I came of age at the ideal time to enjoy the first Animal Crossing game on GameCube, so it holds a place of nostalgia in my heart—paying off Tom Nook, hunting for rare fish, basement gyroid-dungeon, lectures from Mr. Resetti, collecting all of the K.K. Slider songs, and playing Balloon Fight and Excitebike—my sister and I both played the game excessively.

I finally decided to pick up a Nintendo Switch (ironically, the Animal Crossing special edition—though mostly because it was in stock at the time) at the end of the summer and Animal Crossing: New Horizons was one of the first two games I purchased with it.

So how does the fifth entrant in the main series hold up nineteen years after the first release and how does it hit now that I'm nineteen years older?

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