jeremy1456's Full Review: Animal Crossing for GameCube
Nintendo has always been known to release some of the best games in the world, but it's only once in a great while that this company takes a risk, what I mean by taking a risk is by bringing one of their more... "Japanese Oriented" games to the North American market. Nintendo has, however, finally taken a risk; one of their strangest looking games; Animal Forest around the world, and for this I am thankful. Animal Forest originated as a Nintendo 64 game in Japan that had no hope of ever being released to anywhere outside of Japan; the game sold pretty bad but Nintendo decided to develop a sequel to it on their newest console the Nintendo Gamecube in the form of Animal Forest , and the game finally to the attention it deserved. Well, earlier this year Nintendo announced that it was already working on bringing Animal Forest to the US, but along with the new stuff included in the game the title was changed to Animal Crossing. Well, after owning the game since it's release I've finally set out to write a review for it, so here goes nothing.
While some are quick to claim that Animal Crossing is the best Gamecube game to date, or even the best game ever, I disagree strongly; Animal Crossing isn't the type of game that you can really say is better then every other game, mainly because you aren't supposed to play it like you would any other game. Animal Crossing falls into the simulation genre, and can best be described as a mix between The Sims and Harvest Moon. Gameplay is similar to Harvest Moon because you have total control over your character as you earn money by selling stuff and interact with your neighbors, but the level of customization seems like it was heavily influenced by the Sims. Animal Crossing may borrow some aspects between these two games, but at the same time it brings a whole lot of new stuff to the table.
Life (Or Something Like It)
Have you ever played a game with no immediate goal in mind, but just for the fun of it? Well that's sorta like how Animal Crossing is played out; it's one of those life simulation games where you take control of a character, and just play out it's life. This may sound very un-interesting at first, but there's more to it than the simple things in life; Animal Crossing is a very diverse game, so diverse in fact, that no two people will share a totally similar experience while playing it, and so each time you start over almost everything will play out very different then it did the prior time. This aspect of the game gives it incredible longetivity, and therefore makes Animal Crossing one of the longest games on the Nintendo Gamecube.
Alright, so you now know that Animal Crossing is a life simulation, but you are probably now wondering how the whole thing plays out. The game makes good use of one of the Gamecube's internal clock, Animal Crossing uses this to sync the game with the real time; I'm talking the time in real life. Basically, if you are playing at 8 pm on March 7th that's what time it will be in the game. To make the game feel more realistic Nintendo even added the real seasons, and night and day to the game to make it feel more like real life.
Starting Out On Your Own
Animal Crossing was made to feel like a life simulation, and they succeeded; the story has you under the control of a character as he/she is moving to a new town to start out their life on their own. While on the train your character encounters a talking cat (yes a talking cat) named Rover, who, after seeing that your character has no house in which to live in, or even a clue on where to stay in their destination town, decides to help out by making a phone call to the local shop owner in your destination so that he may set you up with a new house. There is a slight problem however, as your character has only 1,000 bells (the bell is the game's currency), and the house costs about 17 times the amount that you have. Luckily for you the shop owner (Tom Nook the raccoon) is a very trusting person, and so he allows you to take up a loan to pay off the house.
Paying off Tom Nook's loan is only one of the hundreds of things you can do in Animal Crossing though, you can make friends, catch fish and bugs, play games, make friends, meet new people, and go shopping. Of course if you plan on playing Animal Crossing over an extended amount of time you will most likely do every single one of the things that I have listed, but nothing is really a requirement, you don't even have to pay off your debt if you choose not to. The list of possible things to do in Animal Crossing stretches far beyond my simple list though, the game is pretty deep.
Different Every Time You Play
Earlier in this review I was talking about how everyone's experience will be very different from each other's, but there's a pretty big reason why. You see, when you start a new game in Animal Crossing everything is totally randomized; the animals living in your village (more on the animals later), the fruit that grows in your village, your character's face, and even the village itself is created randomly by the game. This is a very nice little aspect; since no two villages are exactly alike you and your friends will be amazed at the differences between your villages and villagers.
There are several different types of fruits in Animal Crossing, but each village will have only one type of fruit growing in it at the beginning, but other types of fruit trees can be planted in the game. The fruits in Animal Crossing include peaches, pears, cherries, oranges, apples, and coconuts. There really are no advantages to having a particular fruit growing in your village; it just all boils down to personal preference I guess.
Communicating With Animals
In what seems like an effort to strike up a certain appeal with younger gamers, Nintendo decided to use animals as the villagers instead of people in the game, now this isn't exactly a bad thing, but it does make the game seem kind of weird. As I mentioned earlier, upon starting a new game everything is create for you, and around 5 animals are chosen by the game to live in your village. These animals are chosen randomly from a database of hundreds of different villagers, and so most people will get a totally different set of villagers living in their village, and this adds a certain charm to the game. What's more is that the animals you start with in your village aren't the only ones that can take up residence; random villagers will often move to your village, and current villagers will sometimes move away. Your village can have a total population of 15 animals, and their houses are all randomly located throughout the village.
