I got the original Animal Crossing game just because I could use it to play old NES games. It would turn out that the game was pretty enjoyable on its own merits, so that sweetened the deal a bit. And though I didn’t play the game every single day for the whole year, I did put a lot of hours into it.
A couple of years later, though, and I would have a DS for my very own. The crazy handheld with wifi capabilities. One of the first games I heard about for the system was a new game in the Animal Crossing universe. One that promised to let you visit your friends’ towns over the Internet. And since visiting other peoples’ towns in the GameCube version of the game was simultaneously the best and most tedious feature of the old game, this was pretty exciting for me.
So I bought the game a couple of days after release day and settled in. It still features you as the token human moving into a town populated by humanoid animals. You still have to take out a loan to buy a house from the resident loan shark Tom Nook (the Crook), and you still run around the town doing menial tasks for your neighbors.
I really wanted to like this game more than I did. They did add a few things: your guy could change hats, the game world isn’t broken up into discrete ‘acres’, you can acquire emotes, and the promised wifi abilities are all in there. But, really, the game is largely the same as the GameCube offering with a little bit of polish in the right places. But since I had already played that one to death, I got bored with this one pretty fast.
I did hook up with the folks I knew and we had little meetings of all our Animal Crossing towns every time we’d have a get together. But they had the habit of playing a little, then saving, then moving the clock ahead, then playing again, then moving the clock ahead, and so on. So the little synchronized events that were supposed to take place between our towns didn’t exactly work very well. Not to mention that in my town it would be Winter and I’d go visit a town and it’d be Summer or some such. Not a big deal, I guess, but it was a little annoying.
The other thing that I thought was pretty lame was that all of the old classic NES games that were in the original game were nowhere to be found. You could still collect Nintendo themed furniture and that kind of thing, but you couldn’t just pop over to play Excitebike or something for a few minutes. And since that was the biggest draw for me, I didn’t really have much of a reason to keep visiting my town. Yeah, unlocking new couches and closets is great and everything, but it’s just not the same. Especially since I already did most of this stuff a few years ago.