Animal Crossing: New Horizonsis the latest title in the long-running Animal Crossingseries created by Nintendo.This version has you running your own island, welcoming new residents, and enjoying your relaxing tropical vacation.
Disney Dreamlight Valley, on the other hand, tasks players with reviving a land ravaged by a phenomenon known as The Forgetting, which has caused many of your beloved Disney pals to forget who you are and why you love this valley so dearly.
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Both games are great for relaxing, as you clean up your respective lands, meet new residents, and decorate to your heart’s content.
But which of these games is the better? Let’s break them down and pit them against each other to see which one comes out on top.
10Residents
Disney Dreamlight Valley
Residents, or villagers, are the backbone of any society, and there are plenty of them to interact with in both games. Unfortunately, for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I have to give the point to Disney Dreamlight Valley.
Animal Crossing is known for its many villagers, and New Horizons brings back many of the older characters while introducing plenty of new ones. The number of characters is very limited, however, allowing only 10 of them to reside on the island at one time.
You also don’t have the opportunity to choose which ones stay and which ones go, as the system is randomized, meaning once a villager you dislike decides to leave, you can easily see another one you dislike appear.
Disney Dreamlight Valley, on the other hand, has a lot more residents, each with a unique quest, and, if you don’t like one of them, you can send them to a different land to live or just remove their homes to make room for other residents.
Along with this, the homes of the residents each stand out thanks to their ties to their respective Disney properties, making each resident feel more like a thoughtful addition to your valley.
9Daily Activities
Daily activities are what keep you active in both games. This is your ability to dig up fossils, go fishing, complete daily quests, and more, and it is another point for Disney Dreamlight Valley.
Animal Crossing hasn’t evolved much over the decades that it has existed, and that is very evident in New Horizons, as the only daily activities arefishing, catching bugs, digging up fossils, hitting rocks, checking shops, and talking to your neighbors. Sure, it is a lot, but it isn’t on the level of Disney Dreamlight Valley.
In the valley, you can talk to your residents for daily conversations, play Scramblecoin, remove Night Thorns, collect ores, give residents their favorite gifts, cook meals for residents at the restaurant, feed critters, collect chests, gather fish, collect vegetables in the garden, and flowers from the greenhouse.
If that wasn’t enough, there are periodic Star Paths that give you more daily activities to complete in exchange for items.
8Customization
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
As is expected in a cozy game, both titles allow you to decorate your surrounding area, creating themed locations and increasing the overall vibe. After a lot of thought, I think Animal Crossing: New Horizons has Disney Dreamlight Valley beat, and it’s for one reason: terraforming.
Disney Dreamlight Valley offers a lot of decorations, special quest items, paths, and more to customize your valley. It is pretty impressive just how many items you can unlock if you put work into the game.
However, some of these require you to use in-game currency to get them because they are unlocked via the Star Path, and if you don’t have the in-game currency, you need to resort to using real-world money.
In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you can unlock everything without spending a dime, because everything costs Bells. Along with this, you get the ability to customize the ground by altering the landscape, creating mountains, and you can even alter the direction of the rivers.
While there might not be as many items, you have access to a deeper level of customization. You can even customize everythingbased on the time of year.
7Base Content
If I were talking about the original release of Disney Dreamlight Valley, I would have said that Animal Crossing steals this one, but Disney Dreamlight Valley has since received many updates that make the base game much more substantial than Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a fair amount in the base game with numerous villagers, tons of customization options, and fun events that happen at certain times of the year.
It’spure and simple funthat is enough to keep you busy for a while, or at least until you have completed a number of the major achievements, such as collecting all the fossils, bugs, and fish. If you don’t care about this, you will spend maybe 30–40 hours completing the base game.
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What happens next?
In early access, it took me about a week or two to complete Disney Dreamlight Valley. This was before the game was complete and all the base-game residents were added.
Since then, the game has received monumental updates that have increased the amount of decorating you can do, the number of items you can collect, and the number of residents in the game.
Dreamlight Valley now has over 40 residents in the base game, with each having a unique questline. Combine this with the yearly events, Star Paths, and the promise of even more free characters, and it is easy to see why I say this game has more base game content than Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
6Additional Content (DLC)
There is a joke that Nintendo doesn’t care about Animal Crossing, and it’s because of the lack of DLC that the company releases for these games. However, New Horizons got a DLC in the form of Happy Home Paradise - an addition that allows you to build homes for villagers similar to Happy Home Designer.
