Okay, I’ll admit it- one of the biggest reasons I was excited about buying a DS was because of the Animal Crossing game. It was one of my favorite games on the GameCube and I was fascinated by the possibilities for the DS.
Animal Crossing: Wild World is truly a unique gaming experience, which unfolds entirely in real time. So when you boot up the DS after stumbling home from a party at three in the morning, then it will be three o’clock in the morning in the game. But just like in real life, if you show up in your village in the wee hours of the morning, the store might be closed and all of the animals might be sleeping. Also, some events are very time-specific; an animal you have become friendly with might ask if s/he can come over to your house, and you will have to choose a suitable time for a visit. The environment will also reflect the current season- so, in wintertime, there is snow on the ground. The real-time aspect is extremely innovative; you don’t see very many games where a minute is quite literally a minute.
The game begins when name your character and choose your destination. After that, your character arrives in the village you have chosen with only 1000 bells (the currency in the game). Fortunately, your character is welcomed by the local robber-baron, a raccoon named Tom Nook. He’s okay with the fact that you are virtually penniless; he’s willing to sell you a house, but you’re going to be responsible for paying the mortgage. And you’re going to have to begin paying it off by working for Nook.
The tasks that Nook gives you are designed to acquaint the player with the game and the other characters in it. In addition to Nook’s evil lair (i.e. quaint country shop), the town also includes a town hall/post office, a clothing store, and a museum. The town is also inhabited by various animals. This is a little odd, considering that your character is human, but this is part of the charm of Animal Crossing. Some of these animals are rather commonplace like cats and dogs, and others are more exotic like wolves and elephants, but all animals appear to be about the same size, and they all walk around on two legs.
So once Nook frees you from the bonds of indentured servitude, you have a wide variety of ways in which to earn money in order to pay back your mortgage. To be honest, you don’t have to pay back your mortgage, but doing so prompts Nook to expand the size of your house (and give you another mortgage to pay). A larger house obviously enables you to store more stuff.
In any event, the most basic way of earning money is selling Nook fruit collected from the village trees. Each village has a native fruit, and a decent number of trees in that village are fruit-bearing. Nook will buy each piece of fruit for 100 bells. I highly recommend connecting with a friend and trading fruit, because Nook will buy non-native fruit for 500 bells apiece. You can also collect shells from the beach, although this is not nearly as lucrative as gathering fruit; only a couple of the shells sell for over 100 bells. It should be noted that shells wash up on the beach with greater frequency than they did in the GameCube version of this game.
Once you have some cash in your pocket, you can invest in tools like a bug net, a fishing rod, and a shovel. While I haven’t noticed very many bugs in the village since it is winter, the river and ocean are chock-full of fish just waiting to be caught. Some of these fish can be sold for thousands of bells- like the 7k tuna and the elusive and reclusive superfish that can be sold for 15k bells. While some fish and bugs appear all year long, many of them only make seasonal appearances; I suppose this would explain the lack of insect activity. Fish and bugs can also be affected by the time of day.
You will also find pockmarked ground in the village. If you dig up that spot, you might find a fossil. Fossils can be identified by the owl who runs the museum. If you have already donated a particular type of fossil (or are not the donating type), fossils will sell for about 4500 bells, which is a lot of money when you are just starting out.
In addition to fossils, you can also donate the fish or bugs you catch to the town museum. This is one of the choices that makes your gaming experience a unique one- do you donate what you find to the museum, or do you simply sell it because you need/want the money?
If you’re looking for a quick way to make money, you can play the stalk market. Every Sunday morning, a sow named Joan (get it- Sow Joan!) comes to your village selling turnips. You buy them in lots of ten, and then you can check with Nook every day for the current selling price for turnips. Obviously, you want to buy low and sell high.
So, once you’ve amassed a small fortune in bells, you can spend it at Nook’s store. Most pieces of furniture in the game belong to sets, so if you happen upon an item that catches your fancy (and has an adjective in front of it i.e. Lovely Couch or Kiddie Bookcase), chances are it is part of a set. There are also pieces that belong to themes. Having a clean house with matching furniture can earn you points with the Happy Room Academy. A new feature in the DS version of the game is that the animals that you befriend will sometimes ask if they can see your house. When the animal shows up, s/he will walk around your room and then grade it.
This room grading from a fellow villager is rather meaningless; the importance lies mostly in the socialization. Each animal comes with his or her own personality. The number of animals in the village fluctuates; at the beginning of the game, there are relatively few inhabitants, and more will move in as the game progresses. Characters will also move away throughout the course of the game. A large part of the game involves interacting with the villagers, so it is important to establish relationships with them as early as possible. The animals will ask you gossipy questions about the other animals and even give you a nickname- my nickname is Wonder B. It’s interesting to see how the nickname is catching on; at first it was just the animal who gave me the nickname, but now a handful of them refer to me as Wonder B. But just like in real life, some of the animals just won’t like you, no matter how nice you are to them.
