While New Horizons addresses many of the gameplay criticisms of past entries, this game has added almost as many problems as it has fixed.
- Perhaps the most hated design choice of the game: tools now break after a certain amount of use, save for the ones required to traverse the island. This means if you were in the middle of fishing, catching or digging, you have to immediately craft or buy a new tool. And unlike the Axe from previous installments, tools don't give any visible indication of their current condition, or gradually break as they're used; you could be using a tool that looks brand new only for it to suddenly poof out of existence a moment later. Even worse is that the legendary golden tools, despite having more endurance than their normal and store-bought counterparts, also break after enough use. The DIY recipes for the golden tools take a long period of time to unlock note and the Golden Nuggets needed to upgrade a tool to Gold are not easy to come across either. You can renew certain tools' durabilities by customizing them, but this requires consumable customization kits so you'll still need to manually count how many times you've used each tool, there's the risk you'll forget to "fix" tools this way and have them break on you, and golden tools and axes of all types cannot be refreshed in this manner.
- Secondary profiles will have their progress limited by what the primary profile has unlocked. Since Switch games save to the system memory rather than the cartridge, it's impossible for people who share a console to have separate islands.
- Elements of the DIY system can be frustrating:
- All conventional methods of obtaining DIY recipesnote have a chance to give you recipes for items you've already learned how to craft, which becomes more likely as you fill up your recipe collection. The only uses are to sell them for 200 bells a piece or trade/give them to others. Also didn’t help that before update 2.0 they couldn’t be stored, forcing them to clutter the island to be kept for trades.
- The game does not give you an option to refuse to take duplicate recipes from villagers, despite presenting that option to you if they offer you a recipe you haven't obtained yet.
- Seasonal recipes can only be obtained from balloons while their materials are available, giving small windows as short as 2 weeks to obtain them.
- Even if the DIY workbench you are using is in your house, the DIY system will not pull raw materials from your house's storage if you do not have sufficient raw materials in your pockets; you must manually transfer the materials to your pockets.
- Items must be crafted one at a time.
- Customizable DIY items cannot be customized immediately after crafting them, requiring exiting the DIY system and re-interacting with the workbench to do so.
- The process of getting fish bait (which is useful for spawning fish quickly in specific bodies of water) is a bit lengthy. You have to dig up manila clams on the beach, which always come with a "caught something" text box, and then convert them into bait with a workbench. Manila clams aren't used for anything else other than a few cooking recipes, so some players wish they could just use the clams as bait outright.
- Open plots are needed to spawn random villagers on mystery islands and/or invite villagers moving out from other islands. However, you only have one guarateed day to get a villager of your choice, with the chances of vacant plots auto-filling with random villagers becoming higher with each passing day. Eventually the game will auto-fill the vacant plots, limiting the time where you can get the villager you want.
- The "void villager" concept from New Leaf returns as the "move-in queue", an uncheckable stack of four villager slots that the game either fills with unadopted villagers that have moved out of other players' islands when you are in the same multiplayer session as them, or simply just throws random villagers in. This can compromise the villager hunting experience:
- If you have a villager in your "move-in queue", there is only one day after the plot has been left vacant to adopt a villager before said "move-in queue" villager forcibly moves in.
- Because the "move-in queue" prioritises unadopted villagers (and thus, indirectly, unpopular villagers), it effectively penalises not going villager hunting with an outcome arguably worse than a random autofill. Those who play within larger communities find that the "move-in queue" saddles players with instances of villagers nobody in the group wants; those who play in smaller circles (where adoption of villagers is less common) often find the same villager being passed back and forth via the "move-in queue".
- Any villager in the "move-in queue" will never appear on mystery islands or in the campsite.
- Unlike New Leaf, the "move-in queue" cannot be cleared easily. The only way villagers can be moved out of the "move-in queue" is by using their amiibo card or by letting resident villagers move out and leaving the plot empty overnight for them to move in — something that can only be done every fortnight without "Time Travel".
- If the time limit placed by the "move-in queue" system isn't enough of an issue, villager hunting on mystery islands can add even more frustration:
- You need to expend a Nook Miles Ticket to fly to a mystery island. If you're looking for a specific villager, you'll need a lot of them. The only way to get them is to redeem your Nook Miles at the Nook Stop, and there is no option to redeem multiple Nook Mile Tickets at once. Redeeming a single Nook Miles Ticket takes about 15 seconds worth of text boxes and animations, which will quickly add up if you're stocking up on tickets.
