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Animal Crossing
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North American GameCube version box art |
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| Developer(s) | Nintendo EAD |
| Publisher(s) | Nintendo |
| Designer(s) | Katsuya Eguchi Hisashi Nogami Takashi Tezuka |
| Composer(s) | Kenta Nagata Toru Minegishi Shinobu Tanaka |
| Engine | Animal Forest |
| Platform(s) | Nintendo 64 (Japan only), Nintendo GameCube, iQue Player |
| Release date(s) | Nintendo 64 JPN April 14, 2001 GameCube JPN December 14, 2001 (+) NA September 15, 2002 JPN June 27, 2003 (e+) AUS October 17, 2003 EUR September 24, 2004 |
| Genre(s) | Life simulation game Role-playing game |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Rating(s) | ESRB: E (Everyone) PEGI: 3+ |
| Media | 1 × GameCube Optical Disc |
Animal Crossing, known as Dōbutsu no Mori (どうぶつの森? lit. Animal Forest) in Japan, is a life simulation video game developed by Nintendo EAD and published by Nintendo. It was first released in Japan for the Nintendo 64 on April 14, 2001. Due to limited sales because of the drastically decreasing N64 market, the game went unreleased for the N64 outside of Japan and was ported to the Nintendo GameCube in Japan on December 14, 2001; North America on September 15, 2002; Australia on October 17, 2003; and Europe on September 24, 2004. The Japanese GameCube version lacks e-Reader support, a feature found in the North American and Australian versions. A version of Animal Crossing was released in Japan with e-Reader support on June 27, 2003.
A Nintendo DS follow-up, Animal Crossing: Wild World, was released in December 2005. A second follow-up for the Wii, Animal Crossing: City Folk, was released on November 16, 2008.
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Dōbutsu no Mori Plus, the Nintendo GameCube version of Dōbutsu no Mori, was released on December 14, 2001, eight months after the original game. This version contains extra features that had to be left out in the Nintendo 64 version, and also utilizes the GameCube's built-in clock to keep track of the date and time. The Nintendo 64 version utilised a clock internal to the game cartridge. With the use of the GameCube's clock, time passes in the game even when the game is not being played. This led to the game's slogan, "It's playing, even when you're not". Dōbutsu no Mori Plus (for the GameCube) cost 7,140 yen and sold 92,568 copies during its first week of sale in Japan.[1][2]
When Nintendo decided to port Dōbutsu no Mori to the Nintendo GameCube, the American version, Animal Crossing, had much more text than the Japanese version, Dōbutsu no Mori Plus, in part because of the immense translation that Nintendo undertook when translating Dōbutsu no Mori from Japanese to English. Not only did thousands of lines of text have to be translated, but the translators had to create new holidays and items. Nintendo Japan was so impressed with the results of the translation done by Nintendo of America's Treehouse division that they translated NOA's version back into Japanese and released it as Dōbutsu no Mori e-Plus. Dōbutsu no Mori e-Plus was released in Japan on June 27, 2003, and sold 91,658 copies during its first week of sale.[3][2]
Animal Crossing is a social simulator that has been dubbed a "communication game" by Nintendo. It is an open-ended game, where a player can live a separate life with little preset plot or mandatory tasks. Players assume the role of a new resident to the town. The gender and looks of your character depends on the answers given to a cat named Rover on the train. There are also certain tasks that players can choose to complete, and goals they can choose to achieve. The game is played out in real-time—observing days, weeks, months, and years using the GameCube's internal clock. There are many actual events and holidays spanning the year, including Independence Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, among others. Other regular activities such as early morning fitness classes and fishing tournaments are included in the game as well. When players are done playing, they can go talk to their gyroid (a creature next to their house) and save. If a player turns off the game or resets the GameCube without saving first, the next time they play the game, a mole called Resetti will appear in front of the player's house to scold them for quitting without saving first. Resetti's brother Don occasionally appears in his place, apologizing for his brother's rudeness.
The main goal of the game, given to the player during the game's opening cut scenes, is to increase the size of the player's house. This house serves as the repository for furniture and other items bought or acquired during the course of the game. It can be customized in a number of ways, including roof color, furniture, the music (if any) that plays when a player enters the house, wallpaper, and flooring. These customizations are judged by the Happy Room Academy (or HRA) every day in-game. While the player's HRA score does not affect gameplay, some players enjoy getting the highest score possible. As the player's house gets bigger, more pieces of furniture can be kept in the house, thus making it easier to have a bigger score.
