Animal Crossing: New Horizons might well have received upgrades in the more traditional game departments - like shiny HD loveliness and new character customisation options - but one more welcome upgrade has been confirmed today. Yes, your island name can be up to ten characters in length. Get in.
Eagle-eyed viewers of last month's Nintendo Direct will have spotted that certain screens showed the user's island name as 'Nintenland'; while this suggested that ten-character names would be accepted, it was strangely never actually confirmed - or indeed mentioned at all - by Nintendo.
Today, though, Nintendo has finally confirmed the news for the first time in this tweet:
So, why is this such a big deal? Well, in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, players were restricted to eight-character town names, and while that might not seem like much of a difference, you'd be surprised just how much this two-character buffer can open up your ideas. Our dream of living in a place called 'NLife4Ever' can finally be realised, which is more than enough reason to celebrate in our book.
With 10 characters to play with, what will you be naming your island? Let us know in the comments below.
Comments (44)
Moonscar Island it is.
Paradise. Again.
Now these are the sorts of revolutionary quantum leaps that the franchise is best known for!
I used Koholint for all my AC games since the GameCube, so I should be fine. Good news for others though.
11 characters or riot!!1! Kidding. 10 will do.
@Kaas
This is the most appropriate use of Koholint too, it's an island name.
I've always called my village Blocco after Bloxwich the centre if the universe
My daughter wanted it to be called Crystal Falls which still won't fit so that's one debate avoided!
Am I the only person here who thought there was going to be a list of 10 Animal characters including Terry the Terrapin, Simon the Shark and Amy the Amoeba?
@krvstkvlt I'm sure you can name it "11 characters".
I always favour 'Nowhere' although to add a more hopeful spin I may call my island 'Somewhere'
Does anyone know whether land space will feel limited in late game?
So, Maximum = 10 villagers?
Well...
Same as New Leaf.
Aw man, I wanted to name mine New Dog Food, after my town in New Leaf. I could eliminate the spaces, but I'm pedantic about my grammar and that is completely unacceptable.
I think maybe I am a just huge fan of the Switch's portability, because so many of the 1st party and exclusive 3rd party games are utterly wasted on me. For me the Switch is playing Doom, Skyrim, The Witcher, etc whilst watching the cricket or taking a sh*t.
Smashville will now be an option
Bedlam, same as always.
Usually go with Konoha for my village names in AC, but might rename to Booty Island in reference to Monkey Island 2 ^_^
I've been running with Anitown since the GCN days. But NH technically isnt a town this time around...
So, I guess, welcome to the new age of Anisland: "It's an island!"
Fyre Fest it is.
@Anti-Matter No, 10 characters in the name of the island. I don't think they've said anything about how many villagers you can have.
@Anti-Matter The island's name can be 10 characters or less, not that only 10 villagers can stay on the island.
Since this game has online does Nintendo ban offensive names and does it monitor names so there are no duplicates? I'm thinking Arakko.
@k8sMum Bedlam is so not the name I would think of for an Animal Crossing island, but I like it.
BTW, do you know how movement works in this game? I really can't stand that - touch the screen to move to that spot - AC Pocket Camp has, and I'm also not a fan of the grid based left-right-up-down in the Pokemon RT MD DX demo. I'm hoping for - move the stick and move in that direction - controls. Though I do realize nobody ever really moves anywhere in AC, just stand around an talk, but there is some.
@Dogorilla
Hoo...
Insteresting.
So i can name my town with 10 digit alphabets. 😀
I'm plain and simple, but my town has always been named Nintendo. I just feel like if I named it anything else, it would seem 'cringe' in about a year or so, and then I'd wouldn't be able to change it.
@TheBigK How about 'N Dog Food'... although that may be confused with North Dog Food...
Actually, why did you call it Dog Food?!?
Pikminsula - patent pending!
I never realized this limit... I just named my town Solluxia in New Leaf. I've been unconsciously living on the edge this whole time lol.
I wish they would make the limit even longer. 10 characters of Japanese kana = up to 20 characters if you wrote it in roman letters, so a Japanese island name can effectively be twice as long.
