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Nintendo. Giving us a little peek at Katrina. This little taste of Katrina without actually giving us the real, full-blown, mystical panther. Instead, we get her silent words on our phone screens. Not quite the same. The ACNH Community has been hoping for a while that Katrina and the luck mechanic would return to New Horizons at some point. Sure, it sometimes made your day a little inconvenient, but we liked having this secret random mechanic controlling little things in the background. It just added more to the game, changed small details, made life in your town a little more unpredictable. But New Horizons seems to have changed up some of the ways the game works.
The developers have made a lot of the game easier to pick up and play. As a result, some of those small details have been kept out. Unfortunately, as of now, it seems Katrina is a piece of those details. Katrina has been around the Animal Crossing universe since the beginning. Her role usually isn't super complicated. She usually appears randomly around your town, or at her designated spots in later games, and will tell the player their fortune for a small fee. The early games required you to talk to Katrina to receive your luck, whether good or bad.
Luck affected different occurrences in the game. The original Animal Crossing and City Folk had a similar luck mechanic: the luck for the day could make 1000 ACNH Bells drop from a tree (300 in City Folk) instead of the usual 100, villagers of the opposite gender would follow you around more, trees and villagers had an increased chance of giving you rare Animal Crossing Items, or for the unlucky people out there, make villagers refuse to talk to you, and trip and fall often. Wild World had a simpler mechanic with good luck influencing villager's gift-giving opportunities and bad luck making the player trip and fall. New Leaf took the luck mechanic and upgraded it to a whole new level. After speaking to Katrina 20 times, she set up a shop in Main Street and could be talked to every day. Each day until midnight, your luck had a chance to be set to one of five different luck categories, Money, friendship, love, item, or health. Each category has good and bad luck events.
Many of the effects returned from previous games, Click Here to see it on the Nookipdedia. But there was a lot more added like bees moving slower, mosquitos and jellyfish less likely to appear, or sitting in a chair resulting in farting. Farting is bad luck. These little details were always so fun to come across. Even if you were having a bad luck day, tripping and falling weren't super annoying. It caused you to lose all your balloons, sure, but it made for a nice giggle now and then. And the good luck was always a nice surprise when shaking trees or talking to villagers.
So, here is where we beg the question, how does Katrina fit into New Horizons? That's an excellent question. As of the last update, we will get to see her beautiful face in an app. The Nintendo Switch Online app is getting an update and will add Nook Points that players can collect each day and redeem for prizes. This is supposed to release in late March. So, hopefully, sometime soon since it's already late March. Anyway, once it does, there is a portion at the bottom of the screen that allows you to see words of wisdom from Katrina. The next screenshot shows those words as "Sometimes what is yours may be better served as someone else's." It's hard to tell if this is a good or bad luck fortune, but this most likely has no effect on the game and her words are be there to give advice. Katrina doesn't seem to fit into this app too well. But if you're going to log in daily, then a daily fortune to entertain you for a second isn't something completely out of the left field. Let’s hope this wasn't a cop-out for Nintendo adding Katrina's presence into New Horizons. Maybe it's a hint at a future for Katrina in the New Horizons universe. Or maybe they just thought it would be cute to have a daily fortune when you go collect your Nook Points for that day.
We all want to believe that she is returning, but the fact that New Horizons has been made a little bit easier to play than past games in the series makes you think that something like a luck system may be too complicated for the game that they want New Horizons to be. Even if it was as simple as the good, bad, and neutral luck system that was in Wild World. The small extra mechanics in New Leaf is what keeps the game more enjoyable than New Horizons for a lot of people in the community. Katrina can even be a random occurrence for us to enjoy her rather than parked on Main Street like in New Leaf. It's funny how they'll keep in actual genetics for hybrid flowers yet take out the lock system that has been in the game since the beginning. Maybe the 2.0 update will shed a little more light on how the rest of 2021 will go.
The community misses special characters and the fun mechanics they brought with them throughout the Animal Crossing series. Maybe this small app addition is the only way we'll get Katrina in New Horizons, but at least Nintendo hasn't forgotten about her. We can only hope from here on out that our prayers will be answered, and the developers continue to listen to what the community wants. Click Here to find out more about Katrina!
