Reviews from

in the past


i lost my fervor for this game at some point in my life but upon learning the monumental amount of fine details this game contains revitalized my respect entirely and every time i see this game in my tiktok feed or whatever my heart feels a little lighter. i'll miss this game.

Está divertido, se nota que falta contenido pero se arregla en las siguientes entregas

I’m starting to think Animal Crossing might be good or somethin…

Before I get into my thoughts and opinions some quick info about my playing of this game that I think gives important context; I’ve been playing, in emulator on dolphin, since the end of January. I didn't time travel at all, I tried to avoid googling anything about the game, and I didn't interact with the e cards at all. my only source of info about the game was (mostly) a pdf scan of the Nintendo power guide.

The reason I'm letting myself write this review now is I paid off the final debt to Tom nook (the crazy bastard was buying turnips for 896 bells) today! That's really the only big completion milestone I made, I’d guess I finished about 50% of the museum and like 20% of the catalogue. I wasn't rushing any of these things, I certainly didn't try to minmax gamer strategize them either.

So, all that out of the way, man what a game! My history with animal crossing started with new leaf in middle school and then into new horizons in college, to today, still in college I guess <_<

Point is, I’m no stranger to the idea of the series slow shift away from what people really resonated with. Even with only the previous experience of NL, NH was an insane downgrade. and I've constantly heard, to the point of mocking it a bit, the idea that the series became "too nice" or something.

And now, finally having gotten fairly intimate with the series very first game, I do absolutely now think even less of NH than I did before. The core, day to day gameplay of Animal Crossing was basically already perfected here. Just at a fundamental level I booted up this game daily for completely different reasons than when I played NH every day. sure, I was checking for fossils or browsing shops every day in both, but NH daily play session is almost more comparable to doing daily quests in Fortnite than it is to my daily play sessions in Population Growing. I booted up this game just because I wanted to keep existing in its world. I wanted to walk around my town just because it felt good to walk around. I would throw fish away when the shop was closed and I couldn't sell them just so I could keep fishing.

Most of my issues with the game kinda revolve around the few ways the game didn't let me get truly immersed in it. I legitimately wanted to use the in game diary every day and was so immensely disappointed by the fact you only get one unique diary entry per month. Sure, I can just edit and keep adding to it I guess, but it just seems stupid to not let me just write daily entries. Finding out I couldn't immediately kinda took the wind out of my sails, I have to assume it's like that just because of memory card limitations or something. Still a disappointment.

Another kinda issue I had with the game was the frequency villagers move in and out. It almost felt like an emulation bug or something how every time me and my girlfriend visited towns we'd instantly swap and trade like 2 villagers at a time each. It's not like a game breaker or anything, it just kept standing out as odd every time it happened.

And admittedly, this feels a bit unfair to complain about, but the lack of fashion options in this game is crazy. I understand from a design philosophy perspective the desire to not let you change too much about your in game appearance like face/hair, I think that makes sense (ignoring the inability to choose skin tone, that’s still insane). But you couldn’t even separate hats from shirts? Umbrellas get more unique designs than clothing, it’s just bland.

But my biggest, absolutely most hated element of this game though has to do with sending letters. I won't get too into it here, it's a very new thing to me and I'm still kinda exploring how I feel and talk about it, but I did spend a lot of my playtime in this game as a method of age regression for myself. I dumped all the furniture I liked anywhere I could, I’d plant trees and flowers anywhere I could with no plan or strategy. I purposefully was playing this game like a kid and had a lot of fun doing it. And so, when I was first playing and decided to write letters to all my villagers, it was a huge fucking slap in the face for the game to tell me "uhh write with better grammar dipshit lol". I genuinely was trying to explore childish emotions and feelings writing to my villagers, only for all of them to write back telling me I was being creepy or weird and to stop writing to them.

The grammar check is just horseshit, there's no way around it for me. Even setting aside my weird ramblings about nostalgic feelings or whatever, it just sucks so much enjoyment I could've gotten from this game away from me. The difference in emotions between how much I enjoyed writing weird and silly letters to my villagers VS trying my best not to accidentally have too many short sentences is like staring down into a fucking canyon. It made me stop writing to villagers because it was a chore! My girlfriend, who was also playing along with me in the beginning, also stopped writing to his villagers because telling them you liked the tumblr comic where they ordered a yummy silly gets a response begging you to stop sending letters. I would gush to Chevre telling her how cute she is and that I loved her only for the game to respond negatively because I didn't use capital letters. It feels fucking ridiculous, like I cannot understand why they felt the need to include it. It feels so backwards for the game to almost directly encourage you to just find some basic string of letters like "A. A. A. A." to send over and over instead of ever actually writing anything. At that point, why not have the Able sisters throw out your designs if you don’t line up with the arbitrary balance of colors the game wants you to have. It feels silly for me to complain so heavily about a basic grammar check, but genuinely when I found out about this I almost stopped playing altogether. It pulled me out of the world so much and so fast I just wasn't sure I wanted to keep going.

