As you’re no doubt aware by now, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is great. It’s full of wit, beautiful to look at and unabashedly Nintendo.
Sadly, it also shows just how convoluted Nintendo’s online functionality is.
I wanted my friend to come to my town so we could swap fruit. My island is lush with pears; his is a peach orchard. So, I went to the airport and opened my gate and he flew over. We live in different countries, so it was fun to do a joint activity, especially under the current circumstances.
Then we realised how backwards Nintendo can be.
Obviously, voice chat is relegated to a separate app. My best guess as to why is that Nintendo fears the toxicity it can bring and is keen to protect minors, so it’s trying to offload some of the blame to Apple and Google.
Shortly into our online outing we tried to take a picture. That’s us above, temporarily ignoring all the bad things and stupidity in the world. New Horizon’s camera is neat, incidentally with loads of filters and stamps to mess around with, adding to the potential.
I, quite simply, wanted to share this snap with my long-time friend. But I soon realised there’s no easy way to do so. All snaps get saved to the Switch, meaning I had to post it to Twitter, save the image and then send my friend the picture using Facebook Messenger.
Animal Crossing is a social game, so the fact that it’s impossible to share photos strikes me as a huge oversight. It’s not hampering my enjoyment too much, but it’s still a reminder that for all Nintendo’s magic, they don’t seem to comprehend the most basic of online functions.
New Horizons provides an idyllic island to visit. It shouldn’t be this hard to send a postcard.