Animal Crossing

"Hey, I think I did this yesterday."

Around the world, people love Animal Crossing. I did, too. The first time I saw Animal Crossing, it looked like tons of fun. The first time I played it, it really was a ton of fun. I couldn't take my hands off of the game... (except for that I had to). The second time I played it, it was still a ton of fun. The third time, it was pretty fun. The fourth time, it was getting old but still kinda fun. The fifth time... well the fifth time it was just getting old... and finally the sixth time, I never wanted to play this game again.

Now, that is a little exaggerated. I kept up my Animal Crossing game for almost two months, and this was two months of heavy playing every day. I traded over the internet, I visited and interacted with many friends' towns, and I made sure to play many times a day to keep up my collections and such. I kept playing because my friends kept become new to the game and it made it a little more fun to "just play a little while longer," but to be honest, after about a week I was really tired of Animal Crossing.

Why? Doesn't it sound like a ton of fun? Well, in the beginning, it really is. The things you can do are "endless" possibilities. They're endless because you can do them over and over and there really is no end to it. Now, I am a fan of sim games. I love Harvest Moon, the many dating sims out there, and the sim value of Azure Dreams. I like just about every sim game except for Animal Crossing and The Sims... and the reason is because the things they give you to do JUST AREN'T FUN.

The game starts out where you, some random ugly thing that's supposed to be human, rides a polygon and talks to a polygonal thing called Rover, who is an annoying, stupid blue cat (literally, they made him annoying and stupid on purpose, to annoy you... because that's is "personality.") He asks you things like "what is your name?" Then you can tell him your gender by "Isn't it cool?" or "Isn't it cute?" Yes, because only boys say cool and only girls say cute. Didn't you know that? Sexist? No way! Anyway, if you pick the wrong adjective for your gender (after he says something like "Yes! Cute! You're a girl!") you can tell him that he has the wrong gender. Then he will tell you that you're stupid or wierd and probably laugh at you. Then you tell him that you're trying to move, but you for some reason never had a home before today, and you have no money with you! He proceeds to laugh at you and tell you how stupid you are again. I ignored this introduction, because it really annoyed the crap out of me, and I just knew the game would be more fun when I got into it.

So, you end up in the town (That you get to name, of course), and you talk to Tom Nook, a friendly old raccoon that decides you can buy a house from him. The houses are free, but he tells you they're not. If you decide to pay for your house, he will give you a bigger one and you'll be in debt again. Eventually, you can build your house to its maximum, but you might not want to play that long.

So you get your house. It's a tiny little room make out of some shambly material like rotten wood or dirty stone. You have a radio, though! It comes with a song in it, and you can buy/receive many more songs to add to your collection and change what it sounds like in your house. You can even turn the radio on or off. Such interaction!

Then you proceed to get a part-time job with Nook. He makes you do some really annoying tasks, such as plant a bunch of seeds (which is fun the first time), and talk to every last person in town. Then you have to go out and run errands for him (like delivering things to various people) and you're done. Then you get to go off on your own and make your own decision on how to pay off your house (if that's what you want to do).

Once you've done this, the game starts paying attention to what time it is. It works with your GameCube's internal clock, so when it's 8:03 in real life, it's 8:03 in the game, too. This is innovative, and sounds like a good idea, but sometimes it's annoying when the only chance you have to play the game is at 10 pm every day, because everything is closed and everyone's asleep, but hey, they're always shakin' those trees.

Now you have to decide how you want to get money. There are basically two ways to do this. One is from the townsfolk and one is from scavenging around for it. Now, these two ways have many, many different opportunities for things to try to get the money, so it's not like you're stuck doing the same two things again and again (or are you?)

The townsfolk are... well... not so fun. There are something like 150 different animals you can have live in your town. The problem is, in reality, there are only about 5 or 6, just with different skins and names. Each animal has one of the very few "personalities," and each animal with this person acts exactly the same and says the exact same thing as all the other ones of that personality... word for word. The personalities range from things like Mean and Angry, to things like Stupid and Moronic. That's no joke. There are many animals who are either mad all the time or just really dumb. There are a few that are prissy and stuck up, and there's maybe one "friendly" personality trait. I think there's a hick one, too, but it's almost the same thing as friendly. The personality traits really aren't that different. They're still going to say the same things, just word them a little differently. If you get stung by a bee, a friendly animal may say "Oh, you look like you got stung... it doesn't look very nice." and then a mean one may say "You got stung. It looks bad." And then you will talk to another animal and they'll say "You got stung. It looks bad." And the characters will continue to do this, as they never develop AT ALL.