Tom Nook, a tanuki in the Japanese version and a raccoon in the American and European version, runs the local store. At the beginning of the game, he gives the player their first house with a mortgage of 19,800 Bells (the in-game currency). The house is comically small, furnished only with tasteless wallpaper, flooring, a box, a candle, and a radio. Upon paying off the entire debt, part of which is done through a part-time job to Tom Nook, the player is "offered" to expand the house. In reality, the house is upgraded even if you say no. This cycle repeats itself four times with the mortgage significantly increasing each time (with the exception of the basement addition). The first player in an Animal Crossing village to completely pay off all mortgage loans will receive a golden statue that is erected in their honor in front of the train station. The second player to do so will receive a silver statue, the third a bronze, and the fourth a jade.
Though Tom Nook is more than willing to sell furniture and other items to fill a house, there are many other ways to acquire furnishings. You may go to the water to find shells that can be traded for bells. A trip to the town dump may yield items that were unwanted by someone else and are thus free. The police station has a lost and found department run by Officer Booker, who will allow anyone to claim any item that has ended up there. Other villagers that live nearby may need favors and will reward the player for their help. Redd (a fox who randomly sets up his tent in your town) sells furniture, some of which are rare. Players can even obtain new furniture items by shaking trees until a piece of furniture falls from one.
The Animal Crossing village is 30 acres in size and initially contains three villagers, and more will move in or out depending on the player's actions. All of the villagers are animals, hence the game's name, and each has their own small home that the player can visit. There are many possible interactions between the player and the villagers. These include talking, trading furniture and other objects, completing tasks for rewards, writing letters, and, In Doubutso No Mori e+ buying them medicine when they get sick(Also featured in Wild World). Villagers will also interact with each other. There are roughly 200 villagers, but no more than fifteen can ever live in a town at once. Each villager also has a catch phrase that they use regularly, often relating to the type of animal they are. For example, a cow might say, "moo-la-la" or "macmoo". These phrases can be changed at times if the villager asks the player to do so. Villagers can also often pick up their neighbors' catch phrase. When characters go in their house and go to sleep, or if the villager is not in the Acre its house is in, players cannot visit the villagers or go in their houses. Some villagers sleep early and wake early, and some villagers go to bed just as the sun is coming up. Each villager has a distinct personality and a villager's personality not only determines when they sleep, but it also determines most of their behavior, especially their interactive behavior with the user-created characters.
If the player does not interact with individual villagers on a regular basis, they are likely to leave the village. If you only have one town, The villager will be gone forever, however, if you own a second memory card with a town on it and it is inserted into slot B of the GameCube Console, they may move there and still remember your character. The village also has a level of attractiveness that depends on certain parameters that the game itself never explicitly describes to the player, but hints are given to the player by a spirit living in the village fountain, and players have discovered that the main factor is the density of trees.[4] A high level of attractiveness will draw new animals to live in the village.
Nearly two dozen NES games are available to collect in Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing is packaged in North America with a memory card that automatically gives the player two games upon creating a game file. Others are acquired in various ways. The NES games that can be found and played in Animal Crossing are:
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A handful of these games cannot be accessed without the use of an Action Replay device or e-Reader card. In the Japanese versions of Animal Crossing, Excitebike is replaced by Gomoku Narabe, and Soccer by Mah-jong.
Advance Play is when the player links a Game Boy Advance to the GameCube to download the NES game to the handheld temporarily. This is not available for games that were originally produced for the Famicom Disk System, such as Clu Clu Land D and The Legend of Zelda. It is also not available for games larger than 192 kB, such as Punch-Out!! and Wario's Woods, which cannot fit into the GBA's RAM. All other games can be played on Advance Play, but they are slightly squashed on the Game Boy's display (as in PocketNES) because of the GBA's smaller vertical resolution and are limited to one player.
There are three types of multiplayer game play in Animal Crossing.
In the first, up to four players can create their own houses in a single village. No two players can play at the same time, but by taking turns they can each affect the village in their own ways, communicate with each other via the town board and mail, and share in the experiences of the village.
In the second, two players can play NES games together. This requires two controllers and a multiplayer NES game. Once the controllers are in the players are able to select the NES game they want to play. Once the game is started, players can select the two-player option and start playing multiplayer.
A third type of multiplayer play consists of trading items with another player using a system of codes. Tom Nook operates what is in effect a furniture hawala through which a player can "ship" an item to another player in another town. The player hands an item to Tom Nook and specifies the recipient's name and town, and Tom Nook gives the player a 28-character code. In the other town, the player tells the code to Tom Nook and receives the item. Another way to trade items is to simply travel to a friend's town and drop the item the player wants to give them. This prevents the loss of the item code which must be memorized or written down.
