can Do So Much More With Villagers In Pocket Camp

Villagers Have More Depth And More To Do

Not only are the interactions better in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, but there’s so much more to do with them than just speak and gift presents every day. For example, Pocket Camp has a feature called Memories, which calls for some special requirements like villager friendship levels and specific furniture, and shows a small cutscene. These scenes are generally cute interactions between the villagers, like The Library Super Sleuth, which shows Raymond helping Beau and Sylvana find the book they wanted to read. These snippets of memory bring a lot of personality to the villagers and give players much more of a reason to put in all the effort into befriending them.

Alongside deeper friendships, the villagers in Pocket Camp have more to do around the campsite, which is partially due to the sheer number of interactive items that the mobile game received over time compared to the limited sets of furniture in New Horizons. In New Horizons, the most villagers can do to interact with their island home is to sit on the ground, sit on a chair, pretend to water flowers, or chase bugs around despite the number of items that seem like they should be interactive.

In Pocket Camp, villagers can interact with a huge range of items. They can turn off lights, water faucets, and stoves for small interactions that make the camp feel more lived in. Additionally, they can sleep in beds and occasionally have nightmares, which the player can wake them up from. Adorable items from other Nintendo titles, like question blocks and Koopa shells from Super Mario, are interactable as villagers will jump for the block and make noise on the shells. The exact same themed items are in New Horizons, but without any of the interactivity.

What The Next Animal Crossing Can Learn From Pocket Camp

Villagers Will Need A Huge Upgrade

As a series, a focus for most players is their interactions with villagers. Animal Crossing: New Horizons dropped the ball in that respect, since its villagers are mostly categorized cardboard cutouts with six different personality types. Speaking to any single villager in New Horizons will give the same result as speaking to another. Even receiving DIY recipes, a daily ritual, will net the same four or five tired phrases about bugs whispering or being a trendsetter. This lack of personality and repetitiveness is boring, especially for a game that players want to play for months or even years.

What the next Animal Crossing game needs to do is put a much bigger focus on villager personalities and the unique ways that players can build relationships with them that reflect in their dialogue. The town, island, or city that villagers inhabit need to feel more lived in, which can be achieved by letting them interact with more items placed by the player. The most important villager function that needs to return is earning friendship, rather than having every villager be a best friend to the player straight away like in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.