Why Fishing Needs to Be Buffed in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I’m playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I spot a tiger beetle running along the beach and give chase, only to accidentally scare away an Atlas moth that was perched on a nearby tree. I also scare away a large fish, but that doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the moth. It was probably just a sea bass anyways.
Fishing and catching bugs are the two main gameplay mechanics of Animal Crossing, the two “hardest” things you can do in the game. You have your bug encyclopedia and your fish encyclopedia, they each get a dedicated wing of the museum, and Flick and C.J. are partners who let you sell either bugs or fish for a premium when one of them comes to town. Fish and bugs are treated like they’re the same thing, two equal parts of the gameplay experience. But in practice, I’m much more likely to take a swing at a passing butterfly I’ve never seen before than try to fish up a large shadow that I know has a chance to just be a tire.
Because fishing is random, it has less appeal to me. With bugs, what you see is what you get, so you can pick and choose only the ones you want to catch. With fishing if you want a rare fish you’re going to have to just fish up everything you see and hope it eventually pays off. In New Horizons, where tools break after a set number successful catches, that’s the less appealing option. The standard fishing rod only lasts for 30 catches, including trash and random crafting supplies, which somehow feel even more disappointing than trash.
On top of fish being random, catching them isn’t that interesting compared to bugs. Every fish is caught exactly the same way, give or take the number of times it bites on the lure. But bugs can be caught in a crazy variety of ways. Some are super fast and have to be chased down, some are stationary and you have to sneak up on them, some are only found in the ground or even the water. And then there’s tarantulas and scorpions. These bugs were such big money makers in Animal Crossing that they had to be nerfed, along with other valuable insects.Tellingly, fish were not nerfed during that same update.
It’s more than just value that made tarantulas and scorpions so popular. Catching them requires a certain strategy and feels super satisfying when you pull it off. And when you fail to catch them, they cause your character to black out and wake up in front of your house, meaning that a failed capture can be a major setback or make for a funny moment during a livestream. There’s nothing like tarantulas and scorpions for fish. Sure, there’s expensive fish, but they’re not going to dramatically attack you if you fail to catch them, you can’t really game the system to get them to show up, and catching them always feels random and unexpected.
I’ve caught two oarfish. The shadow they cast in the water looks like any other big fish, so it feels like a shock when you suddenly pull up a fish longer than your character is tall. It’s a cool surprise, but it doesn’t mean I’m willing to fish up every large shadow, because I know most of them are just sea bass. If the shadow of the oarfish was actually as long as it’s model, I’d fish it up onsight. At least the valuable sharks have a fin on their shadow, but they’re extremely rare and only spawn during the summer. Without the shark fins, promising looking fish shadows often turn out to be cheap common fish or trash. At least you can spawn more fish with the fish bait, but it doesn’t spawn more valuable fish, just more of the same random assortment of fish you could catch in the area normally. At the end of the day, I’m still breaking my fishing rods getting nothing but sea bass when I could easily just plant some flowers and hunt the valuable bugs that spawn on them instead.
To add insult to injury, even selling fish for a premium is harder than it needs to be. C.J. forces you to do a mildly tedious “seasports” fishing challenge before you can sell fish to him, while Flick accepts bugs right off the bat.
I know not everything in Animal Crossing needs to be balanced. In the end it’s supposed to be just a calming slice-of-life game. I know a lot of people probably enjoy the random element inherent to fishing. I myself quite like catching a fish every now and again. But I don’t seek it out as a source of bells the way I do with bug hunting, and I catch way more bugs in a play session than I do fish. It would be nice if bug catching and fishing felt equal. As it is there doesn’t really seem to be much of a reason to fish besides filling out your museum, while catching bugs is a legitimate source of bells.
I think a simple improvement would be to allow the player to craft better types of fish bait. What if you could mix your clams with certain fruits (or even bugs!) to craft fish bait that would guarantee you a rarer fish? What if certain fish were harder to catch than just pressing the button at the right time? I know a big change to the game like this is unlikely, but if they bothered to nerf bugs, maybe they can also buff fish.
