Animal Crossing: City Folk expands upon the beloved life-simulation formula of previous titles. You'll move to a peaceful village, customize your house, befriend charming animal neighbors, and enjoy the simple pleasures of fishing, bug catching, and fossil hunting. While City Folk introduced a new city area and features like voice chat, it remains largely similar to its predecessor Wild World, feeling more like an expansion than a fully-fledged sequel. Fans of the series will still find plenty to love, but those seeking significant innovation might be left wanting more.

A sweet and cosy game that has enjoyable NPC interactions (no matter if they berate you or speak highly of you) in a simplistic, yet adorable world with a simple, yet effective artstyle.
The whole thing is so cute, the music, the sounds, the simple day-to-day activities collecting things for the museum, making your own patterns for the shop, visiting the city and to pay off your debt are so relaxing and makes the real world seem so nice to do, which is ironically what most people would want to avoid in real life (myself included).
I didn't get super far into it before I stopped, as I'd "changed" a bit since starting, so using an old "account" felt wrong and sharing a town with the old one also felt wrong, and nor did I want to start over because of the bond I'd made from the first time, so I never picked it back up unfortunately. One day I will again.

Today, there are little flowers blooming where there were none yesterday

Thats the kind of discovery that warms my heart, you know?


2010 and there is a little girl who wakes up on a Saturday at 5am in her grandma's house. She runs downstairs before the suns risen and before anyone has woken up, a novelty. Like she is the only one there, like it is her house. She makes cereal and watches tv, to the left and through the sliding glass door she can see the sun coming up. At grandma's house the sun always rises in oranges and pinks. The neighborhood is always quiet and always confined. Throwing away the plastic bowl, she walks out into the living room, turns on the tv, turns on the wii. Sets the setting to hdmi 2 and grabs her remote. And she plays this.

Impossibly beautiful and forever welcoming. City Folk and its open spaces, delightful music that defines an hour of your life. Your neighbors that seem to have an unlimited amount of things to say, sending you letters, asking after your other characters, pushing them into pitfalls regardless because it is funny every time. And to this child, it was very real, and deeply mysterious. You could spend hours doing nothing but I remember it all so well, feeling giddy after ordering 50 wheat fields and placing them in my house, walking and hiding in them. Dyeing my hair cyan in the hair salon, feeling rich if I managed to buy one thing at Gracies. Time hopping to winter so I could build an awful snowman. Making constellations with Celeste, in awe of all the colors and the way the stars shined.

At school, it is now recess. Today, I have brought a stuffed dog to school named Moo. It was my father's but he cared little for it, so it is now mine. Unlike my father, I will take care of Moo. I will not abandon him, or treat him like he is nothing. He comes with me everywhere and I hug him on the bus when I know he is scared, because I can feel what he feels and it is something other people can not grasp. I have many other stuffed animals at home, and they all take turns coming with me. There is a tree in the recess yard. All the kids jump on it and stab at it with pencils, and I remember that I felt like something was burning inside me. That tree was no ones friend and no one saw it, but I would and I did. I sat with that tree every day, talked to it and loved it. As an adult I can recognize now that the teachers were always looking at me because I never played with any of the other kids. This little girl cried a lot, she wanted to go home a lot. She had meltdowns and bit other kids. And children pick up on that, and I knew that they knew that there was something untouchable about me and that they should stay away. I never had any friends. But still, I was so loving. I loved everything and wanted to understand everything. I would be a friend to something like myself, like that tree, but still they could never talk back.

But, the villagers in City Folk could. They talked to me like they were real, like they knew me. I listened to them and loved every second. I fell in love with Rolf and bombarded him with letters asking him to marry me, I adored Friga and her mature attitude that I didnt quite understand yet but compelled me nonetheless. I played in Frobert's house a lot because the colors were so pretty, and he had a frog chair. I loved every detail of every little thing about them, and it was something only a child could experience. But it also hurt too, because once more as much as I loved them I knew that they could never sit with me and give me a hug, or push me on the swing or make me a bracelet, any of the many things I saw other girls my age doing. And I didnt know it at the time, but I never would feel that. I would never have any friends. For two decades, I would be alone. And into the years which should of been the best of my life, I would lose the ability to leave the house. I would lose a lot of things that I was otherwise proud of. And I begun to feel like something like me might never be understood or loved at all.

That child in me never really died, sometimes I still feel her sitting in a field behind the school, bawling her eyes out at an impossible lonliness that children really dont ever feel.