Ok so you've started a new game, you have a couple villagers, now what? You can start making friends with the animals living in your village, having friends is always a good idea, but you can also make enemies out of the animals. Animals that are friends with you will often send you letters and give you stuff, but your enemies will scorn at you, not talk to you, and even paint the roof of your house a different color without your knowledge. It's completely up to you how you want to treat your villagers, and there is no wrong way to play the game.
Animal Crossing isn't called a "communication game" for nothing; there are several unique aspects to the game that are special. For one thing, there is a way to communicate with your villagers; this is accomplished by sending them letters. What makes this so unique is the fact that you actually enter the text, and Nintendo included the ability of the animals to respond to certain phrases like "hi", and "how are you", and so these animals will write you back and thank you for the letter, sometimes they'll even attach gifts to their response. If you send a letter that the animal can't understand you'll usually get a nasty message back from them.
Making friends on Animal Crossing seems like it would be easy enough, but sometimes it takes a fair amount of work. Ever so often an animal will ask you to run an errand for them, but this usually involves running all over the village in search of the animal, only to find out that someone else has the item you are looking for. This can become incredibly tedious, but it's not a requirement to play the game so most of the time you can avoid this often-boring aspect of gameplay. There are, however, plenty of benefits to reap from retrieving and delivering items for the villagers though; often times they will reward you with clothes, bell, or even furniture items to accessorize your house with.
Sometimes while striking up a conversation with an animal they will ask you if the phrase they say at the end of each sentence is out of style, and they will ask you to think up a new one. Now before choosing you have to take into mind that this certain animal will continually say this phrase over and over again, they may even spread it's use throughout the village. Keep in mind though, Nintendo has a filter that will not allow you to use certain profanity for this, but many slang words aren't censored, and so it's pretty easy to infect your village with foul language.
There are plenty of other things that come up in conversations with the animals though, sometimes they will offer up trades, or even just ask you to take some stuff off of their hands. It's always a good idea to talk to your villagers a couple times a day, you never know what they'll give to you. The villagers even know when your birthday is (provided you tell at least one of them when it is), and they'll even give gifts to you, sometimes even NES games.
Online Trading, Minus The Online
Despite the fact that so many people wanted this game to be online, Nintendo decided not to follow the road less traveled, but they didn't totally ignore their fans requests, so they added the next best thing to online play; the password trading system. This system allows you to send players items through the use of passwords, all you need to do is input the player's name and town, the item you will be sending, and the game will generate a password for you to give to the other player. Upon inputting the password the other player will receive the item you sent, and this works especially well for anyone who has the internet, and can find someone willing to trade with them. Almost everything can be traded; games, furniture, and even fruit can all be traded through the password system.
Nintendo has also planned for the future with Animal Crossing; soon you will be able to incorporate the use of the E-Reader Gameboy Advance add-on to acquire new items and village tunes. I'm not sure, but I don't think these Animal Crossing specific E-Cards have been released yet, but when they do become available for sale you will have yet another way to get rare stuff.
Classics Reborn
Nintendo has even gone so far as adding NES games to Animal Crossing; you acquire each of them in a different way. Some can be bought, some given to you for your birthday, and others traded with another human player. The list of NES games include:
Balloon Fight
Baseball
Clu Clu Land
Clu Clu Land D
DK Jr.
DK Jr. Math
Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong 3
Excitebike
Golf
Pinball
Punchout
Soccer
Tennis
Wario Woods
These are of course, only the known games in Animal Crossing so far, there are probably others, but for now this list contains every single game that is known to the public.
What's really great about these NES games is that you can either play them on the Gamecube, or you can download them to the Gameboy Advance and play them from there. The games will instantly be deleted from the Gameboy Advance as soon as you turn the power off of the GBA, so this isn't good for long term playing, so it's often wise to put the Gameboy Advance on sleep mode so the batteries won't drain. This isn't the extent of the Gameboy Advance's usefulness though, it can also be used to create patterns or travel to the Gameboy Advance Island.
Multiplayer Mode... Kinda
Nintendo has included an aspect to Animal Crossing that makes having real life friends so much sweeter; you can have your character travel to another person's village. Of course you can also have more than one human player live in your village, but the fact that you can travel to someone else' village is much more intriguing. Only one village can be stored on a memory card at a time, and so your going to have to have ore than one memory card in your possession to travel to someone else's village. When in your friend's village you can make friends with his villagers, shop at his store, and even grab fruit that is not native to your own village.
When in someone else's village, you can also leave notes on the town's bulletin boards, or even send letters to the citizens of that village. One of the intriguing aspects of the game though is how an animal living in a friend's village will sometimes move to your village when you leave your town. If the animal that moved away was a friend, they will constantly refer to you in conversation with the other player(s).
Another feature in Animal Crossing is the ability to fully customize your home and character; you can do this by acquiring new furniture, carpet, wallpaper, and even clothes. Your style is rated each day by the game, and so you have incentive to make the most out of your space. Your rating will go up if you follow the art of Feng Shui; basically you just have to move your certain colored furniture in certain areas of your house. I'm not too sure what a good rating on your home will guarantee you, but it's probably not a bad idea to try for a good rating with the HRA.
