Review: Animal Crossing: Wild World
nds
02.27.06 / 12:58AM / Joe
I never penned a full-on review of the first Animal Crossing, because I figured my ongoing diary feature more or less covered it. Plus, you almost need to play it for months before you can truly review it, since the game's slow pace unfurls new content long after you've stopped expecting it. Ultimately, the game's success depends on what you put into it... which is a pretty crazy thing to ask of your average gamer. I've read many reviews from people who never "got" Animal Crossing. They sunk an hour into it, maybe a weekend, and declared it boring. Or depressing. Or another Nintendo kiddie game with no point and terrible graphics.
It can be a tough game to grasp. It's not for everyone. I've come up with a short questionnaire of the personality traits you need to be able to enjoy Animal Crossing.
My feeling is, if you answered "Yes!" to any four of those questions, you're a likely candidate for Animal Crossing fandom.
And just to get it out of the way, it ain't like The Sims or Harvest Moon or Second Life... except in the larger scheme of "games about a virtual life." Any reviewer who quotes either of those three games in direct comparison to Animal Crossing is like saying hockey is a lot like tennis. Well, sure,
they're sports...
Me, I score a solid 6 on that chart. But then again, I'm biased and I'm the guy who made the questions. I loved Animal Crossing. But that's the kind of thing I dig. There's lots of junk to collect - and a means to collect that's more varied than the old Spyro the Dragon endless roaming for secret gems procedure. You can organize and display those items, because of the rooms-and-furniture motif. You can customize your world... not to the extent of Second Life, but in a kind of minimalist creative expression: designing textures, landscaping, interior decorating, writing short tunes, creating viral catchphrases and patterns. The dialogues get extremely strange, from the bizarre letters from Mom to Kapp'n's cute sea shanty limericks. New stuff happens depending on what day it is, thanks to an internal schedule that takes weekends, holidays, and the change of seasons into account; it takes place in real-time.
 But that final point is where most people fall off the bandwagon. To most people, "freeform gameplay" brings up a more MMORPG sort of feel... or the GTA approach of open mission selection with plenty of re-spawning sidequests. You can do what you want, but there's still a point. You're still levelling up or crafting finer armor or grabbing all the character enhancements. Animal Crossing has no point. The most impressive thing you can do - complete your item catalog - is so impossibly hard that to this day, five years later, I've never heard of anybody who did it without cheating. The game is purposefully without a point. The intent is that you'll just do what you want to do; that you'll find something interesting enough that will inspire you to keep coming back day after day. Maybe you want the biggest house upgrade. Or you want a completed Museum exhibit collection. Or you want to catch all the fish. Or you want to do it all.
That's why I say it asks a lot of the gamer. It's positively cosmic with introspection and self-evaluation.
The flipside of that is that it can get intensely dull. If you want the money for that mansion, you're going to need to fish and sell and dig and sell and repeat and repeat and repeat until you get enough money... because nothing is cheap in Animal Crossing. It's a grind. You have to really want it. You have to measure if the hours spent fishing for coelocanths (and tossing aside countless common sea bass) was worth the reward. It's not that it can't be enjoyable. It's entirely possible to like catching insects or planting trees or writing letters. It's that the time Nintendo expects you to commit to that task is positively insane. Maybe that's the message: in life, hard work often yields mediocre rewards. And since the game has no "finish" - heck, the game's end credits are cleverly stowed in musician K.K. Slider's weekly performances - you just fake your own goals to keep it interesting.
 Maybe it's that similarity to real life that makes it so compelling. Every day we grind through hours of work for a paycheck that, for most of us, barely covers everything we want to do. We make up our own goals (a better job, a trip to DisneyWorld, a new car) and work towards them. That's Animal Crossing for you. The only exception is that in Animal Crossing, you have a set of parameters that keep your in-game life far more controllable than your real life.
The release of Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS is a lateral move for the franchise. It plays identically to the GameCube version, inheriting all the charm and most of the flaws. New features were added in almost equal measure to what was removed. It's difficult to even consider the game a sequel, since it's mainly just a new look at the previous title. There is no connection between the two games; you are reset to zero when you start in Wild World. Shopkeeper Tom Nook doesn't even reference his past self in the GameCube game, which is a little strange given the focus on real time gameplay. You'd think they would have "aged" the cast five years, just to present something unexpected to the returning player. (Well, Kapp'n has gone from ferryboat captain to taxi driver, so I guess some characters have changed... albeit due to gameplay conceits rather than any kind of overarching storyline.)
Wild World adds multiplayer gameplay, both in local wireless and Nintendo's internet-based WiFi Connection. One of the quirks of the first game was that only one human could be in any given town at a time, even when travelling to visit somebody else via memory card. Wild World allows up to four players to meet in the same town, with one player acting as host. Once your wireless has been configured, you open your Town Gate in either local or WiFi mode. In local mode, any DS gamers in the vicinity will be able to see your open gate and walk on in. In WiFi mode, it looks for other internet-connected players on your Friend Code list (see sidebar). Then your town is loaded into their DS, and you can all run around together, share items, visit new animals, etc.
