Review #233: Animal Crossing

 In which I dig my grave and sleep in it.

 Animal Crossing on the Gamecube is a game that I've been wanting to play for a long, long time, and now I finally did and... It's most definitely not my kind of game.

 In the game you play as a little dude, or a little dudette, who moves into a town filled with adorable little animals. As soon as you arrive, Tom Nook, the town's merchant raccoon, gives you a home... and a debt to pay. Your next goal is to pay the debt, so that he can expand your house and... leave in debt you again. And that's the gist of it, there's no major story arc, no major goal, it's a pretty laid back game, with no particular purpose.

 When you first start the game, the town is randomly generated so that no two playthroughs are the same. At the start of the game, there'll only be 5 villagers, but each day a new one moves in, up to 15, and then some may move out to make room for new ones. These villagers have slightly different personalities, and may give you little errands to fulfill, delivering an item to another villager, finding them a bug or fish, etc, rewarding you for their completion with clothes, money or even furniture. As far as I could tell, these errands are pretty much infinite and randomly generated, and you may not be able to get jobs all the time, so you might have to wait.

 Besides these jobs, you can also buy a shovel, to dig for treasure and fossils, a bug net, to hunt bugs, a fishing rod, to fish, or an axe to cut down trees. You can also plant different trees wherever you want. There's another 'sidequest', so to speak, of filling the Museum with the different fossils, fish and bugs, if you are so inclined. Still, your main obsession will be making money, which is done by selling stuff, fishes, fossils, bugs or even seashells, found at the beach, or the clothes and furniture that you do not want. And then invest the earned money so that you can expand your house or buy whatever Tom Nook sells.

 That's all fine and dandy, if that's your thing, but the game runs in real time. If you skip a day, the villagers will notice, if you play at night, it will be night during the game, and if you play during winter, there'll be snow all over town. Heck, there's even holidays that you can celebrate in the game. That sounds nice, but it can put a halt to your activities. Things like fossils come in limited amounts per day, so after you dug all 3 or 4, you have to wait an entire day. Bugs go away during the night or during rainy days, so that's another activity you can't do. Heck, the first few days are pretty much a bore, you can buy a shovel, and only a shovel, on the first day, the option to buy a bug net will only be available on the next day, and the fishing rod? On the next day. Basically, the first few days really don't let you do much. Even worse, Tom Nook's shop closes at night, so you can't sell your excess stuff, so you might as well not even play the game then, remember, limited inventory space! And while you can just drop stuff on the ground and it'll stay there, it still feels like you aren't doing any progress. In this way, the game almost feels like a mobile game with its artificial barriers.

 And even then, that's about as much as you can do in the game. Do errands, fish, hunt for bugs, dig for fossils and that's it. Maybe furbishing your house with furniture and ornaments is your thing, but at the slow pace in which new items are available, or money earned... I really wasn't to invested on it. And if you look online, you can find codes to get whatever piece of furniture you want, or even the much coveted NES games, like Donkey Kong, Balloon Fight and Clu Clu Land, which were the highlight for me.

 The game has a very simple, minimalist presentation, done on purpose, which kinda works. Your characters and the animals are very cute, simple and small. Even their blurry expressions are a bit adorable. Music is made up of simple, upbeat tunes that set the mood for the game, and every villager has their own tone when they talk, and they do talk, in simple autotune-like chipmunk voices.

 I'm sure that there's an audience for Animal Crossing, it did make it all the way from the Nintendo 64 to the Nintendo 3DS after all! But sadly, for me, it just isn't the kind of game that I like to play or spend time on, not anymore anyways.
 5.5 out of 10.