Summary
The online connectivity of the Switch allowedAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsto include various social features that allowed players to connect through island visits and by sending mail and gifts to each other. Another interesting feature thatAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsincluded was an update to the town bulletin board that allowed players to draw pictures and leave them as notices on the board. While this was a fun feature that allowed players to express their creativity, it would have been nice to have the ability to share these posts with others, especially since the series already has the perfect NPC to facilitate this feature.
The town bulletin board has been a staple feature of theAnimal Crossingseries since the original GameCube title, and it allowed the game to notify players of upcoming in-game events while also letting players post their own notices. However, one major drawback of the bulletin board was that none of the posts made by the player could easily be shared with others without having them visit their town. To remedy this, a futureAnimal Crossinggame should use the underutilized NPC Blanca to help share viral posts across players' bulletin boards.
Blanca Should Facilitate Animal Crossing’s Social Messaging Component
Blanca is one of the more bizarre characters in theAnimal Crossingseries, as she appears as a cat without a face and often requests that the player draw her a new one. In the originalAnimal Crossing, Blanca has a chance to appear on the train in place of Rover when the player travels to another town, asking them to draw a new face on her. She appears again inAnimal Crossing: Wild WorldandAnimal Crossing: City Folk, and this time has a chance to visit the player after they’ve traveled to another town and once again asks them to draw a new face for her.
InAnimal Crossing: New Leaf, Blanca takes on somewhat of a different role, as she has become the host of theApril Fools' Day eventwhere she will challenge the player to a game wherein she disguises herself as another villager and asks the player to determine who is the real one and who is Blanca in disguise. Before this entry, Blanca was historically associated withAnimal Crossing’s social features, since her appearance was typically tied to players visiting another’s town. As such, Blanca could return in a big way for a futureAnimal Crossinggame where she governs the player’s ability to share bulletin board posts with others online.
Perhaps the nextAnimal Crossingcould retainNew Horizons' bulletin board drawing mechanic, but take it a step further by integrating it with a social component that allows friends to see each other’s posts without having to visit their town. If this system had a rating component, Blanca could serve as a messenger who showcases the most liked posts each month by displaying them on her face when she visits a player’s town. This type of feature would help make the bulletin board more useful while also giving a classic NPC a new role.
Although Blanca was initially missing fromAnimal Crossing: New Horizons, she was added in the 2.0 Update as a potential Roost invitee, and her poster can be obtained from Photopia via her amiibo.
There is precedent for Nintendo games to utilize this type of social component, with the most famous being Nintendo’s social media website Miiverse, which was popular during the 3DS and Wii U era but was shut down in 2017. TheSplatoonserieshas also featured a similar concept which allows players to create an image or message that will be displayed when their Inkling shows up in the hub world of players they recently played with. If the nextAnimal Crossingwants to emphasize the social connectivity aspect of the series, then including Blanca as a way of sharing bulletin board posts would be a natural fit.
