Animal Crossing (GameCube) Review

In 2001, or in the United States, 2002, Nintendo began the Animal Crossing series with its first entry on the GameCube. Animal Crossing is a simplified life simulator but you live with animal people. This review will judge the game on its own merits.

 

The main draw of Animal Crossing, as you would expect from a Nintendo game, is the gameplay. The playable character only runs, walks, uses tools, and interacts with people or objects, though. The player does these things over many real life days in an attempt to build towards some of the goals the game sets for you. The main goals are paying off your debts to build the biggest possible house in the game and collecting every painting, fish, fossil, and bug in the game. These two goals (especially collecting stuff) will take dozens of hours even if you hardly do anything else. Along the way (and in general) there are plenty of other things to do. From Saturday night concerts with K.K. Slider, to collecting and playing NES games, to buying and selling on the turnip stock market, there is no shortage of things to do. Many real life holidays (depending on where you live…) match up with big events in the game that keep you coming back, too. There is also the whole customization aspect of the game, where you have the entire interior of your house, your clothing, patterns, and the town you live in itself to design however you like. Overall, Animal Crossing somehow makes the mundane incredibly engaging for long periods of time both in the game and out of the game.

 

Technically Animal Crossing is far from impressive. It’s more or less a N64 port. At least this means it runs perfectly. With the art style used it actually looks fine, though, so this doesn’t really affect the quality of the game at all. The game being based around real time, even when you are not playing it, is cool for a GameCube game, though. It also makes use of the GBA to GameCube connector add on and e-Reader cards, neither of which are important at all to the game or used by 99% of players, but its still cool that they were used.

 

In terms of sound Animal Crossing is quite good. There is plenty of memorable and good music. The ways that the villagers speak are surprisingly well executed and somehow never get annoying to listen to, even when they sing like K.K. Slider does. Sound effects are about what one would expect. Overall this is one of the best aspects of Animal Crossing.

 

The story in Animal Crossing is not a thing. The only story in this series is how the characters’ roles change between games. The characters you build relationships with are well written, though.

 

In terms of value the game is obviously worth it. There is basically endless replayability even when playing alone, which is rare for a GameCube game.

 

Overall the reviewer would give the game a 9 out of 10.

 

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