Aika Horror Village Creator Shares Nostalgic Tribute Following Animal Crossing: New Leaf Online Shutdown

3 weeks ago Justin 1 Comment

Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s iconic Aika Village horror dream town is on our mind today with the creator releasing a nostalgic tribute saying goodbye to the game’s online servers!

If you’re not familiar, Aika Village was easily the most popular and discussed Animal Crossing: New Leaf dream town in online spaces back in the day near the game’s release. While hard to describe in detail, the village embraced some seriously creepy doll murder vibes, with the concerning Hypno K.K. playing in every room as a cherry on top.

We see plenty of intricately themed islands in the era of Animal Crossing: New Horizons nowadays, but Aika Village was a pioneer of sorts with New Leaf to first embrace the concept of a themed town with a story. If you’re familiar with Aika Island from Animal Crossing: New Horizons, they were both created by the same player. (screenshots credited to jvgsjeff)

It appears to have been first discovered in the western Animal Crossing community in January 2013 after being recorded by a YouTuber, leading to an extensive discussion thread of over 200 posts on The Bell Tree Forums with many fans fascinated by the village wondering just exactly what’s meant to be going on. Some have gone as far as to essentially create their own Aika Village fanfic over the years!

Bringing us back to the present though with the news of Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s online servers shutting down yesterday, it was a treat to discover that the creator has recorded and edited together a delightful tribute to Aika Village — please do give it a watch below!

Adding to the pre-existing creepiness factor of Aika Village, many of this tribute’s scene feature 3 identical copies of the player character interacting with the world, and sometimes phasing in and out like ghosts. It really is the perfect send-off to such an iconic part of New Leaf’s history.

In an accompanying tweet, the following message was left in Japanese by the creator, machine translated into English as follows:

Thank you to everyone who visited Aika Village.
Thank you so much for over 10 years.

Proving our claims of Aika’s notablity, this tribute video has already reached almost 5 million views on Twitter as we write this article only 12 hours after it was posted. It’s likely only reaching Japanese audiences for the most part too at this time, with many more views to come as the reach expands to western viewers later.

Plus, an interesting clip sharing Aika Village’s final official visitor count from Luna’s dialogue is included in the video, showing off an unbelievable 315,488 dream visits from the Dream Suite around the world.

That’s quite an impressive count when considering the high amount of effort required to actually visit a dream town versus simply watching a video play-through online — the count is surely in the low to mid millions when considering video views!

It’s quite likely Aika Village holds the final record for most visited dream town, but unfortunately we’ll never know for sure from Nintendo. It’s too bad that the company isn’t more open to community engagement, as some kind of content sharing the top visited dream towns as the online shut down or similar initiative would have been great to see. Ah well.

So long Aika Village! We won’t ever forget you. If you’ve got your own memories of Aika and those olden days of Animal Crossing: New Leaf, leave them in the comments below.

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