Kuroyama it is! (or Heiwayama)
@LavaTwilight Hahaha well I'm really bad at naming things and often just use what words first come to mind. For whatever reason, the first thing I thought of when naming my New Leaf town was dog food.
@rjejr
I pick Bedlam for any game I get to name the town. I like a part of the game to reflect my life, heheh.
As to controls, I'm assuming (hoping, praying) that whilst touch screen may be enabled it will be controller run in any direction. Watching the videos with all those wee maniacs running around like headless chickens cannot be touch screen.
I think you will be surprised how much running around you are going to be doing. I really don't understand the rescue service: it's an island...how lost are you gonna get?!? Maybe Resetti begged for a job, any job, after Nintendo changed the rules.
@k8sMum I played Pocket Camp for about an hour last night, I think I moved 3 steps in all that time. I've read a lot of comments from AC fans who hate Pocket Camp though, so I'm hoping NH is btter than PC.
@rjejr yea it’ll be a lot different than Pocket Camp. The movement will be analogue for sure. PC was a fun lil taste of AC To hold ya over for a minute, but as soon as they added the micro transactions I bailed in protest!
And we’re definitely going to have a ton of exploring to do, with all the additional islands and landscaping duties etc
WOOHOO!
2020, BABEEEEY!
@Northwind what about “Trig? not me” or just trignotme
@Northwind agreed! Please report back, would love to see what you settle on.
@neogyo Thanks for the pep talk, much appreciated.
I know about the airplane flights to the islands, but my concern was they would just show your character on the island, it would say - You caught 5 bugs and 3 fish - then you would be back in the airport. That's pretty much how "amiibo Festival" worked, it was watching a book turn pages.
The landscaping was a selling point for me, but I'm keeping my expectations in check. I'm guessing you'll be limited to 1 box down, ground level, and 1 box up, and confined w/in the island perimeter. So no caves, no valleys, no hills, no mountains, no extra space, basically just moving the river around. I think for most of us that will grow old in about 5 minutes as the island may be fairly full of stuff by the time it unlocks. If we can pick up dwellings and move them around that will be great, but I haven't seen that shown yet.
On the bright side you motivated me to go watch some more videos and it does look like movement is omnidirectional so that's 1 less thing to worry about. It does seem like the landscaping and paths are still on a grid, up, right, left, down, but no diagonals, but since all of this seems new to the game I'll take it as a win. And be glad I don't have to mess w/ aligning angles, I'll happily take the limitations after trying to make stuff in Dreams.
I guess I'm the only one who thinks 10-characters is rather arbitrarily small. I guess bits are expensive?
Chalk it up to the long list of "WTF, Nintendo?" items that just leave you scratching/shaking your head.
The smaller size in things like this comes from the way Japanese is written. Many Japanese hiragana and katakana represent two sounds each, both a consonant and a vowel. ひらがな(hiragana) かたかな(katakana) are both 8 roman alphabet letters but 4 characters in Japanese kana. And throw in Japanese used Kanji 紫(murasaki) "purple" and you get 8 sounds from one character, 4 consonants and 4 vowels!
Thus to a Japanese person 8 characters for the name of something is likely excessive.
My username here and everywhere is just two letters over the 10 character limit Nintendo seems to use everywhere and it hurts.
Currently going by CœstrsPaul on the Switch, and I hate it.
@chagrined maybe they don't extended the 10 letters limits because of the dialogue option and mechanics that use your Island name.
@Heavyarms55 intereting thanks for explaning the reason why Nintendo don't put a 10 to 25 letter limit in our Island name and our name in the game.
cool i can finally name my Island Luxiere, i was very sad that some name that i have for Animal Crossing New Leaf i coulnd't use because of the 8 letter limit, the Animal Crossing New Leaf that my cousin lent me.
@Giancarlothomaz It's not something most people outside of Japan or who don't know much Japanese (Or Chinese) would have any reason to know.
Personally though, I think Nintendo has more than enough experience as an international company at this point that this kind of thing should long since have been changed. shrug
Tap here to load 44 comments
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...