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Animal Crossing: New Horizons‘ colorful cast of island-residing and traveling NPCs already seems perfect, but one inspired player’s brilliant idea for a new character absolutely needs to make its way into the game. The hypothetical NPC’s prescribed role and personality seem so simple and obvious that it’s a true wonder how a character like them isn’t already brightening up players’ in-game days, and Nintendo needs to get on implementing them as a new permanent fixture ASAP.
The Animal Crossing series has featured a few signature inclusions in every mainline iteration since its humble origins on the GameCube. Fruit borne of portly trees, items tied to wayward balloons, and fossils buried in shallow, cracked ground have all stuck around from the very beginning to become instantly recognizable franchise staples, and (aside from the bizarre absence of gyroids) Animal Crossing: New Horizons has similarly embraced those franchise gameplay pillars. In addition to permanent island residents like Nook’s Cranny purveyors Timmy and Tommy and wordy museum curator Blathers, there are traveling NPCs that help facilitate some of the game’s other collection systems, such as the weirdly bug-obsessed Flick and C.J., who always craves more fish content for his stream.
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As Blathers only accepts new fossils into the museum, fans are already gearing up to smuggle a new traveling NPC that would always have time for players’ old fossils into their copies of the game. Reddit user jeremyakatheflash posted a snippet of a conversation with their girlfriend, who dares to dream of a roving fossil collector, ”a dog who was a private collector who would heavily imply that he wanted them because dogs like bones.” That ingeniously simple concept unexpectedly set the Animal Crossing: New Horizons community alight and set their imaginations to work. After seeing the wildly positive response, jeremyakatheflash shared their girlfriend’s further conceptualization of the yet unnamed Scottish Terrier, who loses all composure “when he sees the fossils” and potentially “has a little rivalry with Blathers.”
Even though that take on the still theoretical NPC is clearly perfect for the cute-but-grounded (and sometimes downright dark) humor that Animal Crossing: New Horizons has mastered, another Reddit user, ribbonbones, also fleshed out the fan idea in a similar manner while taking some liberties of their own. This version of the character, named Hammond, is imagined to be more of a field archaeologist with a greater focus on his appetite than scientific merit, complete with charming and punny text lines that would fit right into the actual game.
It’s not clear if this bloodhound rendition of the character or the initially imagined Scotty, who embodies on the complete opposite end of the fossil-collecting spectrum from the vaguely British academic Blathers, would be the most ideal version of the character, but it’s hard to imagine players not being instantly infatuated with either if Nintendo heard them out on this one. Until then, everyday that some form of a fossil-buying merchant is absent from Animal Crossing: New Horizons is another day gone to the dogs.
Source: jeremyakatheflash, ribbonbones
