Collection essentials #544: Animal Crossing (GC)

This is the first game in what would become a big franchise for Nintendo, helped out by also appealing to a lot of casual gamers. Well…technically speaking, the original game was on the Nintendo 64 in Japan in 2001, and this right here is a spruced-up port with a lot of new features that first reached Western shores in the fall of 2002. The graphics were pretty much kept the same for the GameCube version, which explains why they have the “jagged” look of a Nintendo 64 title.

Animal Crossing could be described as a “virtual life simulator.” You start the game as a character with a name of your choice, who is about to move into a town which you also decide the name of. Upon arrival, you get your house on a mortgage from the owner of the town store, Tom Nook the raccoon. After these events, the game opens up to the player to do basically what they want, without any real objective other than “have fun.” The game doesn’t give you levels to beat, enemies to fight, or that usual video game stuff. Nothing particularly stressful or challenging. Basically, the gameplay consists of living in the town how you want to, giving the option of improving and decorating your house, taking care of the town by doing stuff like planting trees and plucking weeds, catching fish and bugs which can be donated to the town museum, chatting with townsfolk, and more. The only real clear goal you have is paying off your house’s debt, which at the end of the day is only optional.

There’s a lot to explain about how Animal Crossing works, and I’m not going to give an exhaustive explanation of everything…but I want to at least paint a decent picture of what it’s like to play it. A big part of the game are the animal villagers. Your town starts out with a handful of them, but more will move in as time goes by. There are a large number of villagers the game may give you, and each one has one of a few different personality types, so some villagers are functionally identical (though they look different and have different houses). When talking to a villager, you can choose to ask them for some kind of task to get a reward or just make small talk with them, and there are a whole ton of things that can happen when you make small talk.

When Animal Crossing came out, it was advertised as a game that’s “happening every minute of every day, whether you’re playing or not.” While technically that’s not true, it functionally works because the game uses the GameCube’s internal clock. So whatever season it is in the real world will also be reflected in the game’s world. If the player hasn’t played in a while, more and more weeds will pop up in town, and animal neighbors will remark to the player how long it’s been since they last spoke. Certain special events happen every certain number of different days, and special ones happen on certain calendar dates like real world holidays.

Animal Crossing is technically a single-player game in the sense that only one player can play at a time. But up to four different people can take up residence in the same town. On top of that, players can visit other players’ towns. When doing this, a villager from the visitor’s town will move to the visited town. 

Writing letters is another feature. Players can write letters to other players, but also the townsfolk. When chatting with a resident, they may show you a letter that another human player has sent them. This can make for a really neat time capsule.

There are a variety of shirts and umbrellas that can be worn and used in the game, and you’re also allowed to design your own patterns for them as well. When you display your own patterns in the design shop, after a while animal residents may start wearing them as well. Once I had nearly every animal in my town wearing Charlie Brown’s signature outfit. Another time I had a bunch of them wearing a shirt that said “Kick me”.

A really cool feature is that the game contains a series of NES games that can be acquired. You can place them in your house and straight-up play them, and the game will even save your high scores for titles that didn’t originally have a save feature. Nintendo wouldn’t do this in future Animal Crossings because they preferred to sell NES games separately by other means, but back then they weren’t rereleasing them yet.

Nintendo didn’t want players resetting their game simply because they missed something or didn’t like what happened, so they created a deterrent: Mr. Resetti. If a player turns off the game without saving, the next time they start playing they will be greeted by an angry mole with said name. He yells at the player for an extended period of time, making a “quick reset” impossible. There won’t be any actual serious consequences, so those who truly want to reset can still do it. Mr. Resetti is pretty hilarious and a clever way for Nintendo to discourage a “picky” style of play.

There are all kinds of neat little things to discover when playing Animal Crossing, I can’t even try to start listing them off. A lot of the fun of the game is just poking around and seeing what things you can find and discovering how you can interact with your environment and the other residents. I think the game does a good job of giving you a lot of stuff you can do without it feeling too overwhelming.

I remember when Animal Crossing first came out, when I was 12 years old, and I was excited for it. It seemed unlike anything I had played (the closest perhaps being The Sims). I put it on my Christmas list for that year, and sure enough, I opened it up on Christmas of 2002, the same copy shown in the photo above. The game did not disappoint, as I sunk very many hours into it during the following year. And on top of that, my younger sisters also got in on the fun. The game shipped with a free memory card since save data takes up so much space, but I already had a large-capacity third-party memory card, so we were able to have two separate towns. My cousin Kevin got the game, too. His mom, my late aunt Linda, played it too, and I think at least one of her letters to an animal resident still exists in my save data. Years later in the early 2010s, I got back into playing it regularly and managed to complete the museum.

It’s very cool that my original town from when I was 12 years old, Samsburg, still exists today. I visit it on rare occasions, probably just a little bit once every year or two on average. My sisters’ old town, Absville, also still exists, although they have not revisited it in many years.

There have been various sequels to Animal Crossing, but none have managed to capture my interest quite like the original. Is it still worth playing GameCube Animal Crossing if you like the other games? It’s hard for me to say because I don’t have much experience with some of the sequels, but I think it may be. This isn’t even a type of game I usually play, so the fact that I enjoyed it so much really says something. For being one of the best “virtual life” games out there and a hugely nostalgic title for me, this copy of Animal Crossing is definitely a quintessential essential.