- The mystery island algorithm selects a random villager species out of the 35 availablenote , and then it selects a random villager of that species note . This means you normally have a 1 in 140 chance of finding Octavian (4 octopuses), but a 1 in 805 chance of finding the likes of Ankha, Bob, Lolly, or Raymond (23 cats).
- Unlike with the campsite, the game doesn't keep track of the villagers you have encountered on previous mystery islands, nor the villagers who have previously lived on your island. This means that it is not rare to find the same villager three times or more during a villager hunt, sometimes even twice in a row.
- There is no option to directly travel from one mystery island to another. Traveling to and leaving a mystery island each involve multiple boxes of dialogue from Orville and Wilbur.
- The campsite, which provides two out of the four means of choosing a villager to come to your island, has more than a few problems:
- Once the campsite is built, a Smug villager will visit the next day. Accepting their move-in is mandatory to progress, so while you could get a sought after villager like Marshal, Julian or Raymond, there's a high chance of being forced to accept a polarizing or unpopular villager from the pool of Smug villagers.
- After a villager has visited the campsite, you are guaranteed to not get another campsite villager during the following two days. From there, it increases 5% each day until the sixth day, topping out at 20%. Bad luck could mean zero campsite villagers for weeks.
- Random campers' dialogue is randomly selected. Only some dialogue gives the chance to invite the camper, whose responses include rejecting your offer, asking to play a 1-in-2 or 1-in-4 game of pure chance to move-in, or a mere 10% chance per invite that they will immediately accept your offer. Unlucky players could end up mashing the A-button for 20 minutes straight with no success.
- Some of the random camper dialogue for "rejection" or "lost card game" is exceptionally deceptive, with lines suggesting that the camper will come back shortly after, or that something needs to be done to call them back. In reality, it's quite the opposite.note .
- If your island is full and you successfully invite a random camper from the campsite, they will randomly name a villager that they will replace. Rejecting the offer normally will lock their move-out choice. The only way to re-roll involves closing and reopening the game without saving at the right moment mid-conversation, then restarting the arduous invitation process.
- Moving in an amiibo camper is more complicated than it should be. Unlike the one day in New Leaf, getting an amiibo camper to move in is now a minimum three-day affair. Each invite, an amiibo camper will request a random DIY item, which must be crafted and given to them within the day. If you can't obtain the materials, you're forced to invite an additional day. It also resets the random camper chances.
- At launch, having a villager in your "move-in queue" also disabled the ability to invite that villager to the campsite via amiibo until you moved them in through it. Unless you adopt that villager directly, the only way to obtain them was go through said queue, which could take up to 1.5 months and saddle the player with a "gifted" version of the villager. This was fortunately fixed via a patch.
- While you now have absolute control over whether your resident villagers stay or leave, getting rid of an unwanted villager is a massive pain in the rear:
- Unless you have amiibo, it's completely random which villagers are selected to move out, and it can only happen once every two weeks on non-event days.
- The algorithm for move-out selections can be especially annoying if you are gunning for all your villagers' photos. All that matters is friendship levels — lower levels make it significantly more likely that villager will be selected, with only four exceptions, with these being the last villager to move in, the last villager whose move out request you denied, a villager whose birthday is within the next seven days, and a villager whose house is in the process of being moved. It's possible a villager could request moving multiple times as you seek their photo.
- The game makes it difficult to completely ignore an unwanted villager. Villagers cannot be fenced in by fences or furniture, so you are guaranteed to see them even if you'd rather not. You must also talk to them at least once before they'll ever consider leaving. It gets even worse if said unwanted villager is the most recent move-in, as the last villager who arrived at the island will never ask to leave, so you'll either have to get rid of another villager first or hope that you get lucky or constantly re-roll the campsite pick.
- Moving buildings involves more than a few annoyances. Moving a villager's house necessitates watching a lengthy set of cutscenes where Tom Nook has the villager show up, they (will always) agree to have their house moved, and then they leave again, before you can get the kit. And since a minimum of 8 (and often the full 10) houses are guaranteed to be filled before the town rating will be high enough to get terraforming, it can get quite annoying to move houses around to fit one's desired town layout afterward. Furthermore, you can't move an empty plot (which would logically be the best time to move said plot), and you can't make small adjustments to the position of a building within its footprint (such as moving a house one row forward) unless you move the building twice, which requires two days and twice the construction fees.