Animal Crossing has a traveling system that allows one character to visit a friend's village. This system requires an additional memory card with Animal Crossing game data, and three blocks of memory to save "travel data". Players go to the train station and tell Porter they want to take a trip. The train will arrive and they board it. This saves "travel data" on the other memory card. Players then arrive at the other town. If a player turns off the console in another town or while they are on the train, the next day the player's eyes will be missing and will look black (which is called a "missing face"), and all the player's items in their pockets (including their bells) will be gone. Resetti will not come.
Players can meet new villagers, shop at Nook's (which will have different stock), shop at the Able Sisters (which may have different patterns) and do almost anything else that they can do in their own town. There are only a few things visitors cannot do, and they all center around the idea that the character is visiting another town, which means the character does not have the same privileges and does not receive the same services that they would in their own town. For example, another town's Nook will not travel to paint a roof, and so players cannot buy paint in another town.
After visiting another town, one of the villagers may move to the visited town. If the visited town has a full fifteen villagers, this will prompt someone from the visited town to move away. Depending upon how many memory cards a player owns, there can be many other villages to see and different items to find.
Villagers can move even if none of the user-created characters travel to another town. If a memory card for another town is in the second slot in the Nintendo GameCube, when a villager leaves, they move to the other town instead of just moving out. If a player interacts with a villager who has moved away from his or her town to the one he or she is visiting, the villager will remember the player.
To trade items, drop the item outdoors in one's friend's town. For items that cannot be dropped, it is possible to put them in your gyroid and offer them for sale, or give them away. When visitors come to town, they can stop by the gyroid and buy fish, bugs, balloons or other items that cannot be dropped outdoors.
Game Boy Advance connectivity plays a role in Animal Crossing, using a Nintendo GameCube Game Boy Advance Cable.
In Animal Crossing, each town has its own tropical island. It can be accessed by plugging in a Game Boy Advance with a GameCube Link Cable and going to the southeastern part of town where the dock is. Players will meet a character named Kapp'n (a pun on "kappa", a turtle-shaped imp from Japanese mythology) there, waiting inside a small row boat. Kapp'n is as generous as the other residents of the town, and will ferry players across to the island for free, while singing bizarre sea-shanties and making ribald, inappropriate remarks. Arriving at the island one will see a new island exclusive animal roaming the tiny island and you can become friends with him/her. The island has a new type of fruit, coconuts, that can be knocked down and taken back to town to be planted. The Island also has fish and bugs that are rare in town. Players can also decorate a small communal beach house and fish at the shores. By staying there for a long period of time, players can get a tan.
On leaving, the player can download the island to their GBA. The player can then give fruit to the villager and the villager will drop bells; if the player then returns to the island they can pick up the money that has been dropped. Players can also leave the islander tools to use, such as the shovel or net. Each islander has a favorite fruit.
Downloaded islands can be traded between GBA's as well using a Game Boy Advance Link Cable. This feature is available within the GBA island viewer.
The Game Boy Advance can also be used when shopping at the Able Sisters. The pattern design tool can be downloaded to one's Game Boy Advance, and one can then upload the design they made on their Game Boy back onto their GameCube. This feature can be accessed by plugging in a Game Boy Advance with a GameCube Link Cable and talking to Mabel in the Able Sisters shop. When presented with options, the player must choose "other things" and then choose either "download tool," which will download the design tool to the Game Boy, or "upload design," which will upload a design from the Game Boy.
Some of the NES games may be loaded onto a GBA as well.
| Publication | Score | |
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| GameSpot |
GCN: 8.1 of 10[5] |
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| IGN |
GCN: 9.1 of 10[6] |
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| GameSpy |
GCN: 4 of 5[7] |
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| GamePro |
GCN: 4.5 of 5[8] |
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| Nintendo Power |
GCN: 4.4 of 5 |
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| Game Informer |
GCN: 9 of 10 |
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| Compilations of multiple reviews | ||
| Game Rankings |
GCN: 86.6% (based on 75 reviews)[9] |
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| Metacritic |
GCN: 87% (based on 42 reviews)[10] |
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Animal Crossing was named the seventh best game of all time on the Nintendo GameCube by the television show X-Play on the television network G4TV. On IGN, the game holds an "outstanding" 9.1 rating.
The game's popularity inspired the creation of an animated movie based on Animal Crossing: Wild World, which was released in Japan.
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