"and shows like SNL or Last Week Tonight referencing it."
This is the part that has really stood out to me. We've seen celebrities publicly express their
AC fandom before - Dylan Sprouse even follows ACC on Twitter - but the series has really become mainstream in a way that it never was before. I still remember first hearing Sam Bee make a joke about it on her show - I had to rewind the video because seeing
Animal Crossing mentioned on a mainstream comedy show was something I truly never thought I would see. Since then Bee has referenced it again, and it's also come up twice on
Late Night with Seth Meyers. I haven't seen it on
SNL yet because I'm only halfway through the season finale, but I look forward to getting to that one as well.

It's good to see that sales numbers are continuing to impress as well. I believe that
Wild World was, at its peak, just inside the top thirty bestselling video games ever, but it's definitely been pushed way down the list since then and is now only the third-bestselling game in its own series.
"and if you do have it, would you say that it's better than new leaf?"
It was clear to me on day one that I would like
New Horizons more than
New Leaf - the only question now is whether it will surpass
Wild World as my favorite game of all time. My biggest gripe with
New Leaf was the difficulty level - previously rare fish and bugs just weren't anymore, especially thanks to the tropical island permanently set to August that you could access at any time. In March and April, as it seemed that
New Horizons was, if not as egregious as
New Leaf, still unfortunately closer to
New Leaf than to
Wild World on the difficulty scale, I pegged June as the month that would likely determine whether
New Horizons would surpass
Wild World on my personal list - the statistic that I most commonly cite to exemplify my frustrations with
New Leaf is that I caught 54 sharks in the first month of the game, something I did not want to be possible once sharks came into season in
NH. Now, though, as it seems that sharks are indeed unreasonably common once again, I find that
NH is still likely to end up as my favorite - there's just so much else to love about this game that wasn't in
NL that I'm willing to look past the abundance of sharks.
As far as the original topic is concerned, I'm perfectly satisfied with
NH for now and haven't even been thinking about future games. The base game alone is enough for a year's worth of content thanks to bug and fish cycles as well as the fun new seasonal differences that have been added to the series, and the rolling updates model that Nintendo has gone with for this game make it likely that I will continue to play it for longer than the one year (plus two weeks, thanks to the bizarre decision to make the golden net only obtainable at the Bug-Off) for which I played
NL.