LaughingTarget's Full Review: Animal Crossing for GameCube
Animal Crossing is Nintendo's answer to The Sims. Their real life simulator takes it one step forward by adding events based on real time, and in the same note, backs up the realism by making everyone and everything an animal of sorts.
Here is the backstory: You are a cow looking thing named (insert chosen name here) who decided its time to live the good life and just walk out the front door with a 1,000 bells (bells = money in this world), hop the next train to the sleepy coastal village of (insert chosen town name here), and begin life as an emancipated adult. What your ignorant self forgot was to bring clothing, furnature, or buy/rent a home ahead of time. Luckily, an annoying cat on the train ride decides to help you out by calling a friend to sell you a house dirt cheap. After arriving, the friend offers you the house for about 20,000. Thinking your a sneaky little twerp, you hand over the 1,000 thinking this country folk fool was too dumb to understand, but the bait wasn't taken. Luckily, he was dumb enough to realize you weren't trying to screw him out of house and home, so he gave you a loan and a part-time job.
So, its up to you to make money, decorate the house...and...uh...wow, this sounds JUST like the Sims. Anyway, you have to pay off your silly debt by fishing, gathering fruit, catching bugs, gathering seashells, or helping the townsfolk with odd jobs. Thus....this is Animal Crossing.
Wow, Next Gen System, Yesteryear Graphics.
Originally, Animal Crossing was in development for the N64, and by looking at these visuals, it would appear that they were nearly done before Nintendo realized that the N64 was dead in the water. So, a translation period was put into effect. Unforutnately, Nintendo didn't bother to improve anything beyond texture crispness (with exception of faces) for the game and most everything is higly blocky and very ugly. All that GameCube power, gone to waste.
SILENCE MORTAL!
The sounds also sound like they were dragged directly from the N64 days. Everything sounds very annoying. The music is dreadful, the opening talk tune is annoying (thankfully, THIS one can go off), and that odd jabbering when the characters speak is just plain horrible. Character speech is a poorly created voice synthesizer, and it speaks really fast and half the words are mispronounced. It all comes together to create a terrible audial environment.
Oh, Can It!
Characters are incredibly verbose, I repeat, characters are incredibly verbose. It takes an average of 2 and a half minutes to listen, or read, to a character talk before it allows you do do anything, then you are accosted by even more speech. Whats worse is you are simply unable to skip through it, you are forced to watch the words slowly scroll across the screen. It wouldn't be so bad had the characters not repeated themselves a good 20 minutes into the game. After the first few talks, they apparently have nothing new to say to your sorry backside.
Dull, Ever So Dull.
There really is very little to do in Animal Crossing. Money making is limited to gathering and selling, or doing mindless tasks for townsfolk. Tasks wouldn't be so bad had they not been limited to solely "go to person A, get me my thing back" quests. They normally give you the run around in these tasks, where you have to talk to a multitude of characters, in one instant, every single one in town, before you could obtain the silly little comic book you were after. Search and retrieve, the perennial message boy, or go around picking up shells. Either way, very little to keep you occupied.
Real Clock Kills Fun
Nintendo had a good idea for Animal Crossing, why not base it off real time? Unfortunately, they forgot to realize that most people cannot be around whenever the game wants you to. I would have to tailor my very life around Animal Crossing to get the most out of the game. Most people cannot be there at noon for the big game. Most people will be mad when they come home from work at night to find the store is closed, and still closed when they leave for work in the morning. If you are not there for something, tough luck, you missed out on it. It would seem that Animal Crossing schedules all the actually interesting stuff for when you are not around. Either quit your job and play this 24/7 (I forsee some problems for those who actually start to enjoy this game) or don't play at all.
And Whats Good About It?
You can play a whole lot of old NES games! Thats right, all you people who missed out on the NES days can get Animal Crossing and be treated to loads of them, more than the same $50 can get you on EBay. This might have been the saving grace of this title for me, but finding the games is a chore and the ones I found thus far I already own. True, you can stick them in your GBA and take them on the go, but why do that when I have a perfectly fine NES sitting right there?
Bottom Line
Nintendo, congratulations, you created your first horrible game. Live and learn, and don't make a game on real life, it is just too boring. Bad visuals, bad sounds, and total lack of variety just kill this title. Even with a ton of NES games to find, it is just not worth the effort.
This game has a 24-hour clock where something new happens in real-world time -- as day turns to night in the real world, it also happens in Animal Cro...More at Amazon Marketplace
Animal Crossing w/Memory Card Gamecube/Wii NEW FASTSHIP YOU'LL LOVE HTMAXPOWER FAST SAME-DAY SHIPPING!* Mammoth selection of excellent products Person...More at eBay
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.