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.

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.

Rating this by modern standards is difficult. Three and a half (sorry City Folk) sequels later, it's really hard to say that this game does much of anything the others don't, and I don't think I could readily recommend it to somebody today when the "cozy life-sim" genre has so much going for it in 2023. With all that said, no other game has quite replaced the OG Animal Crossing for me, and even if I can easily chalk a lot of that up to nostalgia I also think it truly has something special going for it.

Just to get my personal feelings about it out of the way, first: The concept behind Animal Crossing is genius. The Sims had been something of a cultural phenomenon, giving people the opportunity to experience an "idealized" form of everyday life. Make a character, have them mingle, make friends and build a family. You run off to your dream job, make money and construct the perfect house for yourself to live in. It was a quirky, video game-y take on the real world, and a lot of people fell in love with it. Animal Crossing, though, took a different approach - it served almost as an antithesis to The Sims, inviting you to live in a world that felt more down-to-earth while simultaneously being even quirkier and sillier. That alone is an achievement, but the concept is far stronger than it might initially read on paper. With nothing more than a few dollars in your pocket and the clothes on your back, you move into a quaint little village populated exclusively (at least until you showed up) by anthropomorphic animals. The days move in real time, with the sun rising and falling and the seasons turning with the world outside your door. Things change even when you aren't around - shops get new stock, weeds sprout and trees grow taller, villagers notice your absence and somebody new may have moved in by the time you get back. It really did give the illusion that there was a tiny world inside your Gamecube, humming along with or without you. The fact that barely any other developers have touched this idea in the last two decades is frankly criminal. And while the game does a great job at keeping this conceit believable, it is far from the only thing lending Animal Crossing its charm.

The Sims, in its quest to replicate the real world, went as far as to replicate the rules of living in the real world. You still needed to make money to keep the lights on at home and avoid having your fancy new television repo'd by the bank. Your Sim needed to eat, sleep and entertain themselves to stay healthy and sane. Tragedies were fairly commonplace and sometimes unavoidable, with burglars trying to make off with your refrigerator and fires destroying your home or even causing the untimely death of Sims. Meanwhile, days and months rushed by at what felt like a breakneck pace. It was a game about obligations as much as it was about liberty, which for some (myself included) somewhat soured whatever themes of escapism might have been touted. Animal Crossing, by comparison, seemed to say "whoa, let's slow down a little bit". You don't need to eat or sleep or do anything. Your cute little character might fall into a small hole, be bitten by a mosquito, or harassed by some overly territorial wasps, but by the time they step back out of their house the next morning, they'll be right as rain again. Tom Nook offers you a house for "free", tries to instill the value of hard work in you and nudges you into paying off your debts as soon as possible so you can take on a new, larger financial obligation. But it becomes painfully obvious that it's all a bunch of hot air on his part. You have no obligations; pay your house off when you want, and spend all day fishing and chasing bugs and chatting with your neighbors. It doesn't make a bit of difference. Yes, whatever counts as "progression" in the game does still require you to interact with the simple buy/sell loop if you don't want to have the same small box of a house until the end of time, but there's a myriad of ways to earn Bells and items, and if you play the game just a little bit every day - the way you're supposed to play - you'll eventually have everything that you could ever want. Boot up in the morning, complete your own personal checklist for the day, and come back tomorrow to see what's changed overnight. It's kind of hilarious to think about how fondly I can look back on the laid back, slow-paced gameplay of Animal Crossing when so many games these days incorporate similar mechanics now. The difference, of course, is that Animal Crossing does this to make the world feel more grounded and honest, while modern games do it to make you impatient and try to squeeze a few extra dollars out of you when you want to go just a little further (something that the series is ironically guilty of, now, thanks to Pocket Camp).

