Looking Ahead to a Wild World

This is what I've always loved about Animal Crossing; beyond the collecting, beyond the home remodeling, beyond the playable NES games — Animal Crossing gives you and those who play with you a world to not only play and live in, but also interact with and shape, leaving your own mark.

Everyone starts off the game doing a little work for the town's resident capitalist, Tom Nook, but from there you'll find your path diverging from other players. Seeded with a little randomization of terrain and residency, it befalls you to decide what your home and your town will become. Every patch of ground and every town resident has a memory. Everything you do affects how your town lives and grows.

It gets even better when you throw more players into the mix. The GameCube progenitor of the series permitted up to four people to move into a single town and save file, though out of necessity, those four could only be filled with residents from your real dwelling — family members, or perhaps dorm mates. You could also take advantage of town visitation, where you would bring your town's memory card over to a friend's house and he could take a train from his town to yours, meet your town's residents, and even take one home with him.

Animal Crossing really shone when multiple human players were affecting its world. For many months, my wife and I lived in separate towns on separate memory cards, often making several visits to truck goods back and forth and shop each others' stores. When the Nintendo DS was about to launch, and I desperately wanted one for an early Christmas present, I left several 30,000-bell bags (a bell is the unit of currency used in the game) buried around my wife's house for her to find, trying to bribe her into giving me this most-wanted of gifts.

It game wasn't just about trading goods, though. As we made our way through each others' towns and interacted with the landscape and the animals, we left our impression. To this day, as you can read above, the animals in my town remember my wife most fondly. (Many remember her more fondly than they remember me.) It was not unheard-of to spend countless hours doing this, and we enjoyed every minute of it, trying to make the biggest impression on each others' towns.

Unfortunately, we were limited to the two of us participating in reality. Your memory card was precious; it contained your town's entire history. While it was a neat idea to bring it to a friends house and exchange towns, it was unthinkable to mail it off to a far-away friend. If you wanted to interact with other players you knew but could not visit, you had to send items through the store, which gave you an obtuse code that didnt always work for the faraway person to use. A far cry from really leaving your mark on the other's town!

Another part of what made this game so great was the events. For many days out of the year, something special was happening in the world of Animal Crossing. Weekend fishing tournaments against our town residents had us checking in every few minutes to see if we still had the biggest catch. Thanksgiving found us stealing silverware from the harvest table for the benefit of a turkey with a hunted expression on his face. New Year's was a big countdown clock and fireworks over the big lake in the center of town. All were celebrated with our familiar town residents.

Of course, the two of us could only experience the events one at a time; we had to take turns with the big ones. In addition, if we were out of town (since, for example, Toy Day was, in fact, Christmas), we either lugged the GameCube with us to the intense curiosity of family and friends, or we engaged in clock tomfoolery upon our return to convince the game that Christmas had yet to come.

So, there you have it, a perhaps not-so-brief introduction to where we've been. Astute readers will have noted two key things which could, perhaps, bring the game to a whole new level.

Nintendo, it seems, has also noted these.