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.
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.