- The Bunny Day event saw a lot of negative attention for its mechanics, which were criticized as unnecessarily intrusive. Namely, the candy eggs that appear throughout the island take the place of other resources (e.g. fish, stones, and wood) and even show up on Mystery Islands, where their spawn rates are even higher. As a result, they can quickly clog one's inventory and make it harder to complete tasks centered around the materials they replace (including several tutorial sidequests). The event attracted so many complaints that Nintendo outright nerfed the spawn rate of eggs (except for on Bunny Day proper) and shortened the length of the event from 12 days to just 8: a "pre-event" that lasts from the proceeding Sunday to the following Saturday, where Bunny Day proper takes place.
- The implementation and stability of online multiplayer is arguably one of the areas that is most heavily criticised:
- The biggest issue is the lack of autosave in online multiplayer and no ability for the host to force saves, occurring only when they leave. Disconnections will thus remove all progress from the session.
- Opening your island up requires going to the airport and answering a long list of questions. You also must manually close the gate, which is required to re-enable all single-player only features (purchasing from Nook Shopping, spawning wasps etc) and autosaving.
- Dodo Codes allow you to invite people to your island without having to add them to your Switch friends list. Great idea in theory, but if you open your gates via Dodo Code, that code becomes the only way to bring people to your island until you close it. Mistyping also forces you to restart the whole dialogue to correct the code.
- The game will interrupt every player in the session with a long cutscene and a loading screen whenever a player arrives or exits. If any person in the session is in any kind of menu or dialogue, it delays others from entering or leaving.
- An exceptionally disliked mechanic prior to the Version 2.0.0 update was "variation-locking" of furniture, in which each island's Nook's Cranny only ever sells one variant of each furniture item as a means of promoting multiplayer. As these variants can't be changed with customization kits, the only way to obtain different ones without multiplayer was shaking them out of trees, shooting down balloons, or obtaining them from Redd or Wisp, and even then there's no guarantee that you'll obtain a missing variant. Furthermore, certain seasonal furniture that isn't crafted, furniture that costs over 10,000 bells, and Nook Miles furniture are all exempt from these methods. This attracted so many complaints that Nintendo eventually gave players the ability to change furniture variants (even ones exempt from previous methods) at Reese & Cyrus' stand on Harv's island in Version 2.0.0.
- The fitting room at Able Sisters is the only way of seeing or buying the different color options of a piece of clothing that is on sale. Despite this, it also limits you to buying what you try on, meaning you can only get one version of a clothing item at a time and have to re-enter the fitting room repeatedly to get more, with dialogue lines from Mable every time.
- The path-laying functionality in Island Designer also does have a few issues:
- Island Designer, required for laying paths, is only unlocked after you reach a 3-star island rating, which marks the end of the tutorial phase. This means that you have to reach that rating without the ability to even mark basic dirt paths.
- Despite a greater emphasis on designing outdoor areas, paths still have to be placed one square at a time. Also, if furniture is on the ground, it must be removed before a path can be placed. Understandable, but it makes it extremely time-consuming to mark paths and create large areas with the required flooring.
- Custom designs placed on the ground can still be erased (often unintentionally) by standing on them and pressing the Y button, even if they were placed using Island Designer. Many players wish that this wasn't the case.
- Custom design paths also don't show up on the map as paths, instead acting like empty grass spots.
- Custom design paths also don't make any sound when walked on, so no louder footsteps on stone- or gravel-appearing paths, nor the rustling sound of grass when walking on dirt or grassy paths.
- Custom designs can't be rotated, so a full set of designs for a single type of custom path (e.g. horizontal tile, vertical tile, 4-way junctions, corners etc.) will consume plenty of the limited number of custom design slots available. Many players thus yearned for more custom design slots. This was resolved in the 1.9.0 update with the inclusion of 50 additional custom design slots.
- One of the limits of terraforming is that the location of river mouths and Resident Services cannot be changed. This wouldn't be a big problem, except that some of the starting island layouts have Resident Services extremely close to the airport, or have "double south" river mouths that create thin strips of land along the east and west sides of the island. These can significantly complicate design and planning of island areas. Since island layout is chosen at the very beginning, a new player may not realise the significance of these features, only to run into significant difficulties during the terraforming stage.
- The fact that certain items can't be put into storage (turnips, trees, bushes, flowers) has been met with contention from players, due to the consequences of this limitation resulting in them having to either go out of their way to find unnecessarily elaborate or intrusive alternative methods of keeping them safe (e.g. cluttering empty rooms and island space with them, flattening out islands just to have more room for turnips, or crafting large amounts of items that provide table space to make their storage aesthetically pleasing) or have them clog up valuable inventory space. This problem used to be particularly egregious for DIY recipe cards, as this was how the game pressured you to trade your duplicate recipes off, until the 2.0.0 update finally allowed players to place DIY recipe cards in their home storage.
