Despite being massively popular among Nintendo Switch owners,Animal Crossing: New Horizonsis not without its faults. While this latest entry in Nintendo’s beloved life-sim franchise introduced a variety of new mechanics centered around crafting and terraforming, some of these mechanics felt underutilized or not as fleshed out as they could have been. In particular, the approachAnimal Crossing: New Horizonstakes to its trees and the benefits eating fruit grants to the player could use some work, and the next entry in the series should improve upon this mechanic in one key area.
One of the mostpopular additionsAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsbrought to the series was the ability for players to terraform and customize their island to suit whatever layout they desired. While a major part of this mechanic was the ability to raise and lower levels of the ground and carve out rivers, an undersung terraforming feature is the ability to remove rocks and trees from the island by eating a piece of fruit and gaining a temporary strength buff that allows the player to break rocks and dig up entire trees. However, there is a lot of room to expand upon this feature in a futureAnimal Crossinggame.
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Animal Crossing Fruit Trees Should Diversify Their Buffs
While the ability to eat a piece of fruit and be able to destroy unwanted rocks or remove ill-placed trees to redesign an island inAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsis a welcome feature, Nintendo missed a huge opportunity to give this mechanic even more functionality. The wayfruit currently works inAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsallows players to eat any piece of fruit to gain this increased strength buff. However, with a total of six different types of fruits obtainable within the game, giving each type its own specific buff seems like the next logical step for this system.
There are a variety of potential buffs that eating fruit could provide beyond a simple blanket of increasing the player’s strength so that they can move trees and destroy rocks. For example, eating cherries could boost the odds of rare insects spawning, eating oranges could increase the chance of rare fish spawning, or eating peaches could increase player movement speed. With the addition ofswimming inAnimal Crossing: New Horizons, coconuts offer the perfect chance to provide a buff to the player’s swim speed that doesn’t require button mashing.
One important aspect offruit trees in theAnimal Crossingseriesis their exclusive nature, with players only having one type of fruit in their towns initially. Typically, this mechanic is used to encourage players to visit other towns or islands in order to gain access to different types of fruits, but so far the only benefit to doing so is that foreign fruits sell for a slightly higher price with the Nooks. A much better incentive to collect all the types of fruit would be if they offered players more unique abilities like different buffs based on the type of fruit.
These changes might not seem that crucial to gameplay in the grand scheme of things, but it would be a fairly simple way to iterate upon an understated mechanic and could grow the utility of fruit in theAnimal Crossingseries. Collecting all insects and fish tocompleteAnimal Crossing: New Horizons' Critterpediacan be a difficult task, so rewarding players for connecting with others by giving the access to buffs that can help improve their efficiency with this challenge seems like a great incentive. This type of system would also give players more of a reason to fill their town with fruit trees for more than just farming them for cash.
Animal Crossing: New Horizonsis available for Nintendo Switch.
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