Alright, calming down a bit, I do wanna circle back around to something I mentioned earlier, which is the notion that older animal crossing games were better because they were meaner. I just think that’s not true, like pretty straightforwardly. Population Growing is absolutely meaner to you as a player, the villagers are generally a lot ruder than anything I ever experienced in New Leaf/Horizons, and I do kinda like that. I can definitely understand long time fans of the series finding the all around sweeter/kinder tone of the new games to be boring. But I think that’s like, so much lower on the rung of issues that make the new games feel lackluster its strange to treat it like the key factor “ruining the series” (and having it sell more copies than it ever has before). Absolutely none of the dialogue in this game had me blown away or made me think that New Horizons would be better if Chevre could call you ugly, it just felt a little different. I’d say variation in types of dialogue is a lot more important, and honestly Population Growing is kind of missing the weirder, quirkier dialogue I enjoyed in the later games. It’s a balancing act and I really do think the dialogue in this is a lot more comparable in quality to later games like New Leaf than people tend to think.

Overall, it really just blew me away how much Animal Crossing kinda perfected itself first try (or like, first and half since I technically played like the third release of the game. Absolutely wild the n64 version didn’t have the museum). I think considering how easy the game is to emulate and how much content never got carried over into later entries it’s more than worth a shot today. I guess if you’re looking to play with friends this is probably the worst entry you could pick since the multiplayer features amount to “go to a friend’s town while they sit around and wait for you to stop talking to their villagers”. But assuming you’re just looking to play alone, this is an easy recommendation, regardless of past experience with the series.

this game is seriously fucking great i will dickride ACGC till my grave, not my first but i love the ammount of personality into it has a vibe that the others cant replicate

From hanging out with the villagers to collecting a bunch of arcade cabinets and making a cool gaming basement, Animal Crossing was truly a special game that I have a lot of great memories of. Crazy how so many staples in the series were present even in the first game, and how many things the first game had that the new ones don't.


AC is a wacky life simulator with a tranquil cadence that never delivers an action packed moment, but there's also never a dull one. Playing it year round in hopes of catching seasonal fish and bugs while overlooking the town's cyclic changes is time consuming, but a pleasure nonetheless.

After playing this game inconsistently for the past 4 years (and just getting back into it after maybe 2 years of leaving my villagers to rot), I finally paid off my debt and will call the game complete. I gotta say, although very aged compared to the many newer entries in the series, Animal Crossing's gameplay loop is pretty addicting (more addicting than Chinese fart porn, if I do say so myself). Within the next few months I hope to collect all of the fish and bugs and complete my museum :D

no se a cual jugué pero me encantaba irme a la isla y cazar tiburones

in my opinion just as good as wild world if not slightly stronger, seasonal shit being present is always a bonus. villagers felt super real in this one, not just because they talk shit but because they have wants and needs and relationships with the other villagers and overall just have a bigger presence in your town.

the music is divisive i think, a see a lot of love but also a lot of hate for it, maybe some people find it to be too quirky but i love the music of population growing, it gets so fucking weird at like 2AM and i love it - the game's just like "bro why are u awake". the vibes are truly there and they reach a level of animal crossing that i'm not sure has been quite met since. (although new leaf's ost is phenomenal)

i do come back to this game every so often but i recently played for about 2 weeks straight and had a good time with it. just as fun as i remember it being, if not more so. one gripe i have is it takes far too long to unlock the tools in nook's cranny so i just used a code to cheat 'em in because otherwise there isn't much to do in one day.

i also used cheat codes to play NES games which is super cool. (nintendo should do that again with GB games or smth) overall a really fun package and a great first entry in what is now one of nintendo's staple franchises. probably my 2nd favorite AC game, just behind new leaf which i do plan on properly playing at some point.

The neighbours talk smack all the time, so it feels more realistic 7.5/10

Jumped on this game after a few years one time and Apollo called me a moron. Love this game 😁

Great game. Perfectly executes what it wants to be. Little life simulator.

I'm so nostalgic on the og one. The cozy days of desperately searching for the NES games, farming money with fruit export, time travel for shit and giggles and complete all the possible collections there (bugs, fishes, fossils).

