For the last 25 years, most Villagers in Animal Crossing: New Horizons have spent their time living lives of leisure. There were always members of the Animal Crossing community with jobs – from the Able Sisters who kept everyone dressed in the heights of fashion, to the ever-entrepreneurial loan shark that is Tom Nook. Almost everyone else who actually lived in the different towns of the series, however, exists in lives almost entirely separate from the player.
In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, they’d hang around and say the same lines to the player again and again, but otherwise stayed on your island paradise to relax. They’d go around fishing or bug catching to limited success, and wait around for you to come around and decorate their houses. I say, however, it’s time for the villagers of Animal Crossing to buck up their ideas. I’m not saying they need to get jobs, but they should learn from the Pokémon of Pokopia and come together as a community to work.
No Villager is an island
In Pokémon Pokopia, every Pokémon has a role in the community, from the Scyther who processes logs into lumber, to the Charmeleon who runs the furnace to smelt ore. It’s just their way of helping out as the player works to restore the world to the way it once was. They know that as they work, the environment around them will improve, and so will their general quality of life.
Pokopia is a game of a community coming together to recover after an ecological disaster, and everyone has a part to play. If you set things up right, you don’t even need to tell the Pokémon to do anything; you’ll just leave around tasks, and when you come back, they’ll be finished. It gives the Pokémon a mechanical purpose in the game while also reinforcing the game’s collectivist narrative. You’re not in this alone!
In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, however, it’s all on you. Sure, the stakes are much lower than Pokopia’s, but that doesn’t mean the villagers should be resigned to indolence. The island’s museum has a collection meticulously cataloged by resident bird-brain Blathers, but it falls entirely on you to become the benefactor.
The other villagers, despite clearly participating in the same activities, don’t share the same benevolent concept of donating. Maybe when New Horizons started as a series of people on a getaway package that would be understandable, but we’re six years now into this ‘vacation’, and I think it’s fair to say most villagers have just moved in until the next game.
Yet their attitude remains quite the same- they’re on a resort being attended to by one enthusiastic laborer, why would they need to do anything? Even as other people toil around them, they don’t think of raising a hand to help.
Community contributions
This has always been the case in Animal Crossing, though. Back in New Leaf, the villagers would offer minor donations to the various Public Work Projects around the place, but relied heavily on the player to make up the majority. They didn’t care if the mayor had a job outside of the game; they weren’t wasting their bells, no matter how much they wanted that cafe.
Animal Crossing’s villagers are just unusually passive. They’re friendly enough to the player, especially as they just aren’t really allowed to be mean after the Gamecube era, but they’re also unwilling or unable to help in any meaningful way.
You’d never see this kind of attitude from the Pokémon of Pokopia. They lean on the player to deal with all the organization, certainly, but when you call upon them, they’re more than happy to help with construction or to process the materials you need to set up the next Pokémon Center.
The Pokémon understand what it means to be part of a community in a way that the villagers of Animal Crossing just don’t. In any game, the player needs to be the driving force behind the customization choices, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else in the town should just be glorified cosmetics.
If they’re not running a shop, the inhabitants of Animal Crossing aren’t doing anything at all. There’s got to be some kind of way to give them some kind of community spirit, though, or at least have them feel more alive.
More interactions means more fun
It would be great if the villagers of Animal Crossing could help out in some meaningful way. I don’t think you could have the same level of ability distribution as Pokopia’s nearly 300 Pokémon. If the office cat Raymond was the only one to properly assist in administrative tasks, speeding up construction, he’d be more prized than he already was.
I just think you could maybe set up little help posts where the other villagers could meaningfully look like they’re helping. They could deposit resources or bring back unique furniture from little excursions.
Even if they were just able to pick weeds in the vicinity of their house, or collect fruit for you, that would make it feel like they’re helping out the bare minimum while you’re terraforming an entire island to best please them.
At the moment, the Villagers exist to exist. They’re less helpful than the Pokémon of Pokopia, and have less personality than the characters of other cozy games like Stardew Valley. Right now, they exist as dolls, cutesy eye candy to give extra customization, when they could be much more.
Maybe in the next Animal Crossing game, when she’s done with her extended vacation on my island, Ankha might become more dynamic. Maybe she’d teach magic, or help go on expeditions to far-off places. For now, though, I’d accept her just doing her part of the island’s chore wheel once in a while.
FAQs
Animal Crossing’s 25th Anniversary was on April 14, 2026, 25 years after the release of the first Animal Crossing game on Nintendo 64 in Japan.
There’s no unifying goal in Animal Crossing. You could work to fill up your museum, or decorate your town to your liking, or just work to make your house the biggest. You keep on playing until you don’t want to.
Pokopia has some similarities to the Animal Crossing series, as they’re both about creating and decorating different places for cute animals to live, but Pokopia is far more objective-based. It’s better to think of Pokopia as somewhere between Animal Crossing and Minecraft.
