"Life simulation with a side of emotional abuse"
Animal Crossing is a life simulator sort of game released by
nintendo for the Gamecube back in the year 2001. You start the game off
in a train, moving to a new town that just happens to be full of animal
people. Once you arrive, you meet the landlord of the town, Tom Nook,
who gives you a home and then you are tasked with paying him back. After
running a few errands for him, you're set free to do pretty much
whatever you like around town. You can do a variety of activities such
as talking to folks, fishing, looking for treasure and fossils, and
completing quests for other townsfolk.
This title is more of a sandbox as the closest thing I've been
able to find a means of an ending is just fully upgrading your house and
paying off all debts to Tom Nook. The game operates on real world time,
which is an interesting idea, but it is also flawed as it makes the
game considerably less accessible for anyone who works overnight, or
shares the household TV with others. Not able to get onto the game until
the wee hours of the morning? Well, too bad, half the villagers are now
asleep and grumpy and you can't even enter Tom Nooks shop. Have a
real-world social life that results in you not being home on New Years
Eve? Well, then you don't get to see the games New Years Eve event,
either. The game kinda functions like an early version of modern phone
games, as it feels more like something you "check in on" once a day to
see what's happening, rather than playing it all day long.
So, what all is there to do? Well, I've only been playing for a
couple of months*, so I'm sure there's more to discover, but so far I've
found that some of the funnest things to do is hunt for items to donate
to the museum and to decorate my home. You can get items from quests
and conversations with villagers, as well as finding them hidden around
the world, lost in the dump, or being sold at Tom Nooks shop. You can go
along the shoreline and collect shells, dig for buried treasure, shake
trees, and fish -all of these activities can get you things to sell or
donate to the museum. There's a cute little clothing shop where you can
draw your own patterns, which my family I had fun with (we made some
Pride flags, Halloween patterns, and a Queen Chrysalis pattern!). You
can also write letters to people, which has been a great source of
entertainment for my family as well (You can say horrible, profane
things to the other villagers and they'll love you for it!).
The game is overall pretty cute and relaxing, but it does have two
big glaring flaws - the aforementioned "real world time" system, and
the nastiness of the characters. I already addressed several of the
real-world time flaws, but a few others are that the game pulls the
modern phone game shit of trying to guilt-trip you for not being
addicted to it. The longer breaks you take from the game, the more your
world fills with weeds and roaches! As James Rolfe would say - "What a
selfish game!"
The other issue is just that so many of the characters are mean
and nasty, and there's some of that old classic nintendo sexism (and
even some transphobia). Right from the intro of the game, the game asks
your gender by insinuating that every male player would want their name
to be seen as "cool" and every female player would want their name to be
seen as "cute". On my save, if I told the town mayor I most respected
either my mother or grandmother, he would say he "weeps for the future"
as if he some issue with people respecting the women in their families.
There's a giraffe character that appears sometimes, and if you approach
her as a female character. She makes some transphobic remarks about how
"you almost look like a real woman wearing those girl's clothes" and
then "WHAT? You are a girl? But you have such a mannish frame!" . A lot
of characters in the game will just causally talk down to and insult
you. One character, Nibbles, said she'd like to kick me after I ran all
the way across the map to get a soccer ball for her to play with. Some
of the characters are also just really smug and unlikable, even when
they aren't insulting you.
Thankfully, not ALL the characters are trash. I've got at-least a
few sweeties living in my town, too. Ava and Nosegay are both really
pleasant characters, and Joey, teddy and Hambo are also pretty friendly
(though Joey is a weirdo who doesn't wear pants) It's a shame more of
the characters can't be like them. I've heard the townsfolk in the newer
games are a lot nicer, which is good news to me. Another minor
complaint with the villagers is that they have a lot dialogue options
for "let's chat!", but the quest options in this game are very limited,
and a lot of villagers in the same town will offer the exact same
greeting dialogs and such, making them feel robotic. I know a great deal
of the game is randomly generated, but I think there should either be
enough unique dialogue for all characters or the game should try to
at-least only have one of each dialogue set per town.
Overall, it is a cute game to dabble in, but it is also a little
too entitled to your time, and you may need to adopt my own families
coping mechanism of just writing nasty letters to all the jerk
characters, and smacking them with bug nets at every opportunity. I'd
still give this one a try because there is joy to be found in exploring
the world and dressing up your home, and some of the characters are
quite adorable,even if others are total jerkwads.
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