Animal Crossing for GameCube

I've read many reviews claiming that this game has no goals and nothing to do. Yet the people who write that also seem to like the game. I think they like it because there is so much to do! It's just that the activities are much lower key than most other games.

There is no shooting. No bad guys to be shot. No explosions. No fast cars. You can't even run that fast. And there are no puzzles to solve to get to the next level. As a matter of fact, there is no next level! But it's GREAT!

So what is there to do? Well the game has multiple independent goals such as completing the town museums collections, expanding your house, decorating your house and beatifying the town. Each of these activities has a definite endpoint. Once the museums has 1 of every kind of fish, there's nothing else to do there but visit. I've been playing the game for almost a year and I still don't have every kind of fish.

The thing that makes this game different is that it's played in real time. That's REAL time, as in an hour is an hour. When the clock in the game says it's 1:00pm the clock on your wrist will say that too. The store opens up at 9:00am and closes at 10:00pm (there are exceptions). It gets dark in the game when the clock says it's 6:00pm plus or minus depending on the season. The foliage gets greener in the spring and brown in winter. You can only make snowmen in winter. You can only visit campers in summer. You can enter the fishing tourney on Sundays in November. There are fireworks on July fourth, meteor showers, random rainy days or snowy days. A yearly mushroom collecting contest and other 'special' days, most of which offer unique opportunities to get otherwise rare items for your house or to sell. And to COMPLETE even ONE of the various objectives can take several months. Some goals can take a year or more as certain things in the game happen only once a year. And that's part of the fun, and part of the challenge too. Certain fish, insects, etc. can only be found in certain places, certain times of the day and/or certain times of the year. For example, summer nights when it's raining are best for catching rare and valuable coelacanth fish. And when do you think you'll catch May Flies?

The main activity in the game is to decorate your home and this involves several steps that can take some time each. First, you must pay for everything. Expanding your home (up to 3 times) costs a lot. Also, some furniture can be found and some won and some earned for doing favors, but it's not likely you'll get all you want without buying some. So you must earn money (Bells). This can be done several ways but first let me finish the decorating. Besides picking which furniture pieces you want, the placement in the house is important for two reasons. First, the Happy Room Academy will RATE your layout. You get more points for completing a theme and using 'special' items. But you loose points for using oddball pieces or placing items where they can't be reached or used. Secondly, the game has a built in Feng Shui detector. Some items have luck and if placed in certain parts of the house they can improve your luck in getting money, or finding treasure or even catching rare fish.

Getting money can be down by hunting insects, fishing, digging up fossils, or doing favors for other residents. Items you collect doing these activities can be donated to the museum, used in your home, or sold to the local storeowner, Tom Nook. Then there's the turnip market. It works like the stock market with turnip prices changing daily. They can only be bought on Sunday mornings but then they can be sold to Tom Nook any time during the following week. If you keep them more than a week they spoil and you loose your investment.

The most common activity is doing favors. Your town will have form 4 to 15 other residents, plus 1 to 4 Human players. The non-human resident are talking animals and they are chosen randomly from a fairly large possible set. Each animal has one of several personality types. Some are rude, others are vain, and still others are sweet. When you talk to one of them, you can ask of they need a favor. More often then not they will ask you to retrieve something from another character, or to deliver something to another character. And sometimes the other character redirects you to a third. Whoever finally receives the item gives you a gift of anything from stationary, to clothes to money to furniture. Anything you don't want you can sell to Tom Nook.

And through all the other activities, you must try to keep the town rating high. You must add to the museum, help Tom expand by doing a lot of business with him, expand your house and get good ratings on your decorations, pull weeds that grow a few each day, thin trees that grow too close together, plant trees in sparse areas, plant flowers, re-write the town theme music, introduce new fruits, collect new musical tapes, design new clothes, write letters and generally keep residents happy. There is no town rating you can see but a happy town will see more residents move in and give you more opportunities for favors and trades. A run down town will see residents leave and your luck will plummet.

Special visitors and events spice up the routine to keep it from getting boring. Wendell arrives once a month to trade wallpaper for food. Sahara trades an old carpet and some Bells for a new carpet. Cray Redd sells rare items from a tent once a month, but he also sells common stuff at very high prices so you have to be a wise shopper. Gracie will give you clothes for a car wash once a month. My favorite is Gulliver who shows up about once a week passed out on the beach. Wake him and you'll receive an unusual item from his world travels. More frequent guests include K.K. Slider who comes each Saturday night to play and give away music. Joan who sells turnips on Sunday mornings and Wisp who appears only in the middle of the night but will give you a present or pull all the weeds if you can help him catch some lost ghosts. Other visitors arrive only once a year, like Franklin the turkey, Jingle the Reindeer and Jack the Lantern. I'll let you guess when they show up! There are dozens of visitors and events I haven't mentioned too.

To enhance the experience even further, you can find NES games that actually work; you can really play the original Donkey Kong on your Game Cube! With a game boy Advanced and a cable, you can visit a tropical island. And with an extra memory card you can visit a second town you've created, or have a fiend lend you his memory card and you can visit his town. Take presents to him and find rare things to take back to your town. An E-reader can be used to get new furniture items, songs or NES games. And lastly, there are on-line sites where people actually trade clothes patterns and codes for furniture.

Now it's a lot of fun without any adrenaline rush, but there are a few things that the programmers could have done a little better. The letters are the worst part. Many residents complain if you don't send an occasional letter, but writing them is slow, awkward and tedious. There's no cut and paste so every letter has to be written from scratch. To make it worse, the characters are picky and complain if the letters are too short or if they don't understand them, but there's no guide to help you figure out how to improve your letters either. Also, the banter from the animals can get repetitious. They repeat too often and some of the prewritten conversations are too long. It's a pain to wait for them to shut up so you can ask them if they need any favors.

That said, I still find myself going back to this game over and over. If I get a new game, Animal Crossing may sit a week or two, but eventually the novelty of the new game fades and Animal Crossing calls me home. And home it is. And that's the final reason to like it. It's yours! Your house laid out with your furniture in your design in a town you helped build and plant and decorate. A little like real life where you rarely get a bonus of 10 million points for killing the big bad boss, but instead you get simple pleasure and satisfaction from smaller accomplishments like getting recognized for you good taste or finally finding that rare painting the museum was missing, or designing an outfit and finding others wearing it a few days later. Well it's after 11 so I have to go see K.K. and try to get his Jazz song for my collection. Happy gaming.