Ah, spring. A glorious season. My allergies are flaring up, sure, but it’s going to be 80 degrees here today after several days of below freezing temperatures. Strawberry plants are popping up in my garden and there are buds on the cherry tree. I’m not playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons regularly anymore, so I don’t have to look at the face of the dreaded menace Zipper T. Bunny and his egg stash this year, and-wait, what’s that?
A Pokémon is still the talk of the town?
Hoppip is still in my Pokémon Center?
Yeesh.
Pokémon Pokopia is currently in the midst of its first event, entitled “More Spores for Hoppip,” and while it was cute for a few days, players are quickly wishing this little fool would please just get out of their Pokémon Centers and float away somewhere else. Please!
More Spores for Hoppip officially began on March 10, so just over a week ago. But the event was announced on the 5th, and was accessible then by time traveling (messing with the Switch 2 clock). As a result, a lot of fans eager to see what it had to offer started the event five days early, and have thus been in it for two weeks now.
Admittedly, that’s our own fault, but even the people just rolling through it normally sound fed up. The reason why everyone wishes Hoppip would scram is because this event is… kind of nothing! Hoppip shows up and sets up shop in your Pokémon Center, and sells a bunch of spring-themed items that you can buy with Cotton Spores, which are obtainable on Dream Islands. The thing is, it’s very easy to get enough Cotton Spores to buy every item at least once within one or two days of collecting them (you can only visit one Dream Island a day), so most avid players got everything they wanted rather quickly. Most of the items are also purely decoration, too. The only one you actually need for habitat building are the flower seeds, and you only need to buy that item twice to build the habitats for event Pokémon Skiploom and Jumpluff (you get five seeds per purchase, and need eight total).
This would all be a fairly whatever thing if it weren’t for the fact that Hoppip is taking up prime real estate by setting up shop in the Pokémon Center and refusing to move. You see, once you’ve finished building a Pokémon Center, Pokémon with certain abilities will play merchant behind the counter and sell all sorts of interesting items to you. But as long as Hoppip is there, none of them can do that. What’s more, Hoppip is in every Pokémon Center on every island, so it’s not like you can just head out to Rocky Ridges for a shopping spree. You can still get the merchant Pokémon trading, but only by setting up counters and a cash register elsewhere, and powering the latter with electricity. The Pokémon Center is always self-powered and has a built-in register and large counter, making it ideal for trading. You also can’t move the location of the Center while Hoppip is in it, if you want to redesign an area.
The other downside to Hoppip running a 24-hour mall out of every the Pokémon Center is that you can’t get Hoppip to do anything else while it’s in there. When Hoppip first arrives for the event, it doesn’t have a designated Habitat, and you can’t get it to follow you during the event to bring it to a house or grass patch to assign it one. So if you’re trying to ensure everyone has a Habitat, Hoppip will keep on sitting in the “No Home” category until the event is done.
Is all of this trivial? Yeah, a bit. Is it solvable? Also yes. You can just time travel to the future, to after Hoppip has left on March 24 (five long days from now), and you’ll be free. You can put Hoppip in a little leaf house if you want, and go back to using your Pokémon Center as a more general mercantile. But some people don’t want to time travel at all, though, whether out of principle or because they don’t want to do things that could have unknown side effects on their game, and others don’t know how, or don’t want to do it because they’re playing other time-based video games that this could impact. Some people (me) are just stubborn.
What this is giving is massive Zipper T. Bunny energy, though. As some fans have pointed out, Pokopia resting in the life simulation genre and having a spring event with a cutesy guy you can’t get rid of has echoes of 2020, when a creepy guy in a rabbit costume (???) showed up on all our Animal Crossing Islands and would not leave for weeks.
I am gritting my teeth and putting up with Hoppip for five more days. Those cute, vacant eyes have charmed me and the flower seeds it sells are quite nice, so I am buying up as many spring items as possible for when, mid-summer, I inevitably wish I had more picnic blankets or whatever.
That said, come March 24, that little cotton puff better make like a grass Pokémon and leaf my Center. I’ve got remodeling to do.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
