Review
Release Date: 09.17.2002
Platform:
GameCubeDeveloper:
Nintendo Co., Ltd.Publisher:
Nintendo of America, Inc.Reviewed by
Luke Campbell on 4.23.2003
| Review Rating: 9/10 | User Rating: 8.52/10 |
Nintendo has arguably created several different genres in the videogame industry. Platforming with
Super Mario Bros., action RPGs with the
Legend of Zelda, cart battle-racing with
Super Mario Kart, and now with the release of
Animal Crossing, a new genre that really does not fit into any previous mold. Much like Seinfeld was billed as "a show about nothing", the same kind of description can be applied to
Animal Crossing. There's no levels, no enemies, no princesses or planets to save or anything players are accustomed to. Originally released in April of 2001 for the Nintendo 64 in Japan,
Animal Forest was later rereleased on the Gamecube the same year, and was then brought stateside with the new title,
Animal Crossing.
First, lets discuss what the game is all about. Upon starting the game, the player is prompted to name their player, pick their gender, and then pick their town's name as well. A train ride with a highly annoying cat sets the stage. He just happens to know someone who can sell you a house in your new town. Your town is randomly generated, but will always have the same main buildings: a shop, museum, post office, police station, wishing well, tailor, and a handful of residences. All of the inhabitants of
Animal Crossing are... you guessed it, animals. After meeting the shopowner and agreeing to purchase a house (which you have no choice, by the way... you will buy a house and you will like it, mister!), you go to work for the shopowner in order to pay your debt off. This series of odd jobs serves as the training portion of the game. You run from place to place, delivering items to various animals, you write a letter, write an advertisement, and plant some trees. After paying back a small portion of your debt, you're freed of your job, and you go about doing whatever you like. This is where the game gets really... non-linear, and somewhat confusing.
There are many options open to you. For instance, you can continue to run errands for the animals in your town, and upon finishing an errand, you will usually receive some type of gift in exchange. These gifts can be sold or traded to the other animals, or you can decorate your house. Your house's decoration is judged daily, and you're given a point total based on your decorating scheme. There are hundreds of items that you can receive, and there are many different themes that you can decorate your house with, such as construction, space, boxing, kiddy, modern, ranch, etc, etc. You're not required to adhere to any kind of theme, however. In my current setup, my house has sliding panel walls, a pool table, a soda machine, a barbecue, and some bonsai trees. It's all up to your own personal tastes, and playing house seems silly at first. However, you quickly find yourself trying to find that perfect Froggy Chair or Boxing Sandbag to compliment the other items in your home.
You can also donate items to the local museum. There are four sections of the museum: insects, paintings, fossils, and fish. The paintings can be found through trading items with locals or purchasing from the shop in town, should a painting be stocked there (the items in the shop are different on each day). Fossils can be found by digging up little "X" areas on the ground, which you then submit for analysis before donating to the musuem. Fish are found through old fashioned footwork. Buy a fishing pole, and go to the brook or the beach. There are forty different kinds of fish to be caught, all of which come out at different times and inhabit different areas. A nice small touch is that when you donate fish, the saltwater fish are in a tank separate from the freshwater ones. Bugs are found by purchasing a net and hunting down the forty bugs, which also are found all over your town at different times and during different seasons. It's a bit irritating to find the same bell cricket or sea bass over and over, but it makes finding a new type of fish or bug that much more interesting.
Letters are also a part of
Animal Crossing. You submit your fossils for analysis via mail, and you can also write letters to the other locals in your town. Writing letters makes the animals happy, and sometimes they will send a reply mail back with a present attached. However, it is also easy to make the animals mad by writing a confusing letter, and you'll receive no present if you do this. Letters will come to your home's mailbox each day, and on holidays or your birthday, you'll receive gifts from your parents in the mail, too.
The wishing well in your town serves two different purposes. First, it will tell you the condition of your town, and whether or not you need to add or remove some trees from the landscape. A better overall condition will encourage more animals to move to your town, so it is a good idea to heed the well's advice. The well's second purpose is to discard items from delivery missions you cannot complete. For example, if Doc the Rabbit moves out of town today, and tomorrow you accept a mission to deliver something to Doc, you cannot complete the request. So, you can discard the item at the well and apologize for not finishing what you'd agreed to do.
The tailor option is used to make patterns for clothing and umbrellas, but the patterns can also be used on the front door of your house, and on the flag of your island, should you visit Animal Island with a GBA-GC Link Cable. A pseudo-MS Paint program allows you to make a pattern to your liking, and the only limit is your imagination. After some tooling around, some pretty sweet patterns can be made, and I made flag for my island that is cool as well.
As you pay off your debts to the shopowner for the house, he will upgrade your house, which puts you back in debt. You can sell pretty much any item to the shopowner, but certain items will net a higher sale price. For example, your town has one native fruit. This fruit can be sold for 100 bells, but fruit from other places can be sold for 500 bells. If you're not lucky enough to receive these other fruits from a local in your town, the only way to get different fruit is to either visit a friend's town, or use Animal Crossing's trading system, both of which are quite remarkable.
If your friend has a town saved for
Animal Crossing, you can use their memory card to visit their town. Simply load your character into their game, and then you can roam freely in their town. You can find different fruit, different items in the shop, and different animals to talk to. You can run errands for these animals, talk to them and make friends, or write them letters. Conversely, you can also chop down all of the trees in your friend's town, kill all the flowers, send rude letters to the locals, and post nasty messages on the bulletin board, which cannot be erased. You can also drop items in your friend's town and they'll still be there when they load themselves back into the town. You cannot donate items to the museum, or buy items to place in the house. But you can go to the police station and swipe all the items at the lost and found, which is fun as well. However, if your friend visits your town, the same options are also present, so it is probably in your best interests to just play nice.