Now, you can interact with the animals in ways other than just talking to them; for example, you could write them a letter. When you do this, the animal will write back saying that you're stupid and complain that you're sending them wierd letters and tell you to stop. That's because the game decides if your letter is bad or not by a spell check... but the dictionary in the game is very small so you have to use simple words. Plus, the animals will like it if you write "good" words in the letter, and also like reading their name and your name. So if you named yourself Bob and are sending a letter to Tom (and yes, these are names from the game) then you can write a letter that says "Bob Tom cat happy friends love" and they will be fine, but if your letter says "Hi! I am your friend!" then your letter will anger the animal because "Hi!" and "friend!" are not in the spell check dictionary ("friend" is, but not "friend!") It's that annoying. You can also send gifts with your letter, but the animals don't care.

When you talk to them, they will say something random that all animals say (regardless of personality), such as "In the day the sun is out." or something. Then, each personality type will say a certain phrase, like all animals that are mean will say "Whaddya want?" or something. Then you're given the choice to chat with them or ask them to give you an errand. If you choose to chat, they might hint at how to get a certain item, but it's probably impossible to find anyway. If you choose a job, they'll give you an item and tell you to go take it to another animal. This other animal will most likely be missing or asleep. If they are easy to find, they will tell you that you're supposed to go to a different animal for some reason (sometimes they ask you to pick up items instead of deliver them).

You can do this every day. This is the only interaction with the animals you have... doing this same thing every single day, over and over and over.

Now about the scavenge! You can walk around the town and do something slightly destructive to find items or money (which are called bells by the way). You can choose to fish, dig holes, or shake trees. Sometimes money comes out, most of the time you just waste your time. Fishing is fun, I'll give the game that.

Sometimes you won't find money, but something like a fossil. Why is this useful? Well, you can attach it to a letter addressed to the museum (what museum? I don't know. It's not the museum that's in your town. It's just some other museum) and the museum will send you back the same fossil, except it will look different and have a name. Now you can sell it or give it to the museum in your town. Chances are it will be a cheap one, but sometimes you do find good ones. When you shake trees, usually a bee hoard will sting you, but sometimes bells will fall out. Sometimes there is fruit in the tree, and you can collect fruit from other towns and plant it in your town. Fruits that don't originate from your town yield high prices. You can also collect shells near the beach and sell those.

It sounds like something fun from a sim game, but would you want to waste your time collecting the same, worthless shells and shaking the same unlikely trees day after day? Well, you probably would for a few days.

So, you get some money. Now what are you supposed to do with it? Well, you can pay off your debt or buy items. That's it. The items are decorations for your home. Sometimes they are interactive (like radios you can turn on or off, lamps you can turn on or off, or NES games that you can actually play), but most of the time they just sit there. What is cool is that there are furniture sets, so you could decide to have a table, bed, couch, dresser, wallpaper, and flooring all from the "Regal" set. There are also sets only obtainable through special offers and the such, and if you're reading this, you've allready missed them, so to get everything in the game, you're going to have to cheat and use a gameshark or something.

Which brings me to another point. This game sounds like a collection freak's dream. Well, I, for one, am someone who loves to collect things. I always try to get all the items, all the unlockables, all the stats in every game. So, I thought I would love collecting everything in this game.

The problem is, in order to get every last item, not only will you have to cheat with a gameshark, but you'll have to play the game for hours a day for 365 days (a whole year!!) without missing even one single day. And that's just a minimum. It may take you longer.

Now, that doesn't sound bad if your collection is constantly growing, right? Wrong. You'll have almost everything you've ever wanted after a month or two. The rest is just waiting for certain items that appear on one random day out of the year, and only on that day. Sometimes they won't appear at all. Sometimes items appear only on holidays... and chances are you're going to miss getting all the special holiday items that day, or it might be impossible to get them all (such as there will only be one given to you out of a set of three, and you have to wait for the next year for that holiday to come again.) Plus you're going to have to fork over $120 for a Game Boy Advance and a connector cable if you want to get the few "island" items.

