An obvious Animal Crossing clone is being advertised on PS5, and it might be the same game as another copycat that was delisted in January.
A new Animal Crossing for Nintendo Switch 2 is going to happen sooner or later. In fact, considering how successful Animal Crossing: New Horizons was, it’s surprising Nintendo hasn’t announced it already.
For other developers, that means this is a chance to swoop in and draw starved Animal Crossing fans to their own life sims, such as Level-5’s Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, which is at least somewhat original.
The generically named Anime Village Online on PlayStation 5 looks to be anything but, although we suspect this thing won’t even be released, thanks to either Sony’s or Nintendo’s intervention.
Although there’s no gameplay footage, in-game screenshots do show that it’s blatantly copying Animal Crossing’s art style, with the human player character interacting with animal villagers.
The key artwork it has on its store listing is also identical to Animal Crossing’s visuals. It’s almost certainly AI-generated, which has become worryingly common for shovelware like this, which clogs up digital storefronts on consoles and tries to trick less savvy gamers.
The issue led to a hullaballoo earlier this year, with Steam and the Switch eShop, with both Valve and Nintendo cracking down on removing ‘eSlop’ from their stores.
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It’s been a problem on the PlayStation store too and the fact that something like Anime Village Online can even make it onto the store is an indictment on Sony’s lack of quality control.
While the game is slated for a 2027 release, Sony will likely have the listing removed once enough attention has been drawn to it. That’s assuming the infamously litigious Nintendo doesn’t get there first.
Even if it did come out that year, we’d like to think an actual Animal Crossing game will be on Switch 2 by then, so it’ll have missed its opportunity anyway.
According to the listing, the game’s publisher is Wisnu Sudirman, the sole member of Indonesian studio GamePoc.
Its website says it specialises in ‘Unreal Engine development and console porting, delivering high-quality gaming experiences,’ though it doesn’t list any examples of published work.
Animal Crossing fans aren’t so desperate that they’ll put stock in Anime Village Online. In fact, if the Animal Crossing subreddit is anything to go by, they don’t even know it exists or at least don’t think it’s worth discussing.
A thread on the PlayStation subreddit, however, has people baffled at how brazen the knock-off artwork is, with the top comment being ‘They are not even trying anymore.’
It’s also theorised that this game is the exact same one as another Animal Crossing rip-off that appeared on the PlayStation store this past January, called Anime Life Sim.
Not only do both of them look near identical to Animal Crossing, both of them feature a black and white wolf character called Ori in their screenshots.
Anime Life Sim was later delisted, but it seems there was nothing to stop the developer from changing the name and putting it back up, which is further proof Sony needs to be stricter with what games it approves.
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