- The island rating system has more than a few problems — especially since you have to reach a 3 star rating to unlock terraforming:
- While the island rating system has become more complexnote , Isabelle's advice is still not very useful. Isabelle will simply suggest one thing that could improve your island rating, which often will not be the most effective option (e.g. "place fences" when a far superior way to improve the "development" score would be to set up bridges or get the maximum 10 villagers). This is especially painful when going for three stars to end the tutorial phase.
- While the "development" score is easy to push to 3 stars and beyond, the "nature" score is a massive pain in the rear, especially if flowers are not your thing. 270 nature points are needed to attain the 3-star rating. There is a hard cap on the amount of nature points obtainable from trees and shrubs — 190. Disregarding the minor contributions from DIY furniture placed outside, this means you need an absolute minimum of 80 flowers on your island — which means that you will need to plant and propagate a substantial quantity of flowers to get out of the tutorial phase. Those who aren't interested in flowers in the slightest end up having to waste Bells on flower seeds or shovel up a bunch from other islands just to make the quota.
- Until it was changed in an unknown patch, the dropped item limit was extremely aggressive. Any item dropped outside, even on top of placed furniture, counted against the limit. If you had more than 15 dropped items, you could not achieve 5 stars. This meant that achieving 5 stars and leaving all your duplicate DIY recipes somewhere for guests to take were mutually exclusive. This was subsequently changed to only count items dropped on the ground.
- The first five villagers (a Jock and a Big Sister, followed by a Peppy, Lazy, and a Normal afterwards) to move to an island during the game's tutorial phase are stuck with low quality house decorations and extremely basic wallpaper, flooring and furniture that doesn't accurately reflect their personality (instead being one of five preset designs based on their personality, favourite colours and (for the starter Lazy villager) local fruit, with the Jock and Big Sister having it the worst). While understandable in the context of the storyline, the bigger problem is that they will never upgrade to their canonical rooms — they are stuck with that basic wallpaper, that basic flooring and that furniture layout. Currently, the only way to give them their proper room - aside from progressing in the Happy Home Paradise DLC expansion and unlocking the ability to reset your island inhabitants' homes - is to have them move out the island and bring them back later, either with an amiibo, by island hopping, or from another player's island.
- Fruit shaken out of fruit trees or presents falling from popped balloons can disappear from the map completely if they land in a big enough space occupied by flowers, dropped items or placed furniture items. Non-fruit trees will not drop items when shaken and trees, bamboo stalks and rocks will fail to generate materials when struck if nearby floor spaces are occupied as well.
- Like in New Leaf, presents can drop into the river or ocean and become unobtainable after falling from a balloon, although they are coded to try their best to float above solid ground, and making a present fall into water on accident is actually one of the hidden special Nook milestones.
- The game's handling of flower breeding proved to be a very sharp double-edged sword. While the greater hardiness of flowers compared to previous titles gives players more agency in handling them, it also makes it easy for them to quickly overrun one's island thanks to rainfall and snowfall automatically watering all flowers at once, which results in more spawning the next day (even next to solitary flowers). Combined with how difficult it is to keep them confined (requiring the use of physical objects, patterns, or non-dirt paths), the lack of a hard limit on flower growth, and the fact that villagers will occasionally water flowers themselves, this results in managing flowers becoming unnecessarily difficult.
- Speaking of flowers, breeding rare hybrids has been made exceptionally harder:
- The flower breeding system now uses Mendelian genetics. Thus, breeding the rare hybrids is no longer as simple as putting the right colours together — you need to put flowers of with the correct genotype together, which often involves hybrid flowers that look exactly the same as a regular flower of that colour. Even if you do that right there's only a chance — sometimes as low as 5% — that when the flowers breed, the rare hybrid will spawn.
- Of course, to get a hybrid flower, you need the flower to breed first. Instead of the "new flower limit" mechanism used by New Leaf, New Horizons gives a flower a chance of breeding when watered, so players can no longer game the system by watering only those plants that they want to breed. The base chance of a flower breeding, whether it is watered by precipitation, a resident player, a villager or any combination of the above, is an abysmal 5%. The only way to actively increase that chance is to have visiting players water the flowersnote . This added layer of chance means that breeding a rare hybrid can be an excruciating experience.