The game gets extremely boring after a week. There's absolutely nothing to do anymore. Yay, you can shake the trees again. You can talk to the people again. Once you've played the game for a week, you've heard basically every last thing anyone will ever say in the game. It's just repetitive, tedious, and boring.

Now, there are random little things that try to hold you over until you get to do something fun again. You can make your own clothing designs, you can connect your GBA to go to another little island, you can go to K.K.'s place on Saturdays to get a new song for your radio (which makes you watch the entire credits roll, unskippable, which takes a very, very long time)... but after a while, even these things get old. You won't have any new experiences after playing the game for a couple weeks. Ever.

There are some new experiences you can have if you play the game poorly. If you don't play every day, weeds will grow in your town (you have to clean these every day or your animals will get mad), cockroaches will infest your house, and animals will become angry with you for not talking to them. If you turn off the game without saving (saving is a hassle, by the way. You have to go to the little save zoid thing and wait the long save time), a mole named Mr Resetti pops out the next time you turn on the game and scolds you for cheating. He will continue to talk and talk as your punishment. It will take you quite a few minutes to even get to play again. If you read the things he says, it could take you 5-10 minutes just to get into the game again. That's wasting your precious tree-shaking time. The thing is, though, Mr Resetti pops up stupidly. If you save your game, then take a few steps to the right, Mr Resetti will pop up the next time you start playing. It's annoying.

Another problem is you can't play the game for extended periods of time. I have played games for 12 hours straight before, so I like games that you can continue to play... but the game forces you to stop. Once you've shaken all your trees for the day, you're done. You can buy the things you need (they will then be sold out) and talk to people (they get angry at you and stop talking to you once you've talked to them so many times a day, and they all go to sleep at night). Plus, you have to play it at certain times of the day. You can't just start playing at night because everyone will be mad since they're asleep and you'll ruin your animal relationships (which are really non-existent, because there are no affection rating besides "like" and "dislike" for the animals, and this changes almost at random)... Anyway, after about a couple of hours during the day, you're done and can't do ANYTHING else in the game until tomorrow... unless you cheat... which destroys the entire purpose of the game to begin with.

And, well, that's what you do in Animal Crossing. Here's the close-up aspects:

Gameplay

The buttons do what they're supposed to with no delay, but it's a sim game so the controls aren't going to be that big of a deal. The actual value of how fun the game is is very limited. The game is very fun when it's new, and will be fun for the first couple of days. The problem is, you won't like it after you've figured out what the game is, since you're doing the same thing over and over. Of course, if you really like shaking trees, and you think you could do this every day and never tire of it, you might like this game.

Graphics

Well, the game is for Nintendo 64, it's just ported to the GameCube because of its wild popularity that I do not understand. The graphics are... well... bad. The characters all look pretty lame, even for a 64 game. But they're kinda cute, and they don't really matter too much to the game.

Sound

The music is repetitive, and very boring. The best feature of this game is the way the animals talk when you choose for them to speak in "animalese" instead of "beepese" (I think that's what they're called). They actually pronounce the words in a strange high pitch mumble that doesn't sound like they're saying words. It's very strange and fun to listen to... but that's all I can say for the sound. The sound effects are normal, kinda lacking, but normal.

Replay

This game has absolutely no replay value at all. Okay, there is a slight amount of replay value in the fact that you can try to collect all the various items that there are in the game, but that's not a very appealing concept and it's not fun and worth the replay.

Overall

Overall, Animal Crossing was a cool concept and would have been fun if it wasn't so repetitive. If the characters developed and many different events happened, the game would be more fun. It's obviously not impossible, because the Harvest Moon series has plenty of character development and many events and they occur over the span of three years. I'm sure the Animal Crossing staff could have planned this out to work like this, too.

If you're a collection freak, I might try renting Animal Crossing to consider if it's a game that you would decide you might want to play for every single day of the next year. When you do buy the game, you'll get a nifty memory card just for the game allready loaded with some free gifts for the game (you'll get a few items like NES games and a furniture or something).

I would suggest to anyone to rent this game to see if it's something they'd like to play. It requires a lot of your time and dedication and gets boring quickly, but the game is popular and there's a chance you might like it.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/05/04