The animals in the village really seem to like getting letters. At least that’s what they say. You can send them letters with punctuation and perfect grammar, and they’ll still ask you why you sent them a heap of unintelligible drivel. Sigh.
In addition to the residents of the village, you can also interact with special visitors who appear in your town. Most of them arrive bearing rare items, so it is often worth sampling their wares.
Of course, if you’re clamoring for some real company, you can visit a friend’s town (or host a friend) through Nintendo’s free wi-fi service. If you do not have access to wi-fi, and if you have a friend who lives close by, you can also arrange a meetup through the DS to DS connection service. I visited fellow Netjak staffer TheFurryOne in his delightful metropolis. As with other wi-fi-enabled games, you must exchange friend codes with the friend you want to visit. Your friend code is different for each game, so be sure to check for your code at the town gates. Hosting and visiting is a relatively painless procedure, although after my guest left, I went about my business wandering around the town, and then suddenly a screen came up saying that the game would have to reset, and then it did. When I restarted, I still had everything in my inventory that I was holding about three minutes before the reset. I haven’t done too much visiting, so I can’t say that this is a common problem. And since I still had everything in my inventory, and my new foreign fruit orchard was still there, I can’t say that I was terribly inconvenienced. I’m not even going to complain about the friend codes being unique to each game; it’s not that difficult to keep track of codes, and I’m just happy to be able to take my Nintendo games online.
I promised myself that I would avoid a laundry list of ways in which Animal Crossing: Wild World differs from its GameCube counterpart. All you need to know that there are a lot of things that are accomplished in the same way as they were in the GameCube version, and there are a lot of new additions or new ways to do things. However, it is worth noting how smooth the transition was from the home console to a portable one. The two screens take the game to a whole new level, so even though the gameplay is conceptually the same, it feels very different on the DS. The main portion of the game takes place on the lower screen. This allows you to choose whether to manipulate your character with the d-pad and buttons, or with the stylus. The upper screen displays the sky, and if you should happen to see anything in the sky, you can shoot it down with a slingshot purchased at Nook’s. At night, the constellations you have created are visible. The second screen also comes into play during other portions of the game such as equipping a tool, arranging furniture and selling goods to Nook.
One of the most endearing aspects of the original Animal Crossing was the graphics. Fortunately, Animal Crossing: Wild World looks like an updated and made-over version of its older first cousin. The characters look crisp and smooth, and not blocky at all. The environments are quite lush, as are the weather effects. It is quite lovely to walk around the village while a light snow is falling and then look up at the top screen and watch the snow fall from the “sky” onto your character on the lower screen. There are a wide variety of outfits and accessories for your character, and if you don’t like what they have for sale, you can design your own outfits.
There is almost always music playing in the background. While the track is not particularly long, the music almost never gets overbearingly repetitive. The music does an excellent job of complementing the background to provide appropriate ambience. Also, one of the aforementioned weekly visitors is a dog named K.K. If you go to the coffeehouse to hear him play, he will present you with a tape of his music at the end of the performance. You can put these tapes in the music player in your house and listen to them; the animals in the village also have K.K. tapes playing in their homes. The same can be said of the sound effects; they are subtle and add a sense of realism to the game. That is to say, they add an appropriate amount of realism to a game about a person living in a village populated by talking animals (and is not Narnia). That said, when you shake a tree, fruit will fall softly to the ground with a plop. When you dig in the ground, your shovel will slide into the earth with a satisfying crunch. Your town also has a town anthem that plays periodically. Most notably, a remix of the town tune will play when you talk to a villager; the remix is unique to that villager. If you don’t like the standard anthem your village comes with, you can change it. If you’re not musically inclined, poking around the internet will yield “sheet music” to help you change your town tune to anything from the Imperial March to the Mario and Zelda themes.
When you first start playing Animal Crossing, there will be a lot to do at once, as you go about earning Bells and collecting everything you can get your hands on. But as time goes on, you might find yourself playing for shorter amounts of time. After all, there are a limited number of fossils available each day, fishing/bug hunting becomes less of a novelty and more of a chore, and it doesn’t take that long to go to Nook’s store to see if he’s selling that elusive piece in the furniture series you are collecting. But, the beauty of Animal Crossing is that there are new things for you to do every day. It might only take you fifteen minutes of gameplay, but there is new content every day. Plus, when the seasons change, there are new fish and bugs to be caught, so completists looking to catch ‘em all can go wild. As long as you don’t get bored and abandon your village, the replay value is extremely high.
Animal Crossing: Wild World is an amazing gaming experience. It has something for everyone: fishing, bug hunting, philanthropy (i.e. donating fossils to the museum), epistolatory madness, costume design, music composition, empire building and much more. This is the type of game you can play for fifteen minutes a day and walk away with a satisfying gaming experience. Plus, it is one of the pioneer titles for the new Nintendo wi-fi network, so you can quite literally play with friends all over the wide world. Animal Crossing: Wild World is a must-have title for any DS owner, and is not a half-bad reason to buy a DS if you don’t already have one.
