Miyamoto Shrine > Gamecube > Andy's Animal Crossing Impressions

I’ve had Animal Crossing (or Dobutsu No Mori) for about 5 months now and I haven’t played it for about 2. It’s not that it’s a boring game, it’s that you need to have a very good knowledge of Japanese to enjoy the Japanese version fully, but I decided to buy the game anyway.

The whole idea of Animal Crossing is to live a virtual life. You have your own house and possessions, and you can communicate with the other animals in the town to help you ‘progress’ in the game. I put ‘progress’ in quotations because really you could go on playing the game forever, there is no goal to the game you just keep playing until you’re too bored to go on.

The key feature in Animal Crossing is the randomness of everything. There are lots of different town layouts so that everyone wont get the same town, each town has it’s own native fruit which will grow in trees, you can customise everything from your front door to your town’s theme tune. The game will become a part of your daily cycle, you’ll check the dump and shop for new items, then you’ll chat with the neighbours to see what’s going on in town.

There are some events put into the game for specific days, for example on your birthday nearly everyone in town will send you a gift, along with a birthday cake which will only last that day. On Christmas Eve a reindeer will come to everyone’s house and leave them a present, on some nights a ghost will appear who will paint your roof if you perform a task for him. There really is lots to do in the forest.

The main attraction of Animal Crossing however, is the in-game NES emulator. As items you will sometimes come across NES consoles, but these are very rare and you’ll most probably only come across them on special occasions like your birthday or New Years Eve. When found they allow you to play various NES games right from your Gamecube, including Donkey Kong, Clu Clu Land, Punch Out and many others including the games two VERY rare games Super Mario Bros. And Zelda 1 (!).

The game isn’t just for a single person though, it gets much more fun if you have a brother of roommate who shares the same Gamecube. Up to 4 people can live in your town, but you can’t play at the same time. You can send your friends letters and leave them notes and they will receive them the next time they play Animal Crossing, or if you don’t like them you can dig up the trees around their houses and dump all your un-used items around them. If you don’t have a friend or sibling who shares your console however, you can take a trip from your town to theirs via memory card. When you take your memory card over to your friends Gamecube and enter their town, you can take their native fruit home with you and plant it in your own town, or meet all the animals that live in their town.

The Gameboy Advance link-up works well in principle but it hasn't been used for anything useful. You can design your own patches for use on clothes and items on the GBA, but you can also do it through the Gamecube on the TV which is much easier to see and use. You can use it to interact with an animal living on an island and in turn get money from him, which could be useful for the money but it's so tedious and time consuming I just don't see the point. It just feels that Nintendo have quickly brewed up the Gameboy Advance tie-ins as a sales gimmick.

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