"While most 31 year old guys were scoring at the bar, Black_Crusher was eagerly awaiting the arrival of his new Apple TV from Nookington's"

Ah ha, but I'm married so it's not nearly as sad! (Or IS it??). Alrighty, well this is my review of an unexpected hit at the Crusher household and that would be none other than Animal Crossing. Strangely enough, I came across information regarding the Japanese version of this game awhile ago on the web while looking for a Harvest Moon site. (Doublely sad, I win!) When I saw that it was going to be coming to a gamecube near me, I picked it up at Toys R Us and gave it a go. Just what is it about this game that keeps dragging me back to it YEARS after I bought the damn thing??

STORY: 2/10

As far as a story goes, well, you're riding on a train on your way to a new town to live in. While traveling, you strike up a conversation with a talking dog (or is it a weird cat? Who knows?) who tells you he knows JUST the place for you to move in to. The catch is that you don't have any money, so you'll have to work off your debt from a store run by a talking raccoon. I'm just going to skip the "talking" prefix from now on altogether because all the animals do anyway. And so your adventure into this sugary sweet world of kiddiness joy begins!

GRAPHICS: 9/10

Very well done here. The game has a cartoony feel to it, yet manages to look completely different than the other cartoony looking game on the gamecube, Zelda: Windwaker. Colors are bright and clear, and the animals all look different from each other although a few like the lions kind of look like crap, IMO. You start off with a randomly made boy or girl character, and by randomly made I mean that you might luck out like my wife and get a cute girl with good-looking eyes, or be like me and get a psychotic looking fruit-collecting bastard with horns on his head. Oh well, I'm used to him now and in fact have made a green dragonscale shirt for him to wear while he totes his golden axe about town. If this is some sort of demented RPG, well by gods my guy will look like a warrior, damnit!

MUSIC / SOUND: 10/10

I actually happen to think that the sound and music surpasses the graphics, actually. The opening piano / drum song during the menu screen is very awesome when blasted at 10pm. Your neighbors (the human variety who live upstairs) might not appreciate the music like I did, but they'll get over it. To make things interesting, the animal townsfolk all have a certain way of talking which is done by saying each actual letter of their sentences in an ultra-fast way. I'm talking faster than the Micro Machines guy kind of fast! What's more, is that sometimes it actually SOUNDS like they spoke the line correctly, if you can believe that.

CONTROL: 8/10

I'd say that the control is pretty foolproof although sometimes I'd have some trouble while trying to aim my shovel to strike a rock or something. Since your character is controlled by the analog stick, he or she will either walk or run depending on how hard to press the stick. Be careful running around though, because you might scare some fish or insects away!

GAMEPLAY: 7/10

Yeah, it's a fun game alright. But really, what is the POINT you ask? I don't believe that there really is one, but that doesn't mean Animal Crossing isn't any fun. Your main goal would of course be to pay off your house debt to Tom Nook (the aforementioned raccoon), but there's really so much more to do in the game than that. For starters, you can attempt to collect many different types of fish and insects. Or, if that isn't your bag you can also go to the train station on Saturdays and listen to K.K. (a singing dog with a guitar) jam and get new songs to pop into one of many audio devices back at your house. You'll start with a crap radio but you can also get a record player, boombox, or even a huge stereo system.

Ah, but for me the real draw of Animal Crossing is collecting furniture. Sounds boring, doesn't it? Well, I'll tell you a wee bit about my home decor and you'll see it's anything but. I have a pumpkin jack in the box, a mario invincibility star, a sword, a rotating fan, an angelfish, a palm tree, an apple-shaped TV, and a barrel in my bedroom alone. And if you go down into the cellar you'll see torches, a xylophone, a huge collection of NES games, and black chess pieces. So, although my decorating skills leave much to be desired, my house is pretty unique to say the least.

The game itself runs completely different than a Harvest Moon game. Whereas a single game day in Harvest Moon could be over in 15 minutes or so, Animal Crossing draws its time straight from the gamecube inner clock. Yep! So that means that a day in Animal Crossing is the same length as an actual real world day of 24 hours. This goes for weeks, months, and seasons too. The good news is that you'll have plenty of time to do things and not feel rushed. The bad news is you'll sometimes have a full backpack of things to sell to the store, but the store won't be open for 5 real world hours.

