I've been thinking and playing a lot of Animal Crossing lately (like a lot of people) and I've actually come to the conclusion that this game is brilliant and innovative precisely because you are *at best* only nominally the main character.

I understand not everyone is into that, but that doesn't change the fact that it's brilliant, innovative, and unique.

Not everyone is into shmups, arpgs, jrpgs, mmorpgs, etc, but in general folks can recognize innovation.

In Animal Crossing as a series, most of what you do... doesn't matter. Which is actually true about many video games, but they are invested in pretending like it does, and entire subcultures spring up how little your actions matter as a result

Speedrunning is a good example of this.

Did you spend 50 hours beating a game you enjoyed? I enjoyed this game so much I found a way to play less of it! In the process of this, I have proved most of what you did was unnecessary.

Animal Crossing embraces this by saying "Yes, the local mafia don finds what you do important, and will reward you for hard work, but outside of that most folks on the island don't care"

If you're nice to the other islanders they'll be nice to you, unrelated to "progression"

Your islanders are essentially happy living in very basic housing, and are impressed by you improving your house but never jealous.

They comment on weird stuff you do, but they... have their own lives.

There's no world ending threat, and you never have to pay off a loan.

This world exists whether you do anything. It is never portrayed as likely to collapse without you, but beyond that, it's never even implied it would massively change without you.

This is conceptually amazing.

This thread brought to you by the genius choice to run the credits during the first K.K. concert, when my brain was like "Bwa? I'm not anywhere near finishing the game yet"

Then realizing that you never finish Animal Crossing. You abandon it. And the game is fine with that