The birth of a new genre, a game that turns out differently for each person. The town is your canvas.
This is a game that does not sound amazing in theory. It is the way in which it plays that counts. If you're looking for something unique and interesting, an experiment that could potentially be one of the most addictive out there, this could be very much worth trying.
What it is
Animal Crossing is a life simulator. You play a.. uh.. well it doesn't matter who you play. It can be either a girl or boy based on your choices at the beginning of the game. You can buy outfits for the little critter that represents you, as well as a great mass of items that you can arrange in your own house. There are a number of residents in your town, chosen randomly from a pool of hundreds of animal character designs.
Characters / Character Development / Script
When it comes to the characters that live in your town, there are some very diverse personality types they could fall under, varying from snobby to cranky to sporty to sweet to odd.. written with alot of wit. The scope of their conversation is very large, but also dependant on what is going on at the time (for instance, they can repeat themselves a bit too often when they are preoccupied with an upcoming festival.) Aside from offering light (or heavy- some of the characters are mean. ^^;) banter, you could also get lucky and recieve a gift, try your luck with a game they make up, or make them incredibly mad by talking too much. They might do other random stuff like fall in love with you for a day or offer to paint the roof of your house. They also participate in the festivals- another part of this review that I'll get to later. If you try offering your help enough, they might also offer you a job. The jobs are simple errands of "I'll give you a present for taking this thing to so-and-so." While it sounds repetitive, it can be fun early on to find out what you're going to get, and easily lengthen the amount of items you acquire.
Items / Your House / Customization
The number of items is just astonishing. There are hundreds of different types of shirts, "stuff" to assemble in your house like wallpapers, carpeting, all ends of furniture and knick-knacks, playable NES games, house plants, rockets, booom boxes, bamboo poles, swimming pools, giant teddy bears, Link's sword from the Legend Of Zelda series- that was just a small, tiny, miniscule example of the wide range of junk you can collect for your house. You can arrange them in any way you wish, the controls being quite solid enough for constant tinkering with your room. There is also the HRA (A group that rates the layout of your house. Getting on their good side will net you some special prizes. They send you a letter each week letting you know what they think.) There is also a hidden feng shui system. Basically, certain items have attributes and can rise or drop the luck you have depending on where you place them. Luck influences things like how often a character that likes you will offer to give you an item or trade items with you. The extent of this area of the game (collecting items and designing a house with them.) could be a novel little diversion. But for me it became a madly addicting contest to find every single thing, get a perfect score for the HRA, and exercise the endless possibilities. The house you have starts off as a tiny pathetic little hut, but with alot of hard work you can buy great extensions to your house. You also have a mailbox, and will receive mail everyday from friends you've made, and/or from random people.
Speaking of customization..
Everything in this game can be altered to fit what you prefer. This isn't just limited to your house and clothing, the other characters might start adopting little things you say or outfits you've created. You can erect signs and plant flowers or trees (also cut trees down, altering the landscape as you like. You can also drive out characters you dislike in order to get new ones, make a town song that rings out every hour.) All the little things come together to form a game that will be wildly different depending on who is playing it.
Also, remember the fully playable NES games I mentioned before? Some people only bought this game for that purpose. There are 9 games in all, and they are perfect ports right down the last pixel with with save features. But you don't get them all handed to you in a flash, some of them are very hard to track down. And the ones you recieve are random. Overall it is an incredibly nice bonus.
The Many Activities
A second ago I just mentioned how you can create outfits. That is thanks to a little shop nearby that offers you a nearly MS Paint-style canvas to create your own designs for clothing. Or umbrellas. Or carpeting and wallpaper. With enough dexterity and patience (we are designing something with a game controller after all), I could imagine someone drawing something astonishing with that tool. There is also a police station where you can find out about upcoming events, a bulleten board where people (including you) can post messages, a shop that quickly becomes a major part of the game, a post office where you can send letters you have written, and a museum that is empty and waiting for your donations.
What donations would those be..? Well you can fish in this game. There are dozens upon dozens of fish to collect. There are also bugs that require some careful timing and stealth to acquire. Both of those endeavors are fun and the results you get change with the time and date. You can dig areas to unearth fossils. To do all of these things. That brings us to the next portion of this review- the tools that you can use. There is a fishing pole, a bug-catching net, a shovel, and an axe (for cutting down trees). There is a wishing well that will let you know how attractive your town is (based on the amount of trees, flowers you have growing around town, and if you've taken away weeds from the land, etc) . Getting a perfect balance will not only bring in more people to your town, but also allow you to earn some powered up tools.
Festivals
When it is Christmas and Halloween in real life, so is it in Animal Crossing. You'll get presents, rare items, and be able to do activities with the other residents. Some of these require some preperation on the days beforehand. There are also fishing tournaments, sports tournaments, and every couple of days a random "special" person will come over. They will usually offer you items for money or completion of a mini-game activities. Some items are incredibly rare, such that some people have only come across them once so far in all their time of playing.
Money is a big part of this game. You need money to get many items, and to pay off your debt. You can earn money from selling the fish or bugs you catch, artifacts you dig up, and from selling items you don't want or need. You can also sell fruit that grows on the various trees around town. You can also grow more frutious trees by burying foreign fruit obtained from random luck with the townspeople. There are tricks to speeding up the process of making money that would be revealed with careful play.