WiFi also allows Nintendo to pull off some cute "living world" tricks, like having NOA President Satoru Iwata mail everybody a letter and rare item to celebrate the New Year. Last week, everyone who activated WiFi picked up a letter from Nintendo with a piece of Lovely furniture in it, which was their way of celebrating Valentine's Day.
Unfortunately, you can't mail letters/items to your friends offline; you have to be physically inside their town to do so (likewise to mail letters to your friends' animals.) It would have been nice to be able to write letters to offline friends, and then have the game mail them out once you activate WiFi.
To make matters worse, there's precious little to do once you're in someone else's town. Trading/sharing items is a given. (There's even a new vocabulary word for it: the drop-pick. Since merely touching any item will add it to your catalog, people will drop something for you to pick up with the expectation that you'll drop the item to return it.) Viewing each other's houses and collections is nice. It is a moment's interest to see how the geography differs from town to town. A new tool called the timer starts a countdown clock and tracks the number of fish and insects caught... although it doesn't broadcast the results to all players.
That - plus the game's horrible-but-functional chat interface - is about it. You can't even donate to another town's Museum.
 It's a missed opportunity that is typical of Nintendo. They always develop blind spots where they totally ignore gamers' expectations. It's like when Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire came out with underwhelming pre-GBA graphics. Or when Mario Sunshine showed up lacking the familiar themed worlds. Or when Wind Waker revealed the cel-shaded Link. Or the lack of online play on the GameCube. Nintendo can be stubborn, and often they simply decide that what they've done is good enough. Sometimes they're right (Wind Waker WAS beautiful!), but sometimes they're not. When I'm standing in my town with three other people, and we've already traded a bunch of cool items... invariably the next chat balloon from somebody is "Weeeelllllll..." Nintendo thinks they gave us enough to do. They are wrong.
There should have been special items that trigger multiplayer mini-games. I'm thinking of simple WarioWare style games themed to Animal Crossing. Somebody says "Hey, let's play the Find Rover game" and then all participating players see the Find Rover game (like Find the Nest Egg from WarioWare Mega Party Games) slide in on their touchscreens. Or remote control airplanes for hoop-racing on the top DS screen. A jump rope for a game of Jump Forever featuring your avatars. Big winners get a free item; high scores are recorded at the Town Hall.
To simplify things, here's a chart of what happened to the world of Animal Crossing since Wild World.
And, you know, not to mention that there's just more collectible items, more non-catalog items (like individual animal portraits!), and more travelling vendors.
One other important upgrade is the stylus control. The entire game can be played with the stylus (although the d-pad and buttons are available if you want them.) You draw where you want your character to run, tap to use a tool, tap trees to shake them, tap a villager to talk to them, etc. Although you may find yourself accidentally using your current tool quite a bit as you click around. I find it most useful in the inventory screen, where you can now grab-and-drag items around. It goes without saying that it makes pattern creation and conversation typing far easier than in the GameCube original.
The camera is also much nicer in Wild World. Instead of the fixed-point overhead view - and obnoxious invisible acre scroll borders - ACWW has a continuous, flowing exterior map. And, in a neat visual trick, the whole thing is mapped to a cylinder, so the background wraps down and away from your character... which means you can see farther than you could on the GameCube. The top screen shows nothing but sky (and a few altitude-based surprises), but when you pull up your inventory or start chatting, the bottom screen moves to the top so the touchscreen can handle the keyboard.
With a scope as large as one's life, the flaws of Animal Crossing become painful. You're constantly wondering why this isn't bigger or that isn't easier. Why do tools take up inventory slots. Why can I only have eight active custom patterns. Why is everything so random.
And by the same token, the joys of Animal Crossing have been expanded. There's more to collect, more NPCs to interrogate, smoother control... and the portability means you can play it anywhere. I used to have to take a day off of my job to attend the Spring Sports Fair. Now I can whip out ACWW in the middle of the workday. The WiFi multiplayer, as crippled as it is, is a worthy addition, but far from a perfect one.
I would hazard a guess that the next Animal Crossing game won't land until 2008. That should be approaching the middle of the Revolution's lifespan, so Nintendo ought to be pretty savvy on internet play by then. Hopefully they will have figured out how to improve the multiplayer aspect so that Animal Crossing can stand as Nintendo's unique MMORPG. I would even expect that Wild World will interface with it in some way, since the Revolution will also have WiFi access (heck, maybe the DS's touchscreen will be required as a keyboard-friendly controller). They need to maintain the customizable and collectible world, but give us more of a reason to interact with it. That facade - be it through stale multiplayer or predictable fixed NPC conversation - is what ultimately brings Animal Crossing to a halt. This franchise has been hyped as a "living world" and a "communication game" already, and it will be the responsibility of the next game to further that reputation in the face of new technology and heightened expectations.
I know I'll be awfully busy in Wild World until it happens. 02.27.06 / 12:58AM / Joe | 