- Naturally-generated rocks cannot be moved manually, and if one is removed by hitting them with a shovel or axe after eating fruit, another will spawn on a random 1x1 space on any available dirt tile on your island the next day. The only way to have some semblance of control over where rocks can spawn is to spend hours placing down custom patterns, dropped items or solid pathways all over your island except for where you want the rocks to go, and dropping custom patterns and items everywhere can severely alter your island's rating, making it more difficult to progress.
- Collecting all six fruit types is impossible without trading, since you can only obtain four types of fruit on your own: your native fruit, the fruit your mom sends in a letter, coconuts from any Nook Miles island, and the fixed "sister fruit" generated by one rare Nook Miles island. This leaves two fruit types unobtainable without visiting another player's town or having another player send some. To make things worse, this prevents the player from crafting any of the three multi-fruit DIY itemsnote , all of which need all five of the non-coconut fruits. Furthermore, if the player is unable to obtain apples, they are locked out of crafting a "juicy-apple TV", the only DIY television item (and thus the only way to obtain a television in the early game). As salt in the wound, it's possible for the fruit Mom sends to be the same as the "sister fruit", locking you out of a third fruit type.
- On weekdays, your town will be visited by one of nine (eight before 1.3.0) special guests per day, with the weekends taken by K.K. Slider (Saturday) and Daisy Mae (Sunday morning). Prior to 1.3.0, Saharah (rug, flooring and wallpaper vendor), Kicks (bag, socks and shoes vendor) and Leif (flower and shrub vendor) were guaranteed to appear on 3 weekdays out of 5. This left the 5 other guests (Flick, CJ, Redd, Label and Gulliver) having to fight for a mere 2 slots per week. This made it exceptionally difficult to encounter some of them, even with a system designed to increase the chances of encountering the ones you did not meet during the previous week. This was resolved in 1.3.0 by removing the guaranteed slots for the above three NPCs, and moving K.K. Slider's concert from Friday to Sunday if there is an event on Saturday. Nevertheless, certain annoyances remain, such as there not being a guarantee for visitors to come to your island after a period of absence, which can result in desired visitors not going to your island for weeks.
- In an attempt to alleviate this issue further, the 2.0.0 update introduced a plaza on Harvey's island where co-op stores can be built, allowing players to visit Leif, Redd, Saharah and Kicks any day of the week. Despite this, even once their co-op stores are complete, any of those four travelling NPCs can still visit your island on any given weekday, which not only closes up their store in Harvey's co-op hub (which, in some cases like Saharah and Redd, operate slightly differently than when they're visiting your island) but prevents other NPCs without hubs, such as Flick, CJ, or Label, from appearing (though in the case of Label, some would argue that this is a good thing).
- K.K. Slider's Saturday concerts can be a bit of a nuisance.
- In general, K.K. Slider will always come to the island on Saturdays. However, if an event is taking place on Saturday (like the Fishing Torney, the Bug-Off, or other holiday events), the concert will be moved to Sunday. The real problem comes if there is yet another event taking place on Sunday (e.g. the Fireworks Show that takes place each Sunday of August), in which case K.K. Slider will come to the island on Monday. The problem here is that K.K. Slider overrides every other visiting NPC that can come to the island from Mondays to Fridays. Before the 1.3.0 update, he could come to the island on Friday if there was an event taking place on Saturday.
- K.K. Slider's concerts are marked as an event day, meaning that villagers are unable to initiate any sidequest — and that includes move-out requests. This means that there will always be at least one day every week in which none of your villagers will be selected by the game to ask to move out — even if the move-out cooldown expires on the day the concert takes place.
- Just as other characters that host event days, K.K. Slider prevents Celeste and Wisp from appearing on the island at night, which is especially frustrating in Celeste's case if you happen to have a meteor shower on the day the concert takes place, as the game prioritizes heavy meteor showers for Celeste to appear, so tough luck if you've only had light meteor showers, or no meteor showers at all, throughout the rest of the week. This is rather confusing as if there is an event taking place on Sunday, Daisy Mae can still appear during the morning to sell turnips, unlike Celeste and Wisp at night.
- Unlike custom greetings or nicknames, player-written catchphrases can randomly spread to other villagers without them asking you first — even without the interaction between villagers that shows one adopting the other's custom catchphrase. It's possible to reset an unwanted catchphrase by "discussing the resident" with Isabelle, but having to do this every time a catchphrase jumps to another villager is tedious, and this is kind of obtuse since the game doesn't tell you you can reset catchphrases this way (most people incorrectly assume discussing a resident makes them want to move out, since Isabelle makes it sound like they've committed some serious offense). This is even more confusing in New Horizons as unlike previous games, default catchphrases no longer spread!
