Hello Kitty Island Adventure vs Animal Crossing: Which Should You Play

When it comes to cozy sandbox life sims about anthropomorphic animals, Animal Crossing is king. In recent years, though, especially as it’s more widely available now, Hello Kitty: Island Adventure has gotten people’s attention. While there’s nothing stopping you from playing both, some people might only have time for a single one. So which one should you pick?

Pros and Cons of Animal Crossing: New Horizons

One of the biggest pros in Animal Crossing: New Horizons over Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is the level of personalization you can have on your island. Not only do you have more freedom in what villagers you have wandering around, but you can also completely overhaul the entire island if that’s what you so wish. A lot of creative people have released some really cool content, such as turning their island into an autumn-core paradise or transforming it into a Showa-era Japanese city.

Because Animal Crossing: New Horizons lacks real set goals outside of expanding your town, filling up the museum, paying off your debts, and beautifying the place up, you can spend all day playing it if you wanted to. Perhaps since it’s a live service game that encourages repetitive logins, a lot of content in Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is time-gated. For example, you can catch fish all you want, but you can only trade it in or gift it a set number of times a day. This arbitrary lock on how much progress you can accomplish per day may frustrate some players. That being said, Animal Crossing: New Horizons can devolve into that in the early stages of a playthrough as well.

It’s not all perfect, though. A big draw of these cozy life sims is the characters inhabiting your town or island or what have you. Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a lot of cute animal friends to potentially move in. But the New Horizons iteration of villagers only have so many lines of dialogue they can say per personality type, and there isn't that much variety in the game. Their canned, repetitive dialogue can get really boring really fast. A lot of my favorite villagers happened to all share a personality type, so I was reading the same jokes or comments every day until I finally moved some out. The lack of bite in some villagers’ personalities also caused a lot of players to become unhappy in the early days of New Horizons, especially if they played previous entires in the series.

Pros and Cons of Hello Kitty: Island Adventure

Continuing on from the con I gave for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the characters feel more fleshed out and unique in Hello Kitty: Island Adventure. Even if you read a lot of of the same dialogue lines through your play sessions, it’s not like everyone talks in the same way. Talking to Hello Kitty feels distinct from Keroppi, who also felt like his own character from Pochacco or Daniel.

While I personally consider it a con, some people might like the more quest-oriented play style of Hello Kitty: Island Adventure. Unlocking your island over the course of days or weeks requires more steps than simply collecting Bells and materials. You might have to befriend a certain villager first (which is yet another time-gated mechanic) or complete a prerequisite quest. It might feel more like an RPG than an open-ended life sim. But some players who have trouble staying entertained in a life sim might prefer the somewhat more rigid structure and increased level of activities Hello Kitty: Island Adventure.

Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is also receiving active updates, which introduce new customization options, furniture or clothing, and villagers. This might appeal to someone who's already invested a lot of time in Animal Crossing and are bored of it now.

But if the sheer levels of personalization in Animal Crossing are one of its strongest points, then the lack of customization in Animal Island is its weakest. You don’t have a lot of room to exercise in creativity when it comes to what regions you want and where on the island. This makes sense considering the different relationship you and everyone else have with the island, as well as its scale. When making your avatar, you can only use the parts the game gives you, too.

This last point is very subjective, but I prefer the visuals of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The aesthetic of the game can feel too mobile-y, and the models for the Sanrio mascots don't always match with their appearance on merchandise or in other media.

Which One Should You Play?

If you want to play a game to play over long sessions at once while providing you an outlet for your creativity, then I recommend Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I personally prefer the co-op in this game more too. It’s always fun to go to my friends’ islands to check out what they’re doing with it or who they moved in. Since there’s no limit on how many Bells you can make per day or anything, you can spend a lot of time just fishing or crafting together, whereas I never stayed long in Hello Kitty: Island Adventure’s co-op mode.

The more quest-heavy nature of the game works well with Hello Kitty’s friend mode. You can complete tasks or fill up a checklist with your friend to unlock some special actions or bonuses. This is really cool, don’t get me wrong. I just personally would prefer to do what I wanted with my buddies without feeling like I have to perform certain tasks for better quality-of-life in my co-op gameplay. Speaking of quests, the RPG-like style of Hello Kitty Island Adventure might cater to some people more than the open sandbox of Animal Crossing does. Though I prefer Animal Crossing and recommend that one, Hello Kitty: Island Adventure has its own pros that might make it someone else’s dream game. 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available on the Nintendo Switch. Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is available on the macOS, iOS, Apple TV, Nintendo Switch, and Windows PC. PS4, and PS5 versions will come out in 2025.

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