Animal Crossing

I used to really adore this series when I started playing these games back 15 years ago, but revisiting this series now, I am really thinking about why I actually liked this in the first place unfortunately. I get the appeal for sure, but after playing this and New Horizons, I realized that I am now in the boat of players that this game just doesn't appeal to anymore.

I believe as the series goes on, the personality/soul decreases slowly, but the overall gameplay/menu customization greatly improves. This absolutely has the most personality out of any entry in the series. The dialog can be so rude it is comical. They really pussied out with the dialog on later entries. As the series went on, the dialog felt more static and robotic at times, and if you had two like personality villagers in your town, it would not be uncommon to say the same exact thing if you talk to both of them in succession. It has happened on this release as well, but not nearly as frequently.

Not being able to clump like fruits or moneybags in inventory so that you can carry many at a time sucks. The square-based environment is rather obnoxious. I am glad future entries opened the world up. Not being able to quick map tools is rather annoying as well. Not being able to sell groups of items at once is dumb as well. Dressers (storage containers) that you place in your house only hold up to 3 items, which is horrible. I am too used to having near infinite storage in the dressers. Also, the furniture will never be as interactive as you would like. You can't lift weights, go in a pool, use a vacuum, drink tea, cook on a range, etc. It is really just a dollhouse simulator.

I will assume the E-Reader and GBA link things this game encouraged was awesome at the time this was made, but it is unfortunately something I cannot try due to not having access to those. The fishing cue is ass in this, which is unfortunate because it makes fishing a much more frustrating activity compared to other entries where they added an audio cue as well. The vibration for the cue is extremely misleading. Also, the mail system in this series really irks me. You will never truly get a unique response from villagers mail, no matter what you send to them. They will always say "I have no idea what you said in that letter".

The series in general intends the player to play the game for about an hour each day, and I totally understand why. You have daily events that change (sometimes), and you will do the same rather repetitive tasks of everyday life in the game, like finding the 3-4 fossils (and amusing gyroids), fishing (while selling dupes to Nook for extra bells), talking to villagers and doing repetitive errands for them, making a diverse fruit orchard to have another cash cow, all to inevitably pay off your house loan and watch Nook's store grow. I don't know, I just find it a very linear and unfulfilling experience now. I feel like other life sims have a much more fulfilling and interactive experience than this. I love the music in this game though, I just want to note that.

All in all, this is the release with the most soul, but playing later entries really made me realize how much of a rough draft this is. The series has inherent flaws which they never fixed, which is sad, but it almost makes up for it in its unique charm and personality.

Animal Crossing and The Sims are heavily underrated in the history of gaming. They basically opened the door for non-competitive and non-hierarchical game design to the masses (most of us nerds had played Sim City or Harvest Moon).

Nintendo really went full inoffensive and friendly with this game; it's pretty boring to me after the first few hours and would probably make more sense as an actual MMO-type game...but digging and fishing for rewards are the hardest game mechanics to disparage.

Truly a groundbreaking title, Animal Crossing combined the breakout sensation of The Sims' life simulation with an emergent real-time clock mechanic and boatloads of that Nintendo charm to create an incredible environment with many variations between save files. That said, it never made for much of a game, with the chores Tom Nook asks of you turning into a grind, and the scope of this Animal Crossing feeling somewhat limited.

Easiest 5 I've ever given across any media ever. I absolutely love this game. New Leaf may have more stuff to keep you busy and wins in the portability aspect, but honestly I think those cons are, oddly, pros for this game. There isn't much to do and you have to schedule your life around it. Its literally a vacation in a videogame. On top of that, this game excels in its dialogue. When this game was localized in America, it was done by one or two guys who thought for sure the game woild flop, so tons and tons of dialogue was written by them with little censorship/overhead, and it shows. Characters are straight up awful people sometimes in this game, and constantly play pranks or say nasty things to you, which may sound terrible at first but it adds to the verisimilitude of the world. In short: the characters feel alive. This is sort of lost in later titles because the Japanese producers demanded the translations be more true to the original texts, so you end up with colder feeling characters that don't say as much, or tend to repeat the same 3 things all day (this rarely happens in GC).