“Hang in there, kiddo”: A 20-year Animal Crossing Friendship by Sarah L. Hawthorn
1200 words, 6 minutes reading time
Issue 3 (Fall/Winter 2023)
As a kid I didn’t want to be the hero of a video game. I had horrible reflexes and any game with even a hint of fighting scared me. Instead, I loved games like The Sims or Petz, where I could be the benevolent god to simulations. But neither of these games gave me what the cozy game genre does best: a sense of belonging.
Cozy games have had a renaissance. In 2016, Stardew Valley brought an entire farming community genre back to light with hundreds of games following its lead. A Short Walk, Story of Seasons, Coral Island, Palia, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and even cozy-horror games like Night in the Woods all tie their narratives between the player and the villagers to make you feel welcome, needed, and understood. The focus on the importance of friendships and community sets these games apart and keeps you thinking long after you’ve closed the game.
Animal Crossing was my first cozy video game love. Specifically, a black cat within it named Kiki.
Animal Crossing is a simulation game featuring a town full of eclectic animal villagers. The player begins the game with no money, an empty home or tent, and a random selection of villager neighbours to befriend. You are welcomed into the community (some warming to you faster than others), and from there you’re let loose to do what you want. You can fish and collect bugs, dig up fossils, make friends with the local villagers, collect furniture, or just focus on making as much money as possible. It’s one of the most open-ended games out there.
I received a GameCube for Christmas when I was 10, along with a copy of Animal Crossing. I’d been watching a friend play the game at her house and became obsessed with it. This was the era dominated by Neopets and Tamagotchi, both pet simulation games, so Animal Crossing was absolute catnip to me. I also wasn’t a particularly popular 10-year-old, so a peaceful village of friends was particularly intriguing. I’d play the game after school during a ritualized hour or so before doing homework.
Kiki was among my first villagers out of the possible 236 villagers in the GameCube version. Kiki has large, yellow eyes, pink ears, and wears a green argyle knit shirt. She’s a “normal” personality type, which means she’s sweet, bookish, and very friendly to the player. Compared to my other villagers, Wolfgang the cranky wolf and Olivia the snooty cat, who barely gave me the time of day, Kiki was my favourite villager to meet while running around chasing bugs and catching fish. She lived on the bottom left of the map, so I always saved visiting her for last. I have a clear memory of my player talking to Kiki near her house at the last bend of the town’s river. She called me kitty cat and said we were best friends. And that was that. Kiki was officially my favourite Animal Crossing villager, forever.
Since those GameCube days, I played the later versions of the game off and on, but it wasn’t until the 2020 Switch version that I truly dove back into the game. I played Animal Crossing: New Horizons for hours every day along with my friends online. It launched in the first few weeks of the pandemic, which meant a lot of people suddenly had a lot of spare time to play, and a lot of escapism to indulge in. I barely knew anyone that wasn’t playing this franchise that I’d once seen reviewed “as fun as paying taxes”. We got to visit each other’s islands, swap items, meet each other’s villagers, and feel more connected than ever as friends living in different cities. As the months went on and the pandemic got worse (I worked in a hospital at the time in a city far from most of my family and friends), this game represented something safe and constant. Every month brought new events and collectibles in the game and gave me and my friends something to obsess over that didn’t involve existential dread.
But it didn’t have Kiki. Not yet.
While villagers in previous versions were left to the Nintendo Gods to be randomly assigned, in New Horizons you could search on neighbouring islands for new villagers every time one of your own left. If you had enough plane tickets (earned through doing tasks around the island), you could muscle through flying to dozens of islands in order to find your “dreamie”, or favourite villager.
I told my friends about Kiki, and how important she was to me and how much I’d love to have her on my new island again. None of them had her on their islands, but they offered their plane tickets to help me on my search. We’d chat for hours as I hopped from island to island, sharing screenshots of the villagers I found. Every ticket could take 10-20 minutes of grinding to earn. I’d burned through so many I’d lost count, but well into the hundreds. I’d found many cute animals, but none of them was my little black cat in the argyle sweater.
It got to the point where friends from France, Nova Scotia, and California were checking in with me every week or so to find out if I’d found her or not. It felt like a group effort, and the fervour for Kiki between all of us only grew with each passing week without our favourite cat.
My birthday came around in June. I received a card in the mail from one of my Animal Crossing-playing friends with, in essence, Kiki inside. She’d included a small Amiibo card featuring Kiki, which I could scan to receive Kiki on my island.
I had her! I booted out Hans the smug gorilla and she moved in. I moved her house near mine and visited her, heart pounding. She still called me kitty cat, now while sweeping dust in an orange wallpapered home full of boxes. I loved her. I’d grin every time I saw her walking in the rain in her green raincoat or reading under a cherry tree with big round glasses. Even if I was still away from my home, at least she was home.
There was something else I thought about every time I saw Kiki, though. The amount of help and love I got from my friends over the past few months. The extent to which they had gone to make sure I’d have Kiki for my birthday. The hours of joking about the villagers I found instead of her. The memes in our Discord server. Kiki had become our big-eyed mascot for perseverance, in a time where none of us felt like we had a ton of that left day-to-day.
And while I loved having her, I didn’t need her anymore. I had found friends in the 20 years since those lonely grade school days that care about me. And I didn’t need plane tickets to find them.
But this little cat whose goal is to be a writer, who loves drinking mochas, whose favourite song sounds eerily like Twin Peaks, who some players find spooky, whose quotes are “hang in there, kiddo” and “nothing ventured, nothing gained”: She will still be there for me, nose in a book and smile on her face.
Thanks, kitty cat. I’ll find you in the next game.