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Animal Crossing is one of those games that simply screams creativity. It breathes with a wonderful and more different style than anything I had ever seen before. Everything about this game is one of a kind, I’m sure of it.

You begin the game as a young adult leaving home. You’re on a train headed to a new town to live on your own without your parents. With only a small amount of bells in your pocket (bells is the currency in this game), things will be tough. Meeting a new friend who has “connections” though, things might get a little bit easier. He informs you of his pal Nook, a shop owner who sells houses, too. He can get you the house pretty cheap, so it should work out fine. The main goals in the game… Well, come to think of it, there aren’t. You just live life. Of course, you could always update your house to its maximum size, or collect every species of bug and fish! But other than that, there are no real goals.

One very fun thing in this game is decorating your house. You won’t believe just how fun it is, actually! Unless of course, you changed your name to Quentin, you have a dog that is smaller than your cat, and your favorite drink is Banana daiquiris. Other than those select people, you’ll find this game effete, but something about it is very enjoyable. Even for males!

Aside from creativity, there are some very innovative principles of this game. One very neat innovation is the real-time clock. It uses the GameCube’s built-in system clock to tell exactly what time it is and display that time throughout the day in completely real time! Day becomes night, winter becomes summer—it’s all so cool. Not to mention holidays that you celebrate in real-time. All the major holidays we celebrate are in this game, and even a few new ones.

Well, the graphics of this game are certainly nothing to get excited about. Well, they are, but for all the wrong reasons. What I mean by that is… Well, they “suck”. They’re very outdated. We’re talking N64 stuff with slightly higher resolution. I regret to inform you all that this area of the game fails. Of course, I personally didn’t mind the graphics and can’t penalize the overall score for them, but they are bad nonetheless. It’s my job to tell you that much.

This area isn’t exactly spot-on either. The voices you can pick for the characters are either Bebelese or Animalese. Bebelese is basically a plunk sound for each syllable. Animalese on the other hand is MIDI voices. They speed up what they’re actually saying so it makes this cutesy sounding and very awful noise each time one of those God forsaken creatures tries to talk. Absolutely terrible. The music of the game on the other hand is actually pretty solid. You can get songs for your house on Saturdays. Each one of these is very catchy and fun, although low quality. The regular themes are very catchy as well. Yes, the music is pretty solid.

Here even more problems arise! The controls of movements and such are all perfectly fine. The only problem comes with the interface systems and grids. Everything you do is on a very square grid so certain things get rather tedious at times. As for the interface, it is clunky and difficult to control. You press your menu and everything in your inventory is in a 14 square grid as well. Everything about the controls, much like the grid the game controls on, is very, very, square.

This is where the game truly shines. There is a whole year’s worth of stuff to do in this game calendar-wise and even more! There are thousands of items to see, ranging from NES games, home décor, house themes, music, bug collections, fish collections-- There are too many to name.

A lot of people will pick on this game over silly things like graphics, the MIDI voices, and the clunky sort-of interface, but they’d be missing out on a very neat and creative game. I’d call this game revolutionary in many respects, and I highly recommend it to everyone of all ages.

Graphics: 2.5 | Sound: 7.0 | Control: 4.0 | Replay: 8.5 | Overall Game Score: 9.0/10

Animal Crossing for GC screenshot 18