"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

When I think of a town inhabited with animals, I usually get a different mental image than most people. I would imagine some kind of manly, shotgun wielding, wifebeater wearing warrior running around decapitating vicious animals with a beefy shotgun blast.

Perhaps this is why I can never get a job with Nintendo, and why they have stopped answering my e-mails. Regardless of that, Nintendo's perception of an animal overrun world, Animal Crossing: Wild World, the successor to the Gamecube's Animal Crossing, is more of a dip back into your carefree childhood and less of a violent struggle for life. It's not nearly as exciting as my brutal adventure, but what Animal Crossing: Wild World lacks in excitement, it makes up with depth and replay value.

In Animal Crossing: Wild World, you play as a small, proportionally challenged boy or girl who has just moved out of his or her parents' house. For whatever reason, you decide to move into a small, rural town filled with, yes, you guessed it, animals.

However, these aren't your typical animals. They don't go around scavenging for food and fighting over mates. Instead, these animals walk, talk, live in houses, and even wear shirts. These animals are all generally friendly and will readily agree to be your friend. Talk to one animal and he or she will strike up a rousing and sometimes humorous conversation with you. Your animal neighbors might challenge you to a fishing competition, or ask you to deliver a present to another animal. There's always some creature around that you can talk the day away with.

So, you've got a bunch of new friends, but there are still a few things you need, most importantly a place to stay. Thankfully, that's covered. Tom Nook, a maniacal raccoon that owns and operates a small shop in the town also appears to deal with real estate, and can sell you your very own house, albeit a rather small and unappealing one.

There's just one problem to this plan; you have no money. Luckily, Tom Nook, being the opportunity-grabbing mogul that he is, will give you the house in exchange for a little physical work in his shop. After those basic tasks are finished, Nook sets you free into the town, simply giving you a bill to pay off. However, this isn't a small amount of money that you will have to repay Nook. This is a sum that costs thousands and thousands of the game's currency, bells. With a massive debt like this thrown on you, it seems like you'll never be able to raise enough cash to be a homeowner.

Thankfully, the world of AC: WW is filled with ways to make money. There are many ways to quickly raise bells, ranging from selling insects that you catch to running tasks for your fellow villagers in exchange for a reward. You could sell old items that you no longer want, or run along the beach, collect seashells, and sell those as well. If fishing is your interest, you could go to a body of water and catch a fish, selling it to Tom Nook for profit. Even shaking trees can sometimes cause bags of bells to fall from the branches. The moneymaking possibilities are seemingly endless, and soon those massive loans will look like pocket change.

Of course, AC: WW isn't all about making money. There are plenty of other things to keep you occupied as you scurry about the town. For example, you could catch fish, bugs, collect paintings, and dig up fossils to donate to the local museum, which, when you first go there, is completely empty and run by a clueless owl who seems to have made it your job to fill the entire place with interesting items. You could also go to the clothes shop, a store ran by two porcupines that happen to both be sisters and tailors. There, you can buy clothes or design your own. You can design your town's own theme song, write letters, plant flowers, pull weeds, collect fruit, or just sit around and hang out with your animal pals. Often, a town might even feature holidays or special events that you can partake in. While some of these jobs aren't the most interesting (pulling weeds comes to mind, as doing that is a pain in the ass), most of them aren't too bad and it's a good assurance that you will enjoy the majority of the game's tasks. AC: WW does a good job of always giving you something to do.

Unfortunately, AC: WW is also a game that requires you to invest a lot of time in it. Unless you clean up your town every day, it will soon be infested with weeds. Neighbors might move away in your absence, and you can miss important events held in your town or even holidays. One example would be if you were unable to play your DS for a week, and when you returned, you would find your town was overrun with weeds and you missed the arrival of many special visitors. Another good example of what you might miss would be if you were waiting for a desired item to appear in Tom Nook's store. Since the store's inventory changes daily, if you miss a day of playing AC: WW, you might miss the item and not see it for a very long time. This can be an annoyance to people who are trying to collect certain items.

This annoyance is actually much more severe in AC: WW because collecting items is a big part of the game. Since your home is empty when you first get it, it's your job to look around for cool furniture to stock it with. There are literally hundreds of furniture pieces to obtain, from ordinary objects like beds and dressers to UFOs, pyramids, and even some Nintendo themed items. Many of the favorite items from the original Animal Crossing on the Gamecube are back, as well as the addition of many new items. You can make your house as normal or as weird as you like it. Coordinating furniture, wallpaper, and flooring can turn your dingy hovel into a stylish bachelor pad.

However, having a cool house is a shallow victory; what is the point of making a flashy home if nobody is there to see it? Luckily, Nintendo realized that even in a town filled with animals, a person can feel alone, and so Nintendo included online features. Using the Nintendo Wifi service, you can go online and visit a friend's town, chatting, shopping in his stores, checking out his house, collecting fruit, and hanging out with the animal residents. By going online, you can also receive special presents from Nintendo or even find a message a player wrote, put in a bottle, and that ended up being washed up on your beach. AC: WW's Wifi features are fun and easy to use, and this is probably the game's biggest improvement over the Gamecube's Animal Crossing.

Really, though, there isn't much of a difference between the Gamecube's Animal Crossing and AC: WW other than a few extra features in AC: WW. AC: WW has generally the same cartoon like graphics as its predecessor, and the music hasn't been changed too much either. Fans of the Gamecube version of Animal Crossing will feel right at home with the familiar look and feel of AC: WW. Not much has changed since Animal Crossing went on Nintendo's portable DS, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Nintendo's DS has a host of unique features such as two screens and a touch screen, so it's no surprise that AC: WW takes advantage of these features. The game takes place on the bottom screen of the DS system, and on the top screen you can see the sky. During the day, the sky just shows some clouds and occasionally a floating item that you can shoot down with a slingshot, but during the nighttime, the top screen shows constellations that you can design yourself.

The touch screen also has some useful features. If you are not comfortable gallivanting around your digital town using the DS's buttons, you can always use the touch screen for navigation. The touch screen can also be used to access your inventory and arrange items easily with the stylus. You can also draw patterns and align constellations using the bottom screen.

AC: WW takes all the fun of the original Animal Crossing and fixes it up with some new furniture, a few touch screen features, and a fun and comprehensive online mode. AC: WW is a fun game that is simple enough to appeal to anybody, and deep enough to attract the most hardcore of gamers. Although AC: WW doesn't do much to differentiate itself from the original Animal Crossing, and even though AC: WW requires you to play it very often to get the best experience, it is still a fun game and worth it to fans who are willing to drop everything and become engrossed in an enjoyable fantasy world where animals go bug hunting and space shuttles fit in your pocket.

Overall: 8

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/15/06