Animal Crossing for GameCube

Animal Crossing is a game where you're a human moving into a town full of animals. You've got little money and no home. Luckily, you meet a cat on the train who's willing to help you. He has a chat with his old buddy, the raccoon, and arranges a house for you to live in. Since you don't have enough money to pay for the house, you end up working for the raccoon, Tom Nook, in his shop, which is called Nook's Cranny. You put on a uniform and perform various errands, like planting flowers or delivering items to customers. The work doesn't last long, and once you're done, that's it. You still owe quite a bit of money, or Bells in the Animal Crossing world, so you'll have to make the rest for yourself. Making Bells is pretty easy, though. You can go down to the beach and collect shells that vary in worth, to sell them to Nook. You could help your neighbors out and get either some Bells, or an item you could sell. There are other things you can collect and sell, like fruit.

There is a good variety of items to collect. Some things, like art or fossils, can be submitted to the local museum. Furniture, carpet, and wallpaper come in sets, like the blue series or the fruit series, and if you have a nice home with matching items, you get a high score in the Happy Room Academy (HRA). Tom Nook will ask that you join the HRA early on and represent your town (and he won't take no for an answer). The HRA rates the inside of your house based on cleanliness, carpet, wallpaper, feng shui (how things are arranged), and furniture. If you score very well, you can get a model of your house. If you score perfectly, you get a model of a manor (the fully-upgraded version of your house).

After you pay off the debt on your house, you can make it bigger. Of course, you'll owe more money after that, and if you pay that off, you can make your house bigger again, and so on. I've increased the size of my house twice, plus added a basement. You can also add a second story, although I haven't managed that yet.

One of the cool things about Animal Crossing is that time passes in the game as it does in real life, whether you're playing or not. The animals get up in the morning and go to sleep at night, so if you play in the middle of the night, the shop probably won't be open and everyone will be asleep. There's a calendar just like the real one, with different events and holidays at appropriate times, like Halloween in October, a fireworks show in July, and many more.

The graphics in this game are simple and colorful. They are well-done, but there isn't a lot of detail. The music is usually calm and pleasant - just background music for when you're walking around a town. There are sounds of the waves if you're at the ocean, and the noise of crickets and other insects if it's night time. There is no voice acting, but you can choose between silence, a blipping sound, or animalese. Animalese is when each letter is sounded out, so that sounds a bit like what the character is actually saying. It's something new, but it isn't very exciting.

You can have up to four people per town, so you can have a friend or three move into your town and trade with you. You can also put in another memory card with another town on it and visit that town from your own. This gives you access to new types of fruit (there are five kinds and each town has one type), new characters, and new items.

The animals that live in your town will give you items and trade with you, too. As stated above, you can help them with tasks like returning a borrowed item, and they will give you a reward. This is a good way to try to collect different items. You can also just talk to them, and they will occasionally play a game with you so you can win an item. There are many types of animals, ranging from horses to kangaroos to cats. Still, these characters can get boring and annoying after a while. There are several different base personalities (girly, tough, dopey, etc.), but you'll start to see multiple characters of the same personality. You'll soon lose any enjoyment in speaking to them. Also, you can't make or break friendships. You could steal a character's item, or give an item to them, and it won't make any difference beyond the initial reaction.

In fact, the whole game can get boring after the first couple of weeks. The game is very non-linear, and that may be a draw at first, but later on, after you've collected the items, met everyone, etc., it just gets old. You can't really beat the game, so you'll never get that satisfaction. And there's not much of an unfolding storyline.

However, it is a unique game that provides entertainment for a time, and I still like to go back and play a bit every once in a while. It's worth a try, and since the price has dropped, it's worth the twenty dollars or so.