- The gifting system has been praised for improvements, but also received criticism for various reasons:
- You can't immediately give gifts to new villagers, requiring talking for several days first.
- Many villager states block giving gifts, such as fishing or sitting down, with no way to force the villager out of them.
- They won't ever use wallpapers, flooring, etc. The only way to customize their houses like that is to play through the Happy Home Paradise DLC.
- Gifting most items can result in them replacing furniture or taking space in their house, with no way to reliably undo any such change without the Happy Home Paradise DLC.
- Before 2.0.4, there was no way to stop a villager from wearing gifted clothing. Even after Isabelle's functionality was finally fixed in 2.0.4, Isabelle still cannot instantly clear a villager's clothing inventory.
- Completion of most villager requests counts as a silent, automatic gift of the vilager's requested item. In particular, in the gift delivery sidequest, the recipient villager will add the clothing item to their inventory even if the player told the recipient villager during the sidequest that they did not look good in said clothing item.
- Adopted villagers, including those that autofill via move-in queue, will bring their clothing inventory and some changes to their furniture to their next island. This is considered so annoying that many villager traders will refuse any villager who's "Gifted", with "Ungifted" villagers fetching higher prices.
- Getting the photos of your villagers can be very frustrating:
- To unlock the chance to obtain a villager's photo from a villager as a return gift, the villager must minimally be at friendship level 5 out of 6. Early on, you cannot directly tell what friendship level you are at with a certain villager — the only indirect hints towards where your friendship level lies are if a villager asks for a secret greeting (level 5) or asks to buy something from you (level 6). As of 2.0.0, some of the frustration in this regard has been addressed — once you build her co-op tent at Harvey's island, Katrina can not only reveal what your friendship level is with a particular villager for a 1,000 bell fee, but she can also bless your friendship with that villager for 10,000 bells more, causing you to improve your friendship level at double the rate per every gift given and every request fulfilled.
- In addition to the friendship level criteria, to roll for a villager's photo as a return gift, the daily gift given must exceed a sale value of 750 bells (as of the 1.4.0 update). Even if such a gift is given, the chance of obtaining a photo is tiny, maxing out at just over 10% per gift. Since 1.4.0, this has been further undercut by a 15% chance of wallpaper or flooring being the return gift (rolled before the "photo chance"), and 1.9.0 made the "fruit stack trick" (gifting a stackable item from a full inventory), the only way to circumvent the 15% wallpaper/flooring chance, exceptionally impracticalnote . This means that you could get a villager's photo within weeks of them moving into your island, or it could take months.
- Despite furniture having a larger role in New Horizons than in previous games (because furniture can now be placed outside), the Nook Shopping order limit has been reduced to its lowest since the original game (five orders daily, delivered the next day), making buying significant quantities of furniture a major hassle. This also makes it a pain to craft DIY items that use significant quantities of catalogue furniture as raw materials (in particular, those using books and magazines).
- Wall-mounted furniture and rugs cannot be placed outside and thus are useless outside the player's house. This is despite there being panels and cliff sides that wall mounted furniture could ostensibly be mounted on. While this is more understandable for rugs, there are more than a few rugs that ought to be able to be placed outside (e.g. a tarpaulin and a mud mat).
- Unlike New Leaf which had a megaphone system, this game has no way to easily locate your villagers. If they are not at home, you will either have to search your entire island (including the shops, museum, and homes of other villagers) or reset in hopes of them appearing in their home upon reload.
- Out of all the seasonal recipes, the summer shells recipes (and the materials required to make them) are considered pretty worthless. There are only four recipes that aren't wallpaper or flooring: the shell wreath, shell wand, shellfish pochette and summer-shell rug (added in 1.6.0). Since you can only have six wallpapers and flooring on display in your house at any one time (and villagers can't use them), they're not very useful. When compared to the other seasonal recipes, summer shells feels underutilized and quite possibly unnecessary, leaving many to wonder if summer shells were rushed in at the last minute as to fill a seasonal void in summer.
- While swimming is vastly improved compared to New Leaf in nearly every way possible, one annoying element added is that the wetsuit can't be added to a magic wand outfit or the tool ring despite being both a clothing item and a tool. Additionally, you can't change into the wetsuit if you're already wearing a wand outfit, meaning you'd have to manually pull your wand out and turn off the outfit just to go swimming. As a result, switching in and out of the wetsuit is a much more cumbersome process than it needs to be for what is otherwise considered one of the best mechanics introduced in the first summer update.