If you play by yourself, you can still have a good amount of fun, but the trading system is a really cool feature. Suppose you want to trade items with me. You go to the shop and tell the shopowner that you want to send an item to Bjork in Peoria (my player name/town name). Then you pick the item you wish to send, and the shopowner gives you a 28 character password to write down. Then when I go to the shop in my town, I can tell my shopowner this password and receive the item you wanted to send. The passwords can get pretty confusing (like a line will be 4rS&nh1$sTG#JJ, for example), but seeing as the game uses no type of online function, this password system works really well. The only issue with it is that the capital letter O and zero look identical. But aside from that small hangup, this is a cool method for snagging those items you cannot find on your own. Plus, once you have the password, you can use it over and over again to get the item as many times as you want. There's already a large trading board found on gamefaqs.com, and a thread has been started here at GAF for trading as well, so there are a couple of places to look if you're in need of that Odd Clock or Red Balloon.
Animal Crossing also makes use of the Gameboy Advance - Gamcube Link Cable. Connect your GBA, turn it on, and then visit the southern dock to find an animal in a boat. He will ask you to name your island, and then he will take you to your island. The island is always tropical, regardless of the season, and there are palm trees which grow coconuts here. There's a second house for you to stock up with items, as well as a single resident who roams about while you explore the island. Upon leaving the island, you're given the option to save your island onto your GBA. Doing so enables you to play Animal Island on your GBA. In Animal Island, you control a small hand icon that you can move around the island. You direct the single resident around the island, and if you've left certain items there, he will perform tasks. For example, you can leave fruit from your town on the island, and make him eat the fruit. If he likes the fruit, he will drop bags of money all over the place, ranging from a measly 100 bells to an awesome 30,000 bells. If you leave a fishing pole and a bug net on the island, you can give these to the resident and he will fish, and he can use the net to catch floating packages that pass over the island every so often. When you're done bossing the lone resident around, you can go back to the dock in your GC town to return to the island and collect all the rewards. One trip to the island for me yielded a total of 120,000+ bells, and a pitfall item, and I took a couple of coconuts back to town so I could grow palm trees. Though this Island feature does not need to be completed in order to do things in the game, it is an interesting use of the GBA hardware, something that is hopefully used in more games in the future.
Another use for the GBA with
Animal Crossing is emulation of NES games. Emulation is wrong, right? Not when it's authorized by the Big N, it's not!
Animal Crossing comes bundled with a memory card that has a "goody bag" saved onto it, which you receive in the mail after completing the initial wave of tasks for the shopowner. The goody bag typically has one song for your radio/stereo/phonograph, along with two NES games. These can be displayed in your house, and played there as well. Eight common Nintendo classics are available:
Tennis, Golf, Excitebike, Donkey Kong, Clu-Clu Land, Pinball, Donkey Kong Jr. Math, and
Balloon Fight. There are several other games rumored to be available also, such as
Donkey Kong Jr., Donkey Kong 3, Wario's Woods, Punch-Out!, Super Mario Bros, Mario Bros, and
Legend Of Zelda, but some of these are unconfirmed as of yet for the domestic version, and were only available via a Nintendo giveaway in Japan, ala Mew and Celebi for the
Pokemon games here. The emulation quality is dead-on when compared to the original games. These games can also be transferred to your GBA, so if you've had the urge to play
Donkey Kong on the toilet (and who hasn't?), here is your chance.
Animal Crossing also uses the new e-Reader, but I have yet to purchase this item. From what I understand of it, you plus the e-Reader into the GBA and then slide cards through the e-Reader. Doing so will earn you items for your house, and NES games. So if you can't find someone to trade with, there's yet another option available for getting those rare items you so deperately need. This game really pulls off a lot of neat tricks and makes it worth your effort to try all of the different features.
If
Animal Crossing has a fault, it would be the time system. The Gamecube's internal clock is utilized, so if it is December and it's 12:07 am, it will be cold and dark when you fire up
Animal Crossing. There are time-specific events, such as the viewing of the Harvest Moon, or a Sports Fair which takes place at several points over the same day. So if you've missed an event, you're out of luck. However, since you're given the option of resetting the clock before visiting your town, you can make sure you don't miss anything. Some will fault this system, since it makes you feel as if you "have" to play at midnight on a sunday or whatever, but the flexibility of the clock's setup makes it so that you can work around any sort of time constraints set by the game.
Another thing that some may pick apart is the game's graphics. Being that the game was originally for the N64, it is admittedly not the prettiest game in the world, but the graphics actually add to the character of this game, in my opinion. It's sort of like "
Harvest Moon 64 meets
NeoPets" or something... cutesy and crude, but still cool. Had this been originally designed for GC, perhaps the characters would be more well-defined and you'd have actual blades of grass on the ground, but it's really not necessary. If you want to show someone what a GC can do graphically, use
Waverace or
Super Mario Sunshine. But if you're looking for an open-ended experience that somehow defies description, pick up
Animal Crossing. If you're still unsure after trudging through this painfully long review, give it a rental to check it out first. As for me, I recommend it to anyone looking for something different, and to anyone who is into the whole "collecting" factor found in many games today.
