Disclaimer: This is not my normal type of article.

Disclaimer: If Animal Crossing is your favourite game, you  are objectively wrong.

Disclaimer: I’m running out of ideas. If you have an idea for a ranking article, email me.

Okay, as my title clearly states, we’re going to be covering Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. If you have no clue what I’m talking about, you’re living under a rock and are allergic to thinking. But, you may be wondering, what are these games? Look it up. It’s not the 17th Century; we have Google and Wikipedia, you don’t need me.

Also, minor spoilers for both games, but nobody cares, and this is annoying.

I’m going to cover all sorts of things in both games, so get comfy.

PRICE

Obviously, the price is going to be a part of this. Animal Crossing for the Nintendo Switch is $60. Stardew Valley for the Nintendo switch is $15. A clear, better option, but is Stardew Valley a better game?

GRAPHICS/ART STYLE

Now, Animal Crossing is in 3D, but that game is hideous. Some people like the art style, and those people are wrong. The colours are horrifically bright, and the textures are just plain lazy. They wasted all their time making the game 3D, so that they didn’t bother to make the game look good. Nintendo can make pretty games (TOTK, Xenoblade, SSBU, etc), they just got lazy with this one. 

Now, Stardew Valley, even though it’s a 2D game, is a whole lot better art-wise. It’s a really nice pixel art style, with appreciation to detail everywhere. Everything is so thought out, and unlike Animal Crossing, there’s variety in the landscape. 

Both games change by in-game season, but no matter what season it is, Animal Crossing is ugly. Animal Crossing allows you to visit other islands, but, frankly, they all look the same. In Stardew, there’s so much variety, from your farm, to the mines, to Pelican Town, to any house, the forest, etc. Animal Crossing is just House, or Island. Nothing else.

MAP

Now, naturally, we want to explore a little bit. In Animal Crossing, the map is just your Island. However, Stardew Valley has many different places to explore. Your farm alone is larger than the entire Animal Crossing island. Certain floors of the mine are larger than the Animal Crossing island, and the mine has 120 floors. Also, if you want an island, there’s always Ginger Island.

CHARACTER CUSTOMISATION

Now, this is a weird thing to cover, but Stardew Valley destroys Animal Crossing here. In Animal Crossing, no matter how much you try, your character will always be ugly. Also, it charges you in-game currency to unlock more haircuts or hair colours, meanwhile, Stardew lets you make your own colour, and has so much more detail on the customisation menu, it’s insane.  Also, Stardew lets you pick a pet, while Animal Crossing doesn’t, but that’ll make more sense in a minute.

NPCS/CHARACTER RELATIONSHIPS

In Animal Crossing, the villagers are animals. That’d make them interesting, right? Wrong. So. Utterly. Wrong. They have no soul whatsoever. Their personalities and dialogue are more boring than solitary confinement. Now, in Stardew, all the characters have personalities, although some of them mean, like George, or Shane, but there’s also a lot of really good characters, unlike Animal Crossing, who has Tom Nook the Capitalist, Timmy and Tommy the junior capitalists, and the rest of them have literally no personality at all. They wasted all their time making like 400 NPCs, but didn’t give them any personalities. Stardew Valley has only 45 NPCs, but unlike Animal Crossing, they’re not lifeless husks without a personality. 

Also, Animal Crossing’s friendship system is just plain stupid. It has a friendship exp system, but you can’t see how much friendship you have with an NPC, meanwhile, in Stardew, the friendship system is nice and simple. You can check how many hearts you have with any given NPC in a little menu, the max amount of hearts you can have with an NPC is 14, but for the undateable NPCs, it’s 10. Oh, and if you wonder what I meant by undateable NPCs, you can date some of the NPCs in Stardew, but not in Animal Crossing, but frankly, if Animal Crossing had a dating feature, I’d be pretty worried, as I said, all the characters, except the player, are animals. Also, with one of my favourite NPCs in Stardew, if you give her a Quartz, or other gemstone, she’ll say, “Hey, how’d you know I was hungry? This looks delicious!” So, yeah, Stardew has a rock-eating NPC and Animal Crossing doesn’t, making Stardew objectively better.

GLITCHES

Okay, I’m one of the people who like to exploit glitches, so this matters to me. So, if Animal Crossing  even has any glitches, they don’t do anything helpful or funny, so I don’t care. In Stardew, you can clip out of bounds and get one of the hardest to get items solely with a sword, and you can break into people’s rooms without raising friendship by using a chair. Ironically, that hard to get item is just a statue to put in your house.

GAMEPLAY

Both games share fishing, cutting down trees, interacting with other characters, putting things in your house, exploring;  yeah, it’s a lot. However, Stardew makes these activities more fun. Also, since Stardew is meant to be a farming game, you can grow various things, while in Animal Crossing you can only grow flowers. Also, Stardew has mining and combat. The only thing Animal Crossing has that Stardew doesn’t is custom designs, which, I’ll admit, could make Stardew even better.

STORY

Neither game has much of an overarching story, but in Stardew, a lot of the characters have their own little story inside the game, allowing Stardew to win in this category as well.

OVERALL

So what did we learn? Stardew is better in literally every way.  Animal Crossing is a trash game and a waste of money.