"Animal Crossing New Horizon" is undoubtedly the best-selling game in 2020. It sold 1.88 million units in the first week in Japan alone, successfully breaking the Switch's first week sales record. It has long occupied the top position in the sales charts in major regions worldwide.

 
 

As such a phenomenon-level game that is popular all over the world, the director "Kingkoku Aya" and the producer "Heng Nogami" of this game recently accepted an interview with Spanish media La Vanguardia and were asked about "Animal Crossing New Horizon" "Some decisions on the content of the game when it was launched for global players. In this regard, the two developers believe that it is very important to convert some local Japanese customs (such as insect trapping) into a common gameplay.
 
Nogami: The first game of "Animal Crossing New Horizon" released on N64 was only released in Japan. At that time, everyone in our development team didn't know that insect trapping was a unique game activity only in Japan. We added it to the game After all; catching insects is a great pleasure in our childhood.
 
When the NGC version of the series will be released worldwide, I discussed the local Japanese custom of "catching insects" with the developers responsible for localization. They told me: "Even if players outside of Japan don't know the origin of insect trapping, as long as they can enjoy it, they will definitely like it." With this in mind, we decided to keep the insect trapping method in the game. And now that the entertainment industry has been very developed, many people in Japan have never experienced insect trapping in reality, so in "Animal Crossing New Horizon" they can try things that they usually don't have the opportunity to do in real life.
 
Kyogoku Aya: We know that some of the values ​​that appear in "Animal Crossing New Horizon" are unique to Japan, and there are some values ​​that we don't understand. With this in mind, if we want to delete certain activities or functions in the game, because it is something that is not well known in a certain area of ​​the world, although this will make the game more versatile, it is also likely to be so deleting some content that instinctively attract the attention of some players.
 
The focus of the design we adopted in "Animal Crossing New Horizon" is to add some local essence from different countries and regions, so that most players (no matter where they are) can find things they are familiar with in real life that special sense of happiness. There is nothing more joyful than seeing players finds an item/event festival in ACNH that they don’t know about, and it’s actually very common in another country, and thus become interested in different cultures or customs.