To some, that might all sound terrifically boring - and that's totally fair. The absolute lack of true objectives or the relatively short list of things to see and do in the space of a day could lead to more goal-oriented players getting burnt out rather quickly, and that's something that's barely changed even as the series has aged. Even the most relaxed of the broader life sim genre typically have some kind of deadline or end-goal to keep you motivated. The original Harvest Moon comes to mind, where neglecting to make anything meaningful out of your farm leads to a dressing-down from your parents and an unceremonious ending. But I suppose it's that distinct lack of a true motivator that makes Animal Crossing as appealing as it is for myself and for many others. No matter how much time passes, no matter how much things might change in your own life, you can always come home to your quiet little "doubutsu no mori".

Well, I would say that, but it's perhaps just a smidge misleading. The simple fact of the matter is, your neighbors will notice you've been missing, and are just as likely to chew you out for it as they are to admit how much they missed you. Yeah, the villagers are weirder in this game then they ever have been since, and sometimes they can be outright jerks. I remember they would call me a freak, or a weirdo, or blow up at me if I refused to do a favor for them. They might force me to sell items in my inventory to them or repaint my roof to an unfavorable color without asking, then get upset if I had the gall to complain about it. Sometimes they would insult my grammar in replies to my letters, and sometimes they would pick up stakes and move out without so much as a hint that they were leaving, even if I thought we were best friends. This was by and large a quirk of the English translation, and one that has been divisive amongst fans in light of the far kinder characterizations in the rest of the series... But in retrospect, they were funny, and they did stick with me. Cranky and snooty characters in particular were just that - cranky and snooty. Even the typically saccharine lazy and "normal" personalities got in on the hazing from time to time. They would all soften up over time as you got to know them, even if they never totally gave up these character traits. I totally understand why we've moved away from that, as these kinds of personalities aren't exactly what I would call complementary to a game of this type, but I do wish they would at least bring back the sense of relationship development this game imparted. Villagers in modern Animal Crossing games are far too eager to be your friend and nod their heads to everything you do or say. I know this might sound like a strange complaint, but being able to effortlessly get along with everybody you know, let alone people you've just met, really sucks away any implied sense of agency these characters could have. They don't feel real; rather, they feel like characters that were written just to give me somebody to talk to. Let the characters have bad days. Let the characters disagree with me. Let them be a little frigid, or a little shy, or a little less of an open book until we've spent some time getting to know each other. I don't think I can call the villagers of the series' initial offering especially nice, but they did feel fairly real, and it's astonishing how far that can go in making them memorable years after the fact.

I do want to keep talking about the game, but I feel that I could harp on all day if I let myself. I will begin to wrap up by saying that there are little curiosities about this game in particular that manage to make it stand out compared to its successors, even once you set aside all of the ways we typically expect game series to develop. The fixed semi-top-down perspective and the way you scroll through individual acres definitely gave an illusion of your town being bigger than it really was, which sometimes made it fairly easy to get lost even with the inclusion of a map. Signposts dotted the landscape, sometimes adorned with curious messages that might be vague tips and other times meant pretty much nothing. Ditto for your main message board, which would occasionally have absolute nonsense scribbled on it by gods-know-who. Soccer balls would appear at random around town and served no purpose save for the fun of knocking them about and sometimes being desired by villagers. Never found out where they came from. Have never seen them since. Tom Nook actually gave you a job at the start of the game. It paid peanuts and was pretty much just a glorified tutorial, but I remember wishing you could become a full-time worker and make money that way. Blathers couldn't identify fossils on his own, because he was still a student. You had to mail them off to a Faraway Museum, and they would ship them back to you the next day. Kapp'n would only show up if you plugged in a Game Boy Advance, and he would take you to a small island with a unique villager and a beach house you could decorate. NES games were rare furnishing items you could receive and were actually playable, years before Nintendo introduced their Virtual Console service. You had a little gyroid buddy who sat outside of your house everyday, helping you save your game, greeting visitors in your absence and even selling items on your behalf. Traveling between towns was done by reading town data off a second memory card, meaning you could bring your whole "world" over to a friend's house and let them explore with their own character.
Resetti would pop up on resets to give you a stern talking-to for trying to game the system, hammering in the "there's no reset button in real life" message ad nauseum. He scared the living crap out of me as a kid, as he didn't care if you had a power outage or something, but he's softened up over the years and I've come to appreciate what he was trying to teach me, too. Even the context in which it was released made a huge difference - coming out in the early 00's while the Internet was still in relative infancy, all sorts of rumors of varying veracity surrounded the game, some of which still haunt the franchise even to this day. I could go on and on.
There was just so many little "things" in this game that are either wholly unique to it or just weren't quite the same in later installments. It's already a weird game, but it's also weird by Animal Crossing standards.

