Amongst the popular video games, there are several that come out on top. A quick Google search revealed the top three popular video games are Final Fantasy XIII, Modern Warfare, and Call of Duty. However, other video games that come out in the top ten this month are Animal Crossing Horizons, which has been popular since March 2020, and Disney Dreamlight Valley, which came out in September 2022 and continues to gain popularity.
Disney Dreamlight Valley has only been out a couple of years, but it is very similar to Animal Crossing. We will be discussing the ways they are similar and how they are different in this article. I have personally played hundreds of hours on each game and, while I don’t call myself an expert, I am fairly well-versed in both games. But I can still learn new games. So here is my opinion on Disney Dreamlight Valley and Animal Crossing: New Horizon.
Compare & Contrast of Disney Dreamlight Valley & Animal Crossing
The fact that they are very similar games is not lost on the players who have played both Disney Dreamlight Valley (DDV) and Animal Crossing. They are similar in the fact that you interact with the different villagers and make different decorating items. You can collect different fruits and vegetables as well as plant them. You can’t knock trees down in Disney Dreamlight Valley, but you can in Animal Crossing. You can shake and cut down trees in Animal Crossing. There are sometimes bugs that hang from tree limbs and you can catch them with a net.
That leads me to my next point: your tools are different. In Animal Crossing, your tools wear out if you use them a lot. And in the beginning of the game, you will use them quite a lot. You need the necessary materials to rebuild your tools. I recommend gathering up a lot of materials and making several tools at once so they are ready for when they wear out. In DDV, your tools never wear out but you can enhance them. As you play through the game, you’ll figure out how to remove obstacles in your path, but you never replace tools.
How you plant and harvest crops in the two games is also different. In the two games, you have certain crops that yield a higher amount of currency than other crops. However, in Animal Crossing the crops continually flourish until you dig them up. In DDV, the area where you planted the crops becomes immediately available again to replant more crops as soon as you harvest. This difference in DDV makes it so that you are constantly having to replant, but some may welcome that change.
Another difference is that Animal Crossing comes with recipe cards for every furniture or decoration piece. In DDV you have to figure it out. Google, google, google. I can’t emphasize that enough! There isn’t as much designing in DDV. You do get to choose where to put houses on an island, but not what goes into the houses. There was an add-on game sold called Happy Home Paradise, based on Happy Home Designer, which came out in 2015. All you do all day long is design homes for other animals, which is also nice and relaxing.
Animal Crossing & Disney Dreamlight Valley: Plucking Overgrowth and Wardrobe Changes
In the matter of invasive overgrowth, DDV and Animal Crossing both have their overgrown weeds. However, one is more magical and the other natural. DDV has overgrown magical thorns that, when you get rid of them, turn into coins, seeds, and other items. Animal Crossing is more natural. As you begin the game, your island will be overrun with weeds. As you clean up your island, you can immediately pluck them. You can also sell your weeds to a visiting florist who you will buy from you for a good price. Or you can sell it to the local island store, Nook’s Cranny.
Two little raccoons, Timmy and Tommy will be running Nook’s Cranny. The store’s inventory is new every day just like it is in DDV. However, in DDV, you have Scrooge McDuck running the store and you can order pieces of furniture from him as well as outfits change every day in the storefront windows. In Animal Crossing, you have a separate store for clothes. Label, (pronounced La-Bell) has two other sisters who run the clothing shop Label visits the island from time to time and asks you to model certain fashions while she takes pictures.
Speaking of clothing, there are certain ways you can change certain characters in DDV. Ariel and Ursula, for instance, both have legs at one point in the story. Ursula turns into the human, Vanessa to steal Eric from Ariel. In the game, there is a way to turn Ursula into Vanessa and Ariel into a human as well. Google is your friend! I had to look it up to figure out how to change Ursula into a human. Animal Crossing is easier to figure out because it’s not trying to follow story tropes.
Main Major Complaint of Disney Dreamlight Valley
There are so many positives about both games it is hard for me to say which is my favorite. But if I had to pick one that was easier to figure out how to make things it would be animal crossing. I had the hardest time figuring out how to make simple things in Disney Dreamlight Valley. I’m still stuck if they meant for me to figure things out on my own, or if there was some secret manual that I could check that I did not know about.
Honestly, what helped me out was my husband started playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, and, being a long-time gamer, figured things out pretty quickly. I, on the other hand, was stuck. I am not a long-time gamer. I grew up playing Mario Kart 8 on the Game Boy Advance. I spent hundreds of hours on Mario Kart to the point that I got pretty good at it and usually made 1st place. When I first started gaming, I was 13 and I asked for a Game Boy Advance for Christmas. I got it and my very first game was Mario Kart.
And so, armed with little experience, I was, indeed stuck. I have since branched out to games like Crash Bandicoot, Mario Kart on the Wii U, and Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4 and PS5. These games had ways of telling me what to do or it was easy to figure it out. Disney Dreamlight Valley? Only sometimes. Sometimes Mickey would give you prompts but don’t always rely on that. To be fair, other video games have prompts, but they don’t always tell you exactly what you need to do to move on from that area of the game.
Concluding Thoughts
Each game has its pros and cons. It just depends on what you prefer and what you get used to. I recommend playing both just to get a feel for each. Animal Crossing is a very relaxed and mundane decorating game and DDV can be too in a way, but it’s more focused on getting through the different story tropes and unlocking characters. It just depends on what your preference is. Even though there are a lot of differences between the two, it just depends on how user-friendly you like your game.
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About the Author
A freelance journalist, Corinne Crowe has been writing for about five years. She worked as a journalist for three years for a small-town newspaper called The People Sentinel based out of Barnwell, South Carolina, and an online newspaper, Antioch Tenn based out of Nashville, Tennessee. She graduated Suma Cum Laude from Amridge University with her Masters in Human Services in 2020.
She is an avid collector of Pop! figures with an emphasis on Stitch and Disney Princesses. In her spare time, she loves to read. Her favorite genres are historical fiction and nonfiction, biographies, and young adult. Corinne lives with her husband, Andrew, of eight years, daughter Aspen, and her dog Piper who thinks she’s a lap dog, in Tuscumbia, Alabama.