Disney Dreamlight, on the other hand, has received two story DLCs, each with an additional location, new story, and characters. Disney’s game has seen some massive growth since it was fully released.
It has received two story DLCs, with the first one giving you access to Eternity Isle and the second opening upStorybook Vale.Each of these DLCs is approximately a quarter the size of the base game, adds three new characters each, and adds more crafting, meals, and resources.
When you compare this to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the one DLC it received that added a smaller story and the repetitive activity of decorating residents' homes, it is easy to see that Disney Dreamlight Valley has had much more post-game content.
So, neither game is going to have a very deep story, considering they are both designed to keep you relaxed and have the freedom to decorate. With that being said, Dreamlight Valley, again, takes home the gold in this category.
I swear that I love Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but when I think about the amount of stories that Disney Dreamlight Valley has, New Horizons doesn’t really compare.
The story in Animal Crossing is about you traveling to an island and assisting in revitalizing the area and bringing people in. You know the full story within an hour or two of playing the game.
Disney Dreamlight Valley, however, has a full story that takes a long time to complete, along with many side quests for each of the residents. While, admittedly, the story is a bit childish, as it focuses on friendship and forgetting your time in Dreamlight Valley, it is far deeper than Animal Crossing’s.
The criteria I am going for with the economy is which game has a better overall money system, and for this, I have to give it to Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
I admit, both games have a fairly simple money system since they are both meant to be played by anyone, but Animal Crossing takes things a step further. The island revolves around a basic capitalistic society with multiple shops buying and selling goods in exchange for Bells.
There are plenty of shops for the residents to interact with, and if they are feeling lucky, they can participate in the stock market through the use of Turnips, which mimics the real-world stock exchange on a basic level.
Disney Dreamlight Valley’s economy is a little more bare-bones and runs mostly off of two shops. Well, it did, until Daisy opened up a boutique. At first, it was just Goofy running a bunch of farm stands and Scrooge selling all the furniture, not buying.
There was also a restaurant, but the shops don’t compare to those in New Horizons, and you cannot participate in the stock market. Instead, you mostly just grow pumpkins and sell them, since they are the highest-selling item in the game.
3Relaxation
Admittedly, this category is more subjective than the others and goes more off of how I feel when I play either of the games. For relaxation, I am breaking down how relaxed I feel when playing either game, and I have to give this one to Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Let me break down my reasoning. Animal Crossing is that quintessential cozy title that people go to when they want to feel happy and relaxed. The game is very basic and doesn’t bombard you with things to do. You can spend all day just decorating and talking to villagers. It truly is a relaxing experience.
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While Disney Dreamlight Valley is supposed to be relaxing, I find the game does more of the opposite at times. This is because it shows you all sorts of quests that you need to complete, objectives to do, while giving you a deadline to complete Star Paths. With all of this going on, I feel more like I need to work when playing this game than just relax.
2License Use
Nintendo has plenty of licenses, and so does Disney, but which game uses these licenses to the greatest advantage in its respective game? This is yet another point for Disney Dreamlight Valley.
Nintendo is weird about how it uses its licenses at times. Sure, you have games like Super Smash Bros. that bring in every character to interact with each other, but Animal Crossing isn’t like that, and it never will be.
The most you get are Epona (even though she isn’t in New Horizons and instead appears in New Leaf) and Wolf Link, making appearances as villagers, along with some obvious Nintendo property-themed items in the stores.
Disney Dreamlight Valley was built on the idea of bringing in every Disney property. In the base game, you already had characters like Merlin, Mickey, Donald, Ariel, Ursula, Anna, Elsa, and more interacting.
The number of characters from different properties has only increased, and now you can even make friends with Alice, Mulan, Aladdin, Beast, and a lot more. If one thing is certain, Disney knows how to use their properties to their detriment.
Nintendo did an amazing thing when the developer created Animal Crossing - one of thebest cozy games out there. While it wasn’t the first “cozy game” ever made, it revolutionized the genre with relaxing tones, cute villagers, and deep customization.
Unfortunately, the latest title has fallen short compared to other games in the genre, like Disney Dreamlight Valley.
Disney Dreamlight Valley expands on the cozy game genre with fun storytelling that focuses on rekindling friendships that were long forgotten, along with unique DLCs that play into the Disney properties that it utilizes.
Dreamlight Valley has its downfalls, such as the basic economy and lack of deep customization options that allow for terrforming the ground, but it makes up with tons of daily activities that will keep you interested for hours, interesting residents with interweaving questlines, and a relaxing environment that occasionally gets a bit hectic with all there is to do.