There is a certain tinge of irony in comparing the state of Animal Crossing today as opposed to what it was in 2001. I've seen people frustrated by Nintendo's apparent lack of desire to smooth out the core issues that get in the way of what should be a relaxing experience. I've seen people shelling out real dollars to populate their towns with their "dreamies", and I've seen friends get depressed that their own creations seem to pale when stacked alongside the many ambitious builds and projects dotting the Internet. Some feel that the game has become overcomplicated as the years went by, while still others feel it hasn't gone far enough. As for me - I suppose I'm undecided. New Horizons definitely left me wanting, even for all of the things that I enjoyed about it. I'm now back to thinking of Animal Crossing in "ifs" and "whens", wondering how long it will be before the next game crops up to consume my free time. Even still, though: For all the fond memories I have of the games throughout the years, it's always the first that manages to give me that warm and fuzzy feeling. I hope Nintendo can really knock it out of the part on the next one, and figure out a way to pour some soul back into a franchise that feels to be slowly but surely moving away from its core ethos.

Also, just putting this out here: Even though I obviously love the core concept of the game, I've done plenty of time traveling and you don't have to feel bad if you've done the same. Games are an escape. As long as you aren't maliciously getting in the way of anybody else's fun, play the way that you like. Just wanted to say that for anybody who ever felt guilty for pulling Time Lord shenanigans.

The best Animal Crossing. This one meant so much to me growing up in a rural area with few friends.

Getting the gold statue after paying off your home was such an accomplishment. Staying up until 8 PM on Saturdays to hear KK Slider was worth it every time. The little dance you do every loan payoff was worth it.

This game is worth it!

When I think of peak civilization, I think of my Animal Crossing town on the Gamecube. For 18 years that little community has been living inside my memory card. Whether I am there or not, Tom Nooks shop opens at 8 AM sharp every day, and closes at 10PM. My homeboy Teddy is still wearing a custom Yoshi shirt that my sister made twenty years ago, and other villagers come and go as they please. Sometimes they write me a farewell, sometimes they don't. It runs like clockwork, with festivals happening precisely on the day they are scheduled, never being cancelled for poor weather.

"Winnipeg", the very unoriginal name of my town, is a place that holds a special place in my heart. When I visit, approximately once a year, there are no tasks to complete. I simply walk around, greeting the neighbors, and maybe stopping at the river to do some fishing. It's nice and quiet, which is a nice break from a life with growing responsibilities.

The restrictions of the first game are what make it stick out amongst it's more robust sequels. There is no terraforming or constructions projects that eat away at your time. The primary task is to pay off your debts for all the upgrades that have been made to your house. Having completed that years ago, all I have left is to go fishing, collect bugs, and decorate my house with random furniture that I acquire.

In Animal Crossing, you are nobody. The village will keep functioning without you, and when you return there is no urgency to catch up on the going-ons. Loading up my file now feels like when I return to places that were key to my childhood. The lake I spent my summers at, my elementary school, or the family farm. It's places I don't visit enough, and continue to exist without me, but I get that child-like wonder when I return to them. It gives me a break from the busyness of a job or managing my expenses. When you are in Animal Crossing you are there to rest and giving up the reigns of responsibility to someone else.

Newer entries have never caught my attention because the concept has strayed away from what I enjoyed so much about the first game. Too much importance is placed on yourself and it's because of this that I never feel like I can chill out like I did with the first game. The charm of talking to your neighbours wears off really quickly too. It took a lot more effort to truly befriend someone in the first game so when you did get a villager sending you something in the mail, or just giving you a gift out of the blue it felt more genuine.