So let's see.. you can make friends by chatting and answering questions as well as sending letters, alter the landscape of your town, collect and design your own house and a variety of other things. You can go fishing, bug-hunting, or digging for artifacts. You can alter the town entirely to fit what you want and like.
But what is the real point of the game?
What makes it such that I could play it for over a hundred hours and still get the urge to play it again and again, probably for another hundred hours? Well aside from each of the endeavors being inexplicably enjoyable, digging deep into any of them will uncover some crazy goals. Getting perfect scores and balances, completely paying off your debt, completing the item database, trying to collect every possible townsperson, all of which are vast enough to make this game last forever. And I think it will last forever.
That would have been a perfect place to end the review, but there are still alot of things I should mention. This game is like any other game in that you really cannot play it 24/7 into eternity without getting burned out. Even the best games in the world eventually grow stale and you've gotta play something else for a time. But I think Animal Crossing has a glorious lifespan, and even when I was most tired of it I would still be able to come back several months later and enjoy it again just as much. But the best way to play this game is in, say, the equivelant of a week every month over the course of a year- inbetween other games. I was able to obsessively play it for a straight month, but that doesn't quite fit the structure of the game. This is one to be played in little bits as you chip away at everything it has to offer.
This one reminds me of..
I should say Harvest Moon. The two games have lots of stuff in common. HM has the planning and life management going on, the non-linearity, and in the best entries into the series, a comperable number of side endeavors and socializing.
But the game I'm going to pick that I feel has the most affinity to Animal Crossing is one that you probably wouldn't expect. And that is- WarioWare. 0_0 You're probably wondering why. Well, WarioWare was a revolutionary title. One that tapped into things we hadn't thought possible. It was the kind of series starter that really excited me- as I could picture in the future, if all of the beggining kinks were worked out, if all the neat new ideas were built further, it could result in something so near perfection it would be a must-play. Animal Crossing has that same sort of quality, I think. The possibilties are bottomless, and this experiment has resulted in some of the most addictive and unusual that gaming has to offer.
There is the possibility for multiplayer. While it is a nice feature, it is nowhere near as good as it could be. Loading between files takes longer than it should, and you can only control one character at once. Also you can't steal any of your friend's stuff. ^^; You can bury presents for them in the ground though, or collect fruit from their town, and talk to the townspeople who will react to seeing you and remark about your friend. What usually happened in my experience was that a whole bunch of people from my town would move out and go to my friend's town, and vice versa. So it is great if you start to get tired of your host of characters.
One awesome thing is that there are four houses for one memory card. If it's just you playing, you can just have all the houses for yourself and three other characters you make.. but if you have siblings or other family members, they can live next door to you in the game and do the same activities. Gathering you play this game with somebody you get along with-- (^^;) It is far easier to collect everything in the game this way, as recievable items are so varied and trading could be fruitous.
So that's the gameplay portion of this review. Now onto stuff like music and graphics.
Graphics - Not good. The animal designs are diverse and express themselves clearly, and the various junk you can collect looks very far from crude, but disregarding the depth of color, it is very possible that the N64 could have done this with room to spare. But to tell all truths, I don't want the graphics to get better. I want them to stay just as they are now. Because they don't matter at all in this game. If future entries could deepen the many aspects of activities and customization to make the possibilties all the more bottomless, and ratchet up more text (more of the fun dialogue I liked), then I wouldn't mind if the graphics look this way forever.
Music - Quite nice and charming. There are a huge amount of songs in this game. From the songs you can collect from K.K. every friday and have playing at your house each day with a record player, to the town theme that changes every hour, they fit the nature of the series perfectly. They are fun, varied, and simple arrangements. The characters even have their own little language that almost resembles english.
(Graphics would get a 5/10 whilst music would get a 6. But I bumped up their ratings since they have a most unfortunately huge impact upon the final score.)
Length of Game / Controls / Difficulty
100+ hours. I'm pretty sure I've spent at least 150 hours. The controls are fine, though not perfect. I'll get into that in the next section of this review, regarding the weak points of this game. Now the difficulty is always manageable and easy. Except for one tiny insignificant yet deeply annoying part. And those are the bees. Every so often when you shake a tree, bees will spring out at you. You must run around the tree at an angle and quickly whip out your net to catch them in order to complete your bug collection. It could very well be the hardest thing I've ever tried to do in a game. ^^; Also trying to get 100% on everything is exactly as it should be in every game- a task that requires a ridiculous amount of effort.
Weak Points
Well I'm sure you already have an idea of how skewered this game is. While I'm confident that there are some action-loving gamers that could enjoy this one, not all will. It is just such a particular game, whether or not you will like it varies from person to person and may take awhile to discern considering the unusual gameplay.
But I can niggle about little things that bothered me. The inventory system. I already remarked of how I loved collecting items- but there eventually comes a point where you've packed your house, basement, attic, full of stuff. Maybe even took the other three houses and filled those up too. So where do you put items? There is nowhere. I had to invent places to stick them- like inside of old letter envelopes and put them in the mailing center. I'd let some sit on the ground but that isn't a good idea since they'll sometimes end up in the lost and found. So eventually I resorted to desperately burying them in areas and writing down their locations.
What a pain. Thankfully I've heard that the next game has an unlimited inventory bank where you can store all of your stuff. Oh thank the moons.
Now that the sequel for DS has been released "Animal Crossing - Wild World" From what I've heard, it should be better. More features, somewhat better controls, but if you can't get that one, than this is a great alternative that I don't regret.