But a year ago, to this day, I sent someone a message. We had a lot in common, I thought, and I was so desperate for friends. I had just moved into my first apartment and I was so lonely and scared. I stayed up till 1am listening to my cat wailing and talking with them. I did not know that this person would turn out to be my best friend, my first friend. I was just excited to talk to them the next day. And the day after that. For hours, the whole day even. All the time, for a whole year, they spoke with me. They never once let me be alone like I was. And even though I've never had the chance to speak much, and I might be annoying at times, they have never once held that against me. I can be with them, talk with them about things I like, play games with them. And they listen to me, enjoys having me there. Wants me to be there. Impossible.

Later, I met two other people. They celebrated my birthday with me and I dont think I ever smiled as much as I did on that day. And it was the first time I ever had a party with friends, had someone to remember my birthday. And even though they arent with me physically, I was still so happy. I wont ever forget that. Two days ago, I spent the weekend watching one of them play Bratz all day and we were laughing and having fun. And I thought that a year ago, this would not be possible. A year ago I was much less of a person and more like a slave. But now I have people to talk to, people I respect, people that make my life worth living. And even though I still want to know what its like to be hugged, to have a friend physically there, im still so happy. And I can not believe someone in my position got so lucky as to meet these people.

To Nicole, I love you sooo much. You are such a bright and loving person. You are endlessly talented in so many things, so kind and so thoughtful, everyone should be taking notes. Thank you for all the happy memories you have given me over the past year, and for everything youve done to help me.

And to Hilda, thank you so much. Even though you say you wish you could do more for me and you wish that you were more, I sincerely do not care. Because every day I am excited to wake up and talk to you. You make me laugh every day, you are so funny and beautiful. I am so, so proud to call myself your friend and I am so happy to be liked by the both of you. You have changed my life considerably.

For my first year of being on my own, and the first year ive been on Backloggd, I can not be more pleased. I am still not all together free of the ocd that forced me here, and part of me still feels trapped and lonely. I want to experience the things other people my age take for granted. Ive never been kissed, I've never gone to the mall with my friends. Things like that, but for the first time in my life I can at least finally feel content. And I feel like no matter what happens, I will have always people to go back to, people who care. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.


So, it's good to appreciate the times where you've got nowhere to be and nothing to do

The worse sibling to Wild World, but I couldn't help but fall in love with it, and booting this game up on my CRT to let the soft, calming vibes wash over me is therapeutic.

Somehow, at least for me, City Folk inspires that decadent feeling from older games better than WW, it's like you're locked inside a bittersweet, lonely time bubble when you sit down to play it and get immersed.

It was the first AC game I played so maybe a little bit of that is the rose-tinted glasses, but the music, the homely small town you're set into, staying up in the night exploring, the friends that shape your town - it was a great experience.

New Leaf takes the crown as the best AC game imo, with the amount of content it has and what you can do in that game, so City Folk pales in comparison. But if you haven't played an AC game before and have a Wii lying around, this isn't a bad pick at all.

it's honestly amazing how cf managed to flip the entire franchise on its head. backpedalling on what made wild world so great while shoehorning in gamecube features that were missing from wild world doesn't make for an interesting game unfortunately. while it does do some good things, like a consistent 60fps and giving us the holy grail that is the city music (all are genuinely wonderful tracks) however that doesn't excuse the terrible grass deterioration, complete dumbing down of the villager system (which had a surprising amount of depth in wild world) removing all the special character episodes and their memoirs, and making them a LOT nicer (which, in turn, hurts their original personalities a lot) thankfully i don't need to go into detail since everyone knows about them by now, but man did that hurt the sales of the game by a long shot back then.

the city deserves its own section. i absolutely love the vibes, but when you get down to it, it's really just the special shops crammed into one place, and it hurts the game’s replayability a lot. special characters in wild world would pop up in town and do something fun each week, and for me, that was a big motivator to come back to the game every day - there’d always be something new to find, or unlock - and if not, they would at least be interesting to talk to. but now that people like Redd, Katrina and Harriet are always in the city, there was no real reason to come back, since they’d always be there, doing the exact same stuff. gracie’s shop made returning furniture sets from gamecube way too expensive, the auction house is pretty much useless now that wifi’s gone, and kicks would be better if he had his own building. it would have been so much better if they had made new characters to replace these old ones, but that’s what new leaf is for.

i would go into more things like the terrible golden axe fountain rng, the fact that multiplayer is virtually unchanged from ww (and you can't go to the city), the weird exclusion of classic controller/gamecube support and ultimately harder to play for longer periods of time due to the lack of portability, but i don't want to be too harsh considering i have had some fun memories of this game with good friends. the goofy wii speak, pro patterns, and the whole hacked villagers and dlc item fiasco years ago are always a fascinating part of animal crossing history in my eyes. still, for every improvement it introduced, it adds 3 more problems, while also being way too similar to wild world and trying too hard to fill in the gaps it left behind.