When a new entry in the series gets inevitable released, I probably won't bother with it. I know it's not going to replicate the child-like wonder of the past, and I would rather continue the story of my current town that has been growing strong for nearly two decades. It won't be often that I load up the game, but when I do, I am immediately transported back to the TV room in my parents' basement. Patiently waiting for Tom Nook's store to open so I could sell all the fruit I stole from my sister's trees.

K.K. Slider himself delivers Animal Crossing's thesis at the beginning of the game when you first boot it up. If you haven't given this entry in the series a shot, I'd recommend you try the game first before reading this review. This isn't a case where there's spoilers or anything like that, but I do think it's best to read this after experiencing the game for a while. This written from a retrospective lens rather than as a recommendation.

Animal Crossing is the strongest champion of virtual interactivity in video games.

This video game provides a world you live in for as long as you take care of it. It's like a bonsai tree that you maintain and cultivate, which gives it something akin to a life. Animal Crossing uses that life-medium hybrid to converse with players about living as an individual in a social world similar to our own. It makes lighthearted satirical fun of the world that made it in its friendly assholes and utopian capitalism. It's a fun world made to encapsulate and interact with reality.

Animal Crossing gracefully manifests what other mediums could only dream of doing; it creates a world for the player to necessarily immerse themselves in. The game achieves its immersion through participation with only brief, unassertive guidance. Unlike popular media outside of video games where their fictional worlds are statically and directly communicated, the towns of Animal Crossing and their meaning to the player change in ways not limited to the player's interpretation. The purposes within Animal Crossing shift to what players make of it through options in interactivity. Beyond the few tutorial tasks in the introduction, the game gladly welcomes its players ignoring any and all of the intent in its creation.

Animal Crossing encourages communication within its own community and beyond. The game tells you to share your town with your real friends outside of the game. It doesn't want to replace; it wants to support. The game constantly seeks to reflect you in your written letters, your brief friendships, and your impression on the town's nature, and it urges players right from the introduction to share your sandcastle town with others. Villagers from your town can move to the towns of other players you have interacted with. You can visit those other towns from other players by putting their memory card in the second slot. Animal Crossing can be a medium for connection.
There's something tragically idealistic here in what I see as this Animal Crossing's most unfortunate flaw. Animal Crossing has high hopes in this social dream that is a dated and ignored burden to fulfill in the present. However, I do find that this flaw does give towns some neat physicality. I can remember myself as a kid imagining the miniature towns being stored inside of blocks in those tiny memory cards where all my villagers continued to live out their lives, while the GameCube and the CRT it was hooked up to were a magnifying glass and an avatar. This flaw also did not exist in the series for long, as Animal Crossing's unfairly disregarded sequel introduced a much easier way to share your town with others.

Like the villagers in its towns, Animal Crossing itself won't last forever. It only has seven years left. After 11:59pm on December 31st, 2030, the in-game calendar will break and reset to January 1st, 2030. The game will still be playable, but it will no longer function as intended. Animal Crossing discs in their unmodifiable state on their GameCubes will succumb to this as their discs rot, memory cards corrupt, and consoles break. Future Animal Crossing games have been made, but none of them with the sass or the abstract zaniness that came in the first entry. The sequel I previously mentioned traded the sass for a pensive melancholy vibe. That sequel's banal follow-up completely eroded even that new identity away.

The series has recently built itself a new identity as something closer to a dollhouse in its bestselling, joyous, resortlike entry (read my review here). New Horizons captures what the world wanted as an escape from a pandemic at the time of its release. Compared to the original, New Horizons is more likely to go down in any history of video games for its popularity and the social impact it had. New Horizons serves as an artifact of its time. In contrast, Animal Crossing brings forth a far less idealized (but still very fun) reflection of reality. As the experimental origin of the series, it does less to interpret desires of the masses, and does more to capture a sentiment about modern lifestyles. Animal Crossing is artistic ethnography embedded in a toy with indifference towards being seen as an art. It's not a film, not a painting, not a sculpture, not a song, not a dance, not a book. It doesn't strive to be anything like them.
Animal Crossing for the Nintendo GameCube could only want (and deserve) to be recognized and respected as itself; a video game through and through.