My situation is best described by a short timeline:
- Me living together with girlfriend, I have a Switch, she also has an account on it, and that is her primary Switch.
- She buys ACNH on her account.
- Installs and plays on my Switch, becomes Resident Representative on the island.
- I also play on the same island, and get invested.
- …time skip…
- Relationship ends, ex-girlfriend moves away. I keep my Switch and, with her permission, keep playing the game, getting more invested.
- Now she has gained access to another Switch and wants to play there.
Well, I also want to keep playing. I presume that I will have to buy the game myself, that's no problem, but I want to keep the same island as well, if possible.
My question is: what happens if she does whatever she needs to do to start playing on another Switch, but I don't do anything to her account on my Switch.
- Will her local account be deleted? Or can I keep using it and her character to build bridges and whatnot?
- Or if I am locked out of her character, will the island remain playable so I can at least take the time to store items with a friend?
- Is there a chance that she can use the cloud backup feature to transfer the whole island, even though it's intended only for broken/lost consoles?
I don't think she has any interest in this, but it may apply to others in the same predicament.
I can't be the first person in this exact situation, so I've searched around of course, but I couldn't find an answer.
Other people have asked what happens if you delete the representative, and the answer is that it can only be done by deleting the whole island, but I don't need to delete her character for emotional reasons or anything. I'm fine just dressing up her house as a Witch's Lair and posting warning signs all over it.
(just to be clear: j/k, I'm not actually calling her a witch)
Best Answer
Unfortunately, there is no way this ends where the same island is on your copy of ACNH.
Relevant Nintendo Article
You can link your Nintendo Account to multiple consoles. However, you can only activate one primary console per Nintendo Account. On a non-primary console, games that you’ve downloaded with your Nintendo Account will only be playable using your account. On the primary console, games that you've downloaded with your Nintendo Account can be played by all users on that console.
If you continued to play your game normally, and she were to set up ACNH on her own switch with her Nintendo Account properly affiliated with it, you would eventually lose access to play with any account but hers.
Why?
The game is (likely) linked specifically to her Nintendo Account as her Primary Console. This means that anybody who uses this console can play the game.
After she re-assigns everything to this new switch, your console will become non-primary.
As such, only HER account can be used to play the game.
Everything you want to save needs to be transferred to her resident BEFORE she signs in. At that point, you could play the game regularly as her so long as her account information is valid.
I spent several hours on the phone with a Nintendo Rep trying to get myself as the "Main User" of the switch instead of my daughter (She hopped on my "account" to play her games when we first got it, and I wanted her to keep her save files. So I just renamed it and made myself a new one. We got stuck in a cycle of buying games on her account. NOT worth saving her 20 minutes of Odyssey gameplay!). . . So I've gone through every scenario I could think of with Nintendo for legitimate purposes.
Is this the only game she's bought on this Nintendo account? Perhaps you could negotiate a transfer of ownership. (Probably against Nintendo Terms)