- While swimming, you are completely unable to interact with your inventory. This makes a degree of sense, but it has the unfortunate effect of forcing the player to return to shore in order to toss anything clogging their pockets while searching for a specific creature that has evaded them. Having an inventory full of unswappable items (that is anything that is not a fish or a sea creature) forces the player to throw the sea creature they caught back to the ocean immediately.
- The announcements whenever starting your game for the day became very unpopular for a long time:
- There were only a couple of events highlighted in daily announcements (birthdays, changing of seasons/seasonal DIY sets rotating in, meteor showers, campsite visits, villagers moving in, villagers moving out, holidays, event days etc.) and they were not very common. Their rarity meant that Isabelle would often go on tangents that, while cute and funny at first, got annoying very quickly since they repeated ad nauseam. It didn't help that "no announcements" meant no campsite villager and thus, no progress possible on that day on the game's longest-term goal (moving in the villagers you want). This was partially fixed in the November 5th 2.0.0 update, as Isabelle now has dialogue that pertains to which special NPC is visiting the island that day, but it can still be skipped if she has any other announcements to give that day.
- While very situational, if Isabelle is supposed to give out a seasonal craft based on the current season and camper is visiting, a villager is moving in or out, or a birthday is occurring, she will delay giving the recipe until a day where she has no news to give. On a similar note, if a meteor shower happens to overlap with any of the events previously mentioned, Isabelle won't tell you about it and you could potentially miss a great opportunity to obtain star fragments and a Celeste visit. Thankfully your villagers can comment on a meteor shower happening at night if you talk to them, though it may take a few conversations for them to spill the beans.
- As 5 AM is when the game starts a "new day", if you happen to cross that time while playing and you are outdoors, the game will stop everything to do Isabelle's announcements and respawn you back at your house, which is really annoying for those who play around this time. Thankfully, this doesn't happen if you happen to be indoors or on a mystery island, but the moment you step outside / return to your island, Isabelle's routine will kick in. In a similar vein, in the Happy Home Paradise expansion, if you start working on the apparel shop before 5 AM and finish after, you can't partake in the Playable Epilogue; the moment you step outside, the day will roll over and the festival will end.
- Some people have issues with aspects of the drop-off box in front of Nook's Cranny:
- After selling an item through the drop-off box, Timmy or Tommy will call you on your cell phone at the start of your next play session to inform you that they sent the bells to your savings account. Many find it redundant given that the drop-off box already totals the amount of bells that will be sent to your savings account, which is 80% their full price. This is especially irritating for late night or early morning players, who are forced to use the drop-off box exclusively to sell items unless they "time travel" or either Flick or CJ are visiting the island.
- Items cannot be taken back from the box after placing them inside. Accidentally sold a bit too many fruits or crafting materials and don't have enough left over to craft an item you want? Too bad, they're gone for good.
- While every axe strike to a tree has a 1/3 chance of producing each type of wood (wood, hardwood, softwood), the amount and utility of the DIY recipes that use each type of wood is not balanced out. Wood is used for numerous DIY items, including items in the Wooden set (which makes great starter furniture), the highly sought-after Ironwood set and certain fundamental items for outdoor decoration (park bench, stall). In addition, 3 Wood is required to re-craft a Stone Axe after it breaks. Hardwood is used in less recipes, but is used for DIY items in the general-purpose Log set and can also be used to craft items in the Natural Garden set, which make great outdoor furniture. However, softwood is mainly used in the Wooden-Block set, whose items and customization options have a very specific playroom aesthetic. Thus, in the endgame, the player may often be faced with situations where they have too much hardwood and softwood and too little regular wood. It doesn't help that there are only two softwood-only DIY recipes (the two herringbone walls) that allow you to liquidate 15 softwood in a single crafting step.
- One of the draws of the game is customization— and to Nintendo's credit, the game offers a lot of customization options. A lot. The problem is that if you use too many, this can cause the game to chug in handheld mode. While ordinarily a problem you can mitigate, there are some people who have a Switch lite and thus can only play in handheld mode. Thus, it might end up causing issues with lag if you are say, hosting an island party and a handheld player comes in and starts chugging.
- Trying to catch fish that only spawn at piers is by far the worst part about fishing. There are four kinds of fish that will only appear near the normal pier and the airport pier, the latter of which you can't even fish on, but the major problem here isn't just the fact that they're rare, but that their spawn areas are shared with the rest of the sea fish, meaning that any big shadow that you see at a pier is highly likely to belong to a sea bass. Exacerbating this problem is the fish bait: on your island, fish will very rarely spawn near the pier, if at all (although they are much more likely to spawn near the piers at mystery islands), while spreading fish bait will force a spawn, the chances of what spawns are no different than naturally spawning fish, and trying to amass a large quantity of fish bait is tedious, as you have to dig up manilla clams from the beach and then craft them into fish bait one at a time. Ultimately, catching pier fish is a huge hassle that is more dependent on luck than it should be.