Soooooooo cozy, a game that feels like things go on when you don't play and is much less micro-managey than the later titles in the series.

when i was a kid i played this with my dad on the same gamecube and one time eunice asked me for a new catchphrase and being the funny 8 year old i was i put the worst swear word i could think of - "jackass" - as the phrase. after giggling for like 10 seconds i realized that my dad might see it and id get in trouble so i deleted the whole world so he could not see evidence of my sin

I played this as a kid in 1997 - 2003. Tried it again recently and it's still very charming. I just don't see myself playing it in the future at all.

With the new Animal Crossing coming out around a month ago, I thought it'd be a fun idea to stream some of the original N64 game (which I did this past Saturday~). However, when I picked it up a few weeks back, I was met with the realization that while the save battery in the cart worked, the time-keeping battery did not. My appetite for classic Animal Crossing had been not been satiated though, so I finally broke down and got a Gamecube controller so I could finally play GC games on my Wii. I recieved my golden statue in front of the train station earlier today, so I'm calling this game "beaten" in that regard, and I did this pretty casually over the course of a few weeks.

Doubutsu No Mori is the original N64 game that got a straight up port to Gamecube in Japan with the same title. Doubutsu No Mori+ is a fairly significantly upgraded version of the same game, and it's also the game that would serve as the basis for the international release a few years later: the game we in the West simply know as "Animal Crossing" (and that game would then in turn lead to Doubutsu No Mori e+, which was a further modified version ported back to Japanese from the international version). This upgrade that '+' brings to the table brings the N64 original far closer to what we know with Animal Crossing, but there are still some interesting differences between them.

The biggest additions to the N64 game are the Able Sisters' shop as well as the Museum. Another house upgrade or two (namely the basement) have also been added along with 16 more bugs and 16 more fish to catch. You also have a calendar now so you can know when which holidays are! The framerate is also WAY smoother, which is something I didn't even realize until I played them back to back XD

Things it lacks compared to the American version that would follow it are 8 bugs and 8 fish, as well as many fossils and paintings (there's like half as many of each in this version), another couple house upgrades, e-reader functionality, and some American holidays like the Thanksgiving and Christmas-themed ones. The main reason to play this over the American Gamecube game would be the inclusion of several Japanese holidays and aesthetic designs that the American version would take out (like the trees turning pink for cherry blossom viewing), as I think they make this game feel more different than it actually is (aside from, you know, it being in Japanese instead of English XP), but they're still very close to the same thing.

Other than that, it's still classic Animal Crossing. The village is divided into 5 rows and 6 columns of acres, you can do chores for villagers with a direct action with them, and you catch lots of fish and bugs to pay off your loans and make your house bigger. Your town is immutable, for the most part, and you're just someone who lives there. You aren't some hot shot mayor or island owner like the newer games. I wouldn't say it's better in that regard, just different and clearly created with a different gameplay loop in mind. This isn't really supposed to be a game you play for untold hours at a time. It's more something you give an hour or two every day, or every few days.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. In an age of far more in-depth and customizable Animal Crossing games, I think this far more passive, relaxing experience is still worth going back to. I have a lot of nostalgia for the series, but if you want a relaxing time with no Nook Miles or such weighing on the back of your mind, classic Animal Crossing is still as good as it's always been. Even if it may be a bit dull at times, it's still a nostalgia piece that will always be close to my heart <3

There's a mysterious, vaguely uncanny vibe to this one that later games never quite emulated. I like it, and it sticks in my mind long past the lifespan of newer, and arguably better, Animal Crossing games.

"I hope you go to JAIL! And that your stupid house is TORN DOWN, tee-hee!" - Bunnie

I miss all the free NES games from this series :(

Only played this one for around a month or two but still really liked it. Still has a lot of charm and neat little features that never made it to any future games. The villagers being assholes is awesome too. Some aspects of it are clunky and outdated though, stuff like inventory management and item storage were greatly improved in the sequels.
Still a really cool game though with some reasons to play it over other entries in the series.

used to ring in the new year with this classic growing up. the one that started it all, there's just something oddly satisfying about the grid feature of the original. kk slider saturday's will not be forgotten.

the second comfiest game of all time.

So much more charm than some of the later ones--this iteration understood "coziness" in the right ways and made your villagers feel so much less generic than the newer ones.

got on this game a few weeks ago and one of my villagers said he hasn't seen me in 108 months


Such a neat game!! Each day feels different and it really nails down the formula for next games. And hey, there's games inside the game!

This game helped me out of a rough spot growing up so it will always be my number one favorite. Nothing has even come close to taking it's spot. That's really all I can say without getting to personal.

Immaculate vibes, man!

I will always have New Leaf as my preferred Animal Crossing game, but after playing this for a bit I really respect the origins of the series. Sure, its more simple, more rough around the edges. But that makes it interesting! It may not have the endless content of New Leaf, but its got a unique feel, I respect that.

I will definitely be playing this more. I may write more detailed thoughts once I play a lot more.