The animals who live with you are all pretty much cookie cutter beings too. For the most part, they will all say the same exact things with only their catchphrases giving them any stamp of uniqueness. So a cat would say "Meow Meow" and a duck would say "Quackity Quackity" or something like that. Couple this with insanely boring fetch quests you get from talking to them that have you running around the map looking for other animals and it'll make you want to stop talking to the animals altogether. You can also write the animals a letter but 95% of the time they won't understand it. And if they can't understand "Here's a cherry, you're my friend", well why bother writing to them at all?

I really liked the fishing part of the game. For starters, it's much MUCH easier to catch fish in Animal Crossing than in Harvest Moon. You can see the fish's shadow on the water, and you wait for it to start biting. This can freak you out at the beginning but here's a tip: No fish will ever bite more than 5 times. This means that if the fish bit 4 times you can press the button on the 5th bite to catch that little bastard and reel him up. Oh, and when you do, your guy will say a semi-funny phrase about it, usually musically orientated. These get old really fast though, since he never changes his puns for the same fish. Oh, and you'll also CRINGE LIKE CRAZY whenever anybody ever mentions the words "Sea Bass" to you in the future. These are so friggin' common and worth next to nothing in the game. You'll grow to hate them too.

Oh, and don't forget that you can also create your own patterns to put on your clothes, umbrellas, door, and signposts too! This is actually pretty fun, and aside from the dragonscale armor I made I've done a Midnight Oil shirt, a tuxedo, a karate gi, and a newspaper shirt. Not too bad, and it's cheap to do too!

Some other points of interest to look out for are a signboard to create your town's musical theme (very fun), a general bulletin board that your critters will post treasure hunts and other info on, a central dump where animals might toss some good items into, a museum that takes painting, insect, fossil, and fish donations, a police station where you can pretend you own all the lost and found stuff, a beach to collect seashells on, soccer balls to kick around, and a post office where you can mail your letters to the animals. But be warned, although there's a lot to do, it all gets VERY old after awhile!

CHALLENGE: 1/10

The only hard part of the game would be trying to catch a damn bee! You see, sometimes when you shake a tree, a bee's nest falls out on the ground and you're instantly attacked by a swarm of angry bees. When they catch you, you'll be stung and have a nasty-ass beesting right on your eye! YUCK!! Fortunately this will go away the next time you play the game, and it won't really affect the gameplay otherwise. Maybe the other hard part would be clearing a few thousand weeds from your town when you haven't played in a couple of months. Ouch!!

PROS:

+Great Graphics and Music
+Collecting furniture is pretty fun
+Fishing is really fun
+Making your own patterns is a great way to enhance the game's uniqueness.
+Trying to do Slayer songs for the town's theme is great fun!
+The museum is a cool place where you can look at your donations.
+No time limit on anything! You won't feel rushed at all!
+It's addicting, I'll give it that.

CONS:

-Animal inhabitants are all pretty bland and don't differentiate too much.
-Way too many fetch quests where your target animal constantly moves around, making it hard to find them sometimes.
-Waiting for the store to open for hours is NOT fun.
-Bees are a royal pain in the ass and almost impossible to catch!
-The game gets repetitive a lot, since you have too much time and not enough things to keep you interested in for very long.
-Animals can't understand your letters most of the time, regardless of their complexity.
-Pulling 10,000 weeds is never fun if you haven't played AC in months.
-SEA BASS!!!! I hate thee, sea bass!!

OVERALL: 7/10

Animal Crossing is a very unique game, and I can see why it's one of the gamecube's biggest hits. It is fun to play, but gets mighty repetitive after awhile. The game's clock is always synched to the real world one, and this can both be seen as a blessing and a curse, "Crusher, Crusher!" Worth a purchase, especially since it's around $20 now, "Crusher, Crusher!"

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/28/06