Animal Crossing also contains a fairly deep bug and fish catching system, certain bugs and fish only appear during certain times of the year, and certain times of the day so it will take a very long time to catch every single fish and bug in the game. You can store fish and bugs in the museum and put them on display, and you can even keep them at your house as pets.
Playing The Stock Market
Every Sunday a certain animal named Joanna will come through your village, she will be selling turnips by the bulk; you can buy as many turnips from her as you want. The thing about these turnips is that the price they sell for each day changes, and so you can really make a huge profit off of them if you wait until just the right time to sell. There are a couple of bad things about turnips though, they will rot if not sold in a week, and you cannot trade them to someone else.
Earlier in this review I mentioned that the seasons and time both change regularly, and so naturally Nintendo added a couple holidays throughout the year. For some odd reason Nintendo didn't include Christmas though, and rather they changed it's name to "Toy Day" probably so they wouldn't upset the religious crowd. Every single holiday in Animal Crossing that I have experienced so far has been a huge letdown, and so this isn't actually a very big aspect of the game.
My Ratings For: Animal Crossing
Graphics: 4.5/10
When you first look at Animal Crossing you'll really begin to wonder why Nintendo didn't bother to even slightly upgrade Animal Crossing's graphics from the Nintendo 64 version, well I think it's just because Nintendo is lazy. When most people see Animal Crossing for the first time will usually not be able to get past how ugly it looks, but I have to tell you that it doesn't get any better in the game. Animal Crossing suffers from a low polygon count, horrid textures, but it does always run at a smooth 60 frames per second, so that's a plus. Graphically Animal Crossing is nothing more than the Nintendo 64 version with a better polygon count, and a couple sharper details, but other than that what you see is what you get. The NES games look just as good as you would expect them to, and most of the furniture looks great, but the only other good point with the graphics is the fact that they give the game a certain indescribable charm.
As I just mentioned, the textures are just downright awful in this game. The textures are just barely below mediocre until you start looking at the character's faces close up, that's when things get ugly. Not only are the face textures incredibly blurry, but they also lack quite a bit of detail, and aren't even very animated. It's pretty easy to get past the lack of quality in the textures though, and after time it can be almost completely overlooked.
Colors are very bright and vibrant looking, and the game's use of colors changes with the time and the season. This helps to put up a certain mood about where you are in the game, and everything looks especially nice at sunset when everything is illuminated with bright orange. The colors darken very subtle like so you probably won't even notice when this occurs. Nintendo's graphics designers did a really nice job with the Gamecube's color palette; everything is at about the shade I would expect it to be in a life simulation game, and the nice blend of colors gives this game character.
Story: 7/10
It's not that I particularly enjoy the story in Animal Crossing; it's just that Nintendo has made it so that the story plays a fairly big part in gameplay. The animals in town will talk to you about moving to the town, and you'll even receive letters in the mail from your "parents". No matter how long you are playing the game for, you will have to face the story elements sooner or later. Tom Nook starts out as one of the main characters, but after repaying your debt he kinda falls into the position of one of those not so important characters, and is only good for selling and buying from, but I kinda wish that he gave you more to do.
Controls: 9.5/10
Animal Crossing is simple enough to just pick up and play, I mean the only thing anyone should ever even think about having a problem with is the interface on the item screen. Animal Crossing is so easy to play that you could probably master the controls in the first 2 minutes; the joystick moves your character around, the B button makes you run and can also be used to pick up items, and the A button is basically the "action button" which is used to initiate conversation with the villagers. The menu screens can be a little tricky for beginners, but it's not incredibly difficult to learn and memorize them.
Sound: 7/10
The music in Animal Crossing is a little on the bland side, but it is easy to tolerate because it switches every hour on the hour. Also, the main reason I rated this area so high is because of a little dog known as K.K. Slider; he comes to the villages at 8 pm every Saturday and he plays music for you. K.K. doesn't have much of a singing vocabulary (he can only sing "do-re-mi-fa-so"), but his music is interesting, and he gives you a copy of it so that you can listen to the song anytime you want on an in game stereo. I actually sometimes find myself anticipating K.K. Slider's return so that I can collect even more music.
The game's sound effects are awful, really the only sound effect you'll hear is the compressed speaking stuff that is used in place of real voices for the animals, but it mostly sounds like gibberish to me. The voices are usually high pitched, and so it makes it rather annoying to listen to. Even K.K. Slider's voice is annoyingly high pitched, but that may just be why his songs sound so goofy.
Fun Factor: 7/10
Animal Crossing may not be god's gift to gaming, but it's still pretty fun, well if it's your type of game. Personally I loved this game for the first couple of weeks that I had it, but now it's starting to wear down on me; it's beginning to collect dust. Animal Crossing claims to offer years of entertainment, but I really don't know anyone who I think could handle playing this game even every other day for even half a year. So all in all I have to say that Animal Crossing is initially a very fun game, but it's charm can only last for so long. Remember, if you didn't like The Sims or Harvest Moon then Animal Crossing probably isn't the right game for you.
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