"Yardwork, Package Delivery, Home Decorating... Talk About Fun!"

Much like The Sims, the Animal Crossing universe makes a fairly compelling game out of things that would often count as chores in reality. If you want to make yourself a little orchard in your village, all you need is a shovel and a handful of fruit. I suspect that it's a bit more complicated in real life. Also, off of my DS, I don't live in a neighborhood of humanoid animals with bizarre social problems. What a drag.

In any event, Nintendo goes back to the well for Wild World, which is basically a remake of the GameCube version. Call it Animal Crossing 2.0 or some such. The core gameplay is entirely the same: you're a little person that moves into a small village populated by talking animals, who basically act like people would in the same situation. You're given a house by local shopkeeper and real estate baron Tom Nook (and a mortgage to pay), and after a handful of chores to give you a feel for the game, you're off on your own. Literally. There are no goals or objectives to aim for, other than those you make for yourself. The game runs on the same clock as your DS, and holidays, events, and seasonal changes will correspond with those in reality. With that in mind, there's always something happening just around the corner. As such, the game has no proper 'ending.' It does, however, feature quite a bit to do.

Because of the debt on your home, most players will start off by trying to acquire money (called 'bells') to get back in the black. You can do this by completing delivery chores for your neighbors, catching and selling fish, harvesting fruit, shaking trees for random money bags, and so on. Nook doesn't have any hired goons, though, so there's no rush to pay off his interest-free loan. In fact, the only real incentive to pay off your debts to him is that with each loan pay-off, Nook will expand your house to hold more stuff. Veteran players will eventually discover the big-money payoffs of the brutally-named 'stalk market,' where you buy turnips from Joan on Sunday and then try to sell them to Nook at the highest price possible over the following week. You can also eliminate the middle-man and simply plant money trees, although this requires some special equipment. I'm not entirely sure how a living tree can grow from a sack of coins, but if you're willing to believe in talking bodybuilder ducks, what's so odd about a cash tree?

Of course, simply living for money is a pretty drab way to live. So relax for a while and go meet the neighbors. You'll share your village with up to eight animals at a time, all of whom have varying personalities and interests. (You will, however, see the same basic personality types pop up over and over as new animals move in and old ones move out.) A lot of the dialogue in the game is actually pretty funny, or at least odd enough to be interesting. Some translation errors are fairly obvious, but those can be funny, too. Being friendly and helpful to an animal will slowly endear them to you, and if you become close enough friends with one of your neighbors, they'll give you their picture to put in your home. It's a very cute touch.

Another major component of the game is village maintenance. To make the village as attractive as possible, you'll need to plant flowers, chop down trees in overforested areas, grow new trees in empty patches, and water any dying flora. While this doesn't sound especially thrilling (and watering plants becomes rather tedious), there's something relaxing and satisfying about being able to nurture the land without any of the hard work, sweating, and major expense that comes from doing real-life landscaping.

Or maybe you're the outdoors type, with a hunter's heart. Worry not, my friend. You can't hunt down your neighbors (tempting as it may be), but you can go fishing, with a wide variety of fish to catch that change with the seasons. You can also hunt down bugs with your butterfly net. Heck, you can even dig up fossils with your trusty shovel. (Although considering how many fossils you'll eventually dig up, it's quite staggering when you consider how many dinosaurs must have croaked underneath your town back in the day. It's like you're living on some prehistoric graveyard.) You can keep your catches to yourself, or donate them to Blathers at the museum, where he'll put them on display and give you proper credit for finding them first. Or, of course, you can just sell everything at Tom Nook's place, you cold-hearted capitalist pig. I'm not entirely sure why Nook would want to buy gigantic fossils and live fish from you, but I'm sure he has his reasons.

Wild World makes few changes from the GameCube edition, although most of them are for the better. The fossil identification system has been mercifully streamlined; just bring the fossils to Blathers and he'll do the rest. The ability to type out letters and notes using the stylus and touch screen is a MAJOR improvement, and makes letter-writing much more fun. In fact, the stylus makes many of the game's little activities a bit faster and simpler, which adds up nicely over time.

Of course, the DS' main weapon for Animal Crossing enhancement is the Wi-Fi hardware, which makes it much easier to do village visitations than it was on the GameCube. If your pal is close by, you two can be ransacking each other's towns in mere minutes. You can also arrange visits long-range via a wireless router or going to a 'hot spot' location, but you'll have to exchange friend codes with a person before you two can visit one another. While this obviously prevents strangers from coming in and chopping down all your trees and flowers, it does require you to make some preparations before getting to the fun. Also, Nintendo's list of compatible hot spots is basically a directory of McDonald's restaurants, which is not my ideal place to go hang out. Nintendo sells a Windows XP-compatible Internet 'dongle' at their Web site that you can use if you want to (understandably) avoid fast-food joints full of overpriced quasi-food, screaming children, and garish pictures of eerie-looking clowns.

Wild World looks about as good as the original did, although that game was hardly pushing the GameCube to its limit. Everything is as cute and cartoonish as you'd expect, with some nice visual touches as the weather changes. Winter just ended in my village, and the vivid green foliage of the springtime genuinely lifted my spirits on a dreary train ride to work. The Animal Crossing games may not be graphical juggernauts, but they have a visual charm and personality that supercedes any technical shortcomings.

Sound-wise, Wild World is okay. The musical tracks change on the hour, but since you're not likely to play for more than an hour in a sitting, you probably won't even notice. The songs themselves are simple and inoffensive, and quickly fade into the background. Sound effects are about the same as the GameCube version, complete with that weird chattering noise that is used when the animals are talking to you. Bonus points go to the cute little voice that says the names of the letters out loud as you write a letter.

The appeal of a game like Animal Crossing: Wild World can be hard to explain. On paper, it seems like a list of little mini-games and chores. But once you're in there, it becomes good natural fun. I can barely be bothered to make my bed in real life, yet I'll spend 10 minutes arranging my weird collection of furniture in my Animal Crossing house. If the concept sounds remotely interesting to you, odds are you'll get at least a few months of fun out of it. Because of its non-linear nature and completely loose playing style, Wild World is a perfect little sidekick game that you can use when you need a break from your other games. Or, if you really get into Animal Crossing, you can spend two hours a day in there, polishing your village to perfection. Do your thing, man.

If you played the original game to absolute death, you probably won't get much more out of Wild World. But Animal Crossing newcomers should have a ball, and the multiplayer options will win over those who didn't like the meager memory-card swapping antics of the GameCube edition. The ability to have four people share one house also makes this an ideal family game. I'm not entirely sure why the Animal Crossing games are so compelling, but hey, there it is. Now pardon me, as I'm off to ship my gorilla friend Cesar a grand piano.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/01/06