shoogles' A Relaxing Critique of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is daunting in its length, but comes from one of the sharpest minds in gaming discourse. The video's length is greatly helped by its wonderful structure: shoogles establishes a goal for his island at the video's start, and goes down tangents as the days pass in his island. It's at once relaxing as the title says, and an incredibly well-done case study into how the Animal Crossing franchise has grown and evolved over the years.

The therapeutic potential of video games deserves more exploration. In addition to games specifically designed to help deal with mental illness, games can provide safe ways for us to experiment with and overcome challenges that are harder to tackle directly in real life (as I've touched on before).

Tagging @imperium-of-dawn for this as they also asked;

The long and the short of it is that it’s inspired by a segment in ShayMay’s gigantic Omega Ruby review, when he discusses how the ludonarratives of the games tackle the dog-old questionings into supposed animal abuse within the series. Tagging the specific segment of the video for ease of use:

https://youtu.be/kFC6mDKF-0c?t=5118

Within the games, their best answer to that question is that the makeup of their society is one inherently pre-disposed to working more harmoniously, and as such, there is very little worry about abuse of power. Those that do are few in far between, and generally are small enough to be snuffed out, especially in a world where a major crime organization can be defeated by a child.

It’s a society that, by the combination of both trying to sidestep the potential accusations *and* having a disinterest for complex political climates, has resulted in a world design that is chiefly concerned with the benefit of all above all else.

That’s inherently socialistic, and while there’s virtually no direct comparisons or parallels to speak of as of late, I think the games could very easily pull a certain closer theme or ideal and easily adjust a specific region’s plotline to explore a small tangent.

The world is already concerned with systems that are the benefit of all, so it wouldn’t be that hard to imagine say, a story where the antagonist is trying to pull and condense power all into one entity and thus would cause the game to essentially be arguing against the short-sightedness of most capitalistic gains.

I’m not one to go all gung-ho towards socialism, my actual political beliefs are more of the “do what we can right now instead of the impossibly perfect”, but the games are already at that impossibly high perfection that it can very easily pull off such critiques and testing of the waters. Sometimes the best proof to a better social system is to see it in action, and the world of Pokémon already does that.

It’s not like the games are strangers to critiquing environment hazards; the entirety of the Sea Mauville was a subtle criticism of a toxic work environment brought up by the pursuit of draining resources. A criticism that, considering the games are made in Japan, is rather topical of them, and you really don’t see it that often.

I usually don’t tell people to go watch videos, but if you are a sonic fan:

GO WATCH THIS VIDEO(and part 2)!

It’s insightful, makes many good points, and part 2 is one of the best videos on the internet in my opinion.