Animal Crossing review

Welcome to Animal Crossing.

Review written by
Jellofluoride

March 24th, 2014

Animal Crossing was first released on the Nintendo 64 in Japan as "Animal Forest", and was released as an enhanced port to the Gamecube in 2001.

Animal Crossing is a real-time village simulation complete with animal villagers and plenty of distractions and gameplay to last you a lifetime... literally. The appeal of Animal Crossing back in its heyday, was its longevity. You can wait many real life months just to complete your mortgage payments, which slows the amount of customization and items you can horde in your little village home.

Beyond living your virtual life, there is an unprecedented feature at the time, which allowed you and a friend to visit each others' towns by swapping memory cards and taking the train. This let you reach out to other players not only locally, but all over the world by trading codes for items, creating one of the first online game economies.

The graphics in this game aren't anything impressive, but the game never needed them to be. Even in 2013, Animal Crossing: New Leaf retained the same style and almost all of the original's charm. And the same could be said about the game's soundtrack. The music and sounds of Animal Crossing have become iconic and are recognized by longtime fans in each game's release. After 13 years, I still find myself booting up my Gamecube and playing my NES games that are neatly placed in my old house. I walk around and laugh at how there are more weeds than there are trees. And if I'm playing on a Saturday at 8pm, I can always catch K.K. Slider at the train station before he sold out and became a DJ at Club LOL.

This game has a legacy that Nintendo has held close since its inception, and with the protagonist villager in the new Super Smash Bros, you can expect Animal Crossing to last another 13 years.