Last year, Animal Crossing: New Horizons kicked off its post-launch content rollout with an Easter event that may have been one of the worst video game holiday events in recent memory. Bunny Day is meant to be a fun, egg-themed event to begin the spring season in Animal Crossing, but its implementation last year was such a disaster that fans were begging for it to end.
Bunny Day was an indisputable failure for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. While the event's intention was to introduce an egg hunt for players leading up to Easter, it rapidly became a hindrance to island progress. Eggs were hidden daily where resources like iron and wood could be found, so that the player would find them while wandering their island. It's a nice idea in theory, but the eggs ended up replacing the actual materials that players wanted. Not to mention the fact that the egg-themed items players could craft during Bunny Day weren't particularly good and didn't match with any other aesthetics within the game. And all of that is without even factoring in that Bunny Day overpowered the incredibly short cherry blossom season Animal Crossing fans adore by taking place over the same period of time.
2020's Bunny Day in Animal Crossing: New Horizons was obviously designed to be a fun little festival taking place on the island for a couple of weeks, but it just didn't work. Instead of being a complement to the player's daily activities on the island, it completely overtook the daily routine and forced unwanted content onto the player. By the end of the event, players were sick of looking at Zipper T. Bunny, pastel colors, and hoarding eggs that they had very little use for. Bunny Day just wasn't a good event and it desperately needs to learn from its failures.
Animal Crossing's Bunny Day 2021 Will Improve by Default
Part of the problem last year is that Bunny Day took place shortly after the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Many players were still just beginning to build up their islands, making the daily collection of resources incredibly vital to the process. But with the eggs replacing materials players needed, it negatively impacted island development. Now that a year has passed and players have built up their islands, that loss of resources shouldn't be nearly as big of a problem as it was last year; which is an automatic improvement to Bunny Day by default. It doesn't change how stale and annoying Bunny Day became, but it's a step in the right direction.
It's almost impossible to predict what Nintendo will do about Bunny Day in 2021. The reaction to the event last year was so overwhelmingly negative that it's hard to imagine the company would just roll out the exact same event again this year, but Nintendo has a track record and a reputation of being very set in its ways. If Animal Crossing's developers believe this is the way Bunny Day is meant to be experienced, then people should prepare themselves for two more weeks of egg-hunting tedium. But players would greatly appreciate something different this year and Animal Crossing: New Horizons would benefit from a change.