Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 still not supporting a second save file is criminal

I love Animal Crossing: New Horizons a lot.

In 2020 I bought the special edition island-themed Nintendo Switch console and worried it wouldn't arrive before lockdowns started. My console was being delivered to my workplace too, which really made me worry that I might not be able to pick it up for weeks as the world shut down. But because Nintendo is Nintendo, an even bigger fear here was that I'd be unable to eventually transfer my island to the new console at all if it arrived weeks late. 2020 was a time of complete unknowns and it meant that small, insignificant worries like this felt bigger than they were.

People forget that at launch save file transfers weren't possible at all for New Horizons. In July 2020, 4 months after release, an island backup tool was released, allowing you to keep a backup of your island on the internet. But to continue the bizarre secrecy around island life, the tool required, and still does require, a real life phone call to Nintendo to restore data from.

It wasn't until Nintendo released a specific transfer application 8 months after its release, in November 2020, that users could transfer their save files to a new system if they still had the old system. If your old system breaks, to this day, you still need to contact Nintendo to restore your Animal Crossing island backup. It's almost worse than Pokémon's anti-cheating system of not allowing save-file backups at all.

If this is sounding complicated, it's because it is. And this isn't to mention the strangest constraint of all: Nintendo only allows you to have one island per Nintendo Switch console. While every other game on Switch allows you to start a new save from a separate system-level profile, Animal Crossing saves island data as a shared file. The primary player has all sorts of exclusive features that secondary profiles can't access too, meaning a family playing Animal Crossing would only get the full experience of the game by buying multiple Nintendo Switch consoles.

At the time I assumed things would get better in the coming years. Surely Nintendo would hear the outcry around the strange nature of save file management for a game with over 48 million sales. There are countless posts on social media sites about people losing their islands because they assume Animal Crossing saves data like every other game. There are also endless threads online about people unsure if it's worth deleting their original island to start again. It's just unnecessary. For almost every other game on Nintendo Switch, you can just backup data to the cloud. If this was a game on PC you'd just be able to move a save file to another folder and not lose your data.

Imagine managing 48 million potential customer support calls instead of just allowing an automated save file restoration. Previous games were also far more flexible. On the 3DS you could have two islands by owning a second copy of the game. On GameCube save data was only defined by which memory card you were using.

So in 2026, when Animal Crossing: New Horizon's new 3.0 patch introduced a bunch of nice features, I hoped there'd be some kind of acknowledgement around the inflexibility of island management.

But there isn't. If you want to start a new island without losing your old island and progress, there is no option other than deleting your original save file entirely. If you own a second Nintendo Switch you can technically transfer your island to that console, which will then free your first console to start a new island, but again this just feels so restrictive for no reason. To start a second island you still need an entire second console. In a funny way, The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild also had a similar one-save limitation on Nintendo Switch 1, but on the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game they added a second save file that you can use without losing your first one.

But when it comes to New Horizons no changes have been made around backups either. Maybe it would put me at ease to just be able to delete my save file locally if I could keep the online backup to restore at a later point. But I'm not even sure if that's possible, and if it is, you'd still need to convince a Nintendo representative over a support phone call to let you restore the save file to your system. Technically you're only allowed to restore your save file to a brand new system too, with the system being built with broken and stolen consoles in mind. You're technically only meant to restore your island to a brand new console.

It's not like there are professional Animal Crossing players cheating in the game at a competitive level. And even if there are people selling rare in-game items online, does it really matter? Is the in-game economy of Animal Crossing really that sacred? There are still to this day Twitch channels that advertise hacked islands with money that users can take to break the in-game economy. So why prevent genuine users from just creating a second save for fun?

I hope if Nintendo is working on a follow-up to Animal Crossing: New Horizons that they rethink the clearly complicated system of island data management. For a game about escapism, it's bizarre that save management is so restrictive and technical.