- A very minor one, but the fact that there is no way to select pronouns as well as a gender (or "style", as the game puts it), meaning that all villagers refer to you with gender-neutral pronouns (In the English version at least, as a game set in a language with grammatical gender must assign male and female pronouns to the player and the villagers). While the majority agree that this is a step in the right direction for non-binary members of the community, they also feel that the inability to be referred to as anything other than "they" and "them" is rather jarring if you don't go by those pronouns and makes choosing a style in a mirror pointless.
- Before 2.0.0, the rewards for Wisp's sidequest were generally felt to be lackluster. Unlike the GameCube game, there is an undisclosed cap on the value of the items that Wisp can give out, and before 2.0.0, the cap for "something expensive" was extremely low. This was a far cry from the other daily NPCs with sidequests who will give you exclusive items. In addition, Wisp doesn't offer his services from the Gamecube games to de-weed the town instantly or provide a free roof colour change (although that last one would be a bit redundant given that Tom Nook already does that provided you have paid off all of your loans). This was remedied in 2.0.0 by immensely buffing Wisp's reward pool - heavily favouring furniture, removing the chance that Wisp would give something of low value despite picking "something expensive" and significantly increasing the maximum value of the items in Wisp's drop pool.
- Completing the Art wing of the museum is an exceptionally drawn-out process without other players' assistance. The main source of art is from Redd, who appears, on average, once every 2 weeks as an island visitor offering 4 art pieces each time. Like past games, only genuine pieces may be donated, and there's no guarantee that Redd will be selling non-forgeries and/or genuine ones you don't already have. And like New Leaf, a player can only buy one piece of art per Redd appearance. Male residents may rarely send pieces, but it's luck if it's genuine or always fake if from a "Smug" resident. Thus, without trading, visiting other people's islands where Redd is visiting, making additional accounts so each can make a purchase from Redd, or time traveling (which re-rolls his stock), it will take an excruciatingly long time to complete the art wing. Update 2.0.0 helped address this through building his co-op store on Harvey's island, but it is only two pieces a week unless you buy a piece.
- amiibo cards are the only guaranteed way to move in a specific villager, but they come in blind bags, and the first four series have become scarce over the years.
- The 2.0.0 update introduced Kapp'n's Boat Tours, which allow players to travel to Nook Mile-esque islands that can contain a variety of unique collectibles, treasures, crops, gyroid fragments and resources added in the new update. However, players are only allowed one boat tour per day, as opposed to as many as you can afford with Nook Mile Island tickets. This severely limits how many resources you can amass that are exclusive to these islands (provided you don't own the Happy Home Paradise DLC expansion) such as vines, farming crops and gyroid fragments. Not helping matters is that, much like Nook Mile Islands, the only way to influence which island you'll arrive at is to randomly get the "Belongings" fortune from Katrina, which guarantees that Kapp'n will take you to a rare island.
- Placing and relocating buildings and your house is a very nice element of customization freedom that hadn't been offered before, but the odd-number lengths of the museum and your fully-upgraded house (in terms of spaces on the map grid) make many symmetrical placement options for them unavailable. This is especially frustrating because this means they cannot be lined up with the fixed-size bridges and stairs.
- One of the most hated aspects about Happy Home Paradise is that if you reduce the dimensions of the room you're working on, any items that are not completely within the room's new bounds are deleted, with no way to undo it. This makes it easy to lose lots of progress because you forgot to account for some furniture at the edges of the room before shrinking it. The only warning you get is that any items that will become partially out-of-bounds are highlighted in light yellow; there aren't any audio warnings, confirmations about the adjustments you're about to make, or other explicit verbal alerts about it.
- Near the end of the Happy Home Paradise storyline, Lottie falls ill. At this point, a random villager will show up and demand a house, which the player has no choice but to design according to that villager's preferred theme. While the task can be cheesed by placing the requisite furniture and doing little else, villagers and their homes cannot be removed from the Happy Home Paradise archipelago, and said villager will appear on the Happy Home Paradise main island, no matter how much the player does not want to see them. The only recourse is to put said villager in a role in a rarely-visited facility.
Looks like someone left quietly.
