Animal Crossing Players Discover That NPCs Can Fall In Love With You
The Animal Crossing series is endlessly loved for its wholesome vibes and peaceful gameplay - a nice break from the violence that many video games love to explore. A player on the game’s subreddit discovered a lovely feature of the original Nintendo GameCube version, in which NPCs can fall in love with your player-character. How adorable!
What Exactly Did The Player Discover?
Reddit user u/LazerCrystalx shared a video, showing one of the little encounters. In the video, their player is wandering around a wooded area followed by an emperor penguin named Cube. Eventually, Cube catches up and begins to lay it on thick, flirting with the player by asking if they work out and commenting that their clothes look good on them.
It’s a little awkward but still very cute, as Cube’s nervousness comes across quite clear in the dialogue. For the rest of the video, he continues to follow the player, as love hearts appear from his head every time he stops to flirt. Users in the Reddit thread overwhelmingly thought it was a cute feature, lamenting its disappearance in later entries. There were some who also thought it was a little creepy, which is fair as telling someone “your mouth, your eyes… Everything about you totally fascinates me,” can be a little hit or miss in real life.
How Does The Love System Work In Animal Crossing?
One commentator explained the system to the original poster, stating, “This was a luck based thing! On days of high luck, villagers of the opposite gender of the player would ‘love’ them.” Importantly, the luck system is missing in the latest entry, New Horizons, which explains why the characters can’t fall in love with the player.
Some players do also point out how the dated system is, in terms of only letting an opposite-sex NPC fall in love with the player. LGBTQ+ representation wasn’t exactly a huge thing companies thought about in the early 00s, so if Nintendo do ever reimplement the system, we’d hope it has more fitting representation.
The current Animal Crossing game, New Horizons, is set to get a big content update and expansion soon, taking it into version 2.0. The update will bring some familiar faces from past entries back, letting them visit the player’s island. The DLC is also set to launch very soon on November 5. Called Happy Home Paradise, it will allow players the ability to build holiday homes.