Sixteen years ago in 2001, the adorable life sim Animal Crossing made its debut on the Nintendo 64 in Japan before releasing on GameCube later that year. It made its way to the West in September of the following year. Since then, the series has grown and evolved with four games in the main series and two spinoff titles.
The series’ most popular title is Animal Crossing: Wild World for the Nintendo DS, with 11.75 million units sold. It’s closely followed by the most recent release, Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the 3DS, with 10.45 million copies sold. Both titles are in the top 10 best-selling games for their respective consoles, beaten mostly by Mario and Pokémon games.
So what’s next for AC?
Animal Crossing is undoubtedly one of Nintendo’s most popular IP’s, with huge playerbases in all regions. They have to keep the ball rolling.
Nintendo announced a mobile app Animal Crossing game some time back, originally planning a March 2017 release. Obviously, that didn’t happen, and they’ve said the wait could be as long as March 2018 for this one.
The mobile app likely won’t be a full-fledged Animal Crossing game with a town full of villagers and trees and buildings. I’m picturing a Super Mario Run Kingdom layout with pre-determined spots for various unlockable buildings and decorations filled with rewards and mini games.
My friend Peter and I recently chatted about our predictions for this app game. You can watch our video below.
Could we see AC on the Switch?
After Nintendo rolls out the Animal Crossing app, players are gearing up for a new title for the Switch. Nintendo’s actually dropped a few hints that this game is happening, but we haven’t had an official confirmation yet.
Call me optimistic, but there’s no doubt in my mind Nintendo will give us a new mainline Animal Crossing game on the Switch. In fact, this could be the first big title to dual release on the Switch and 3DS, as there are so many Animal Crossing players who love their dedicated handhelds.
I can picture a revamped, massive town for you to construct and decorate with more options for buildings, public works projects, trees, flowers, bushes, and maybe even more types of additions.
Wouldn’t ya know it, Peter and I also made a video talking about our wishes for an Animal Crossing Switch game, which you can watch below.
I’m sure we’ll also see plenty of new amiibo figures and cards roll out with both the AC app and Switch/ 3DS games.
What are your hopes and predictions for the future of the beloved Animal Crossing series? Let us know in the comments!
5 comments
I love Animal Crossing. The new game should come with you leaving your town and going to a mall . To rare thing you want, but have good rime.
What if this time it was open world and the lot would be much, much larger? Maybe not Breath of the Wild big, but big. What if you could have all these areas to explore, and specific places to hunt bugs or look for fossils…There’s no limit to how far you can go, as long as players collect stuff
The only problem with that is that the game takes place in real-time, so if you make it take too long to get around the world, you’ll never be able to accomplish anything.
Well, I could still conceivably see the map being at least 4-8x the size of a New Leaf map.
The 3DS is WAY too underpowered to do any kind of simultaneous release for both it and Switch. Those who are doing it for both substantially remove features and change graphics. Plus, Nintendo themselves haven’t released a Switch/3DS variant of the same game, it’s all been 3rd party companies. You’re also overlooking the biggest too, 3DS already has an Animal Crossing game built for it from the ground up, Switch will have one built from the ground up specifically for Switch, as well as Switch connecting to mobile- there’s a Switch app, something 3DS can’t do, so if this new app connects to the next Animal Crossing game, only Switch can connect to smartphones, the 3DS is too old, using too old a technology- it’s like they didn’t put New Leaf on the DS, they put it on the 3DS