KerryAndGabe.com

I’ve been meaning to write this review for a few months. We have been playing Animal Crossing quite a bit since we started in January. We both had the DS version which got quite a bit of play. It’s too bad that we sold the DS version since you can apparently load your catalog (and maybe other things) from the DS. Considering that the Wii version is very similar to the DS version, this isn’t a huge deal. I think we’re having a better gaming experience by not loading the old files. It’s more challenging to start with a blank slate and rebuild our collections.

For those not familiar with Animal Crossing, your character has just moved to the town (which you name) and buys a new house. You are free to furnish your house with whatever you like, and one of the “subgames” is to get a high rating from the Happy Room Academy. They base their scores on the completeness of furniture sets, feng shui, the inclusion of certain “lucky” items, as well as other various bonuses. This is just one of the many goals that you can complete in the game. Gabe and I tend to like to collect everything. In order to buy things, you have to make some money. The primary way to make money is to sell stuff. You can fish in the rivers and ocean, pick fruit from trees, collect fossils, catch bugs, pick up shells, as well as find random furniture items in various ways. All of these can be sold at Nook’s who offers a limited selection of products that differs from day to day. The game has many furniture sets that coordinate together to decorate your house, complete with wallpapers and floorings. You get a bigger house as you pay off each mortgage, giving you more space to decorate your house. You can also donate items to the museum, creating another goal of collecting all the possible bugs, fish, fossils, and paintings. Another store sells clothing items which you can use to coordinate your look. These clothing items often contribute to an overall outfit or costume.

The game is in real time. When an animal says that something is happening tomorrow at 5pm, they really mean tomorrow at 5pm. This can make for a big time waster! Certain things happen at certain times, stores are closed during the night, and some things even happen on specific days throughout the year.

The game has endless possibilities. You can plant trees and flowers around town to create a pleasing environment, improving your town ratings. You also have a responsibility to water the flowers around town to ensure that they continue to live – this part of the game can be a bit of a pain. I never got into creating hybrid flowers in the DS version, but we’ve been trying to create hybrids in this version. Plant two flowers next to each other, and a hybrid flower may grow nearby.

You can interact with the other residents of the town. Different animals have different personalities. You can send them letters and gifts, and they will send you letters and gifts. You can greet them around town and chat about various things. They will start to give you nicknames, ask you for “cool” greetings, and then go around town shouting out your catchphrases. Our animals tend to be a bit rude as we give them phrases like “who smells?” and “bloody hell.” This amuses us.

In the Wii version, you can have up to 4 players who each get their own houses in the same town. It’s fun to share the same town, but it has a few drawbacks. The biggest drawback to sharing a town is that we share the same stores. Since we only have one Nook’s, we have to wait much longer to complete our sets. On the DS, we visited each other’s towns and were able to trade for items that had not appeared in our store yet. We also share the same museum and “dig spots,” so each player may not get to dig up fossils and other buried treasures each day. During the winter, only one person a day can build a snowman. Since this is the only way to earn the snowman furniture collection, it makes it difficult to collect more than one set. The only furniture sets that we have been able to complete have been a few special sets available only at certain times of the year (the snowman set, for example). We have created four players in our town – one for each of us in our family plus an additional character. It doesn’t bother us that we can only collect one full set for the special sets since we prefer to decorate all of the houses differently. Maddie has the full snowman set in her house.

The Wii version gets its “City Folk” name due to the city that you can visit by riding the bus. In the city, you can visit the sketchy Redd’s shop (he used to come to the DS town periodically in a tent). In this version, he offers 2 pieces of furniture and a painting that may be a forgery every week. Considering that many furniture sets have several items from Redd’s, collecting those sets is a bit tedious. In the city is a very expensive shop, and they offer four different furniture sets throughout the year (corresponding to the appropriate season). Currently, we’re collecting the princess set for Maddie. Between the snowman set and the princess set, she has the nicest looking house in town!

I have seen complaints that City Folk does not utilize the Wii controls and that they didn’t really improve the game significantly from previous versions. This hasn’t bothered us too much. The game was very strong when we played it on the DS, and enough time had passed that we were ready to enjoy a new incarnation. A few sets have been added. You can use the WiiMote’s motion capabilities to cast your fishing pole and catch fish, but this is just about the only thing unique to the Wii that they have added. We’re not too disappointed. Overall, it’s a great game, and I hope that we will continue to play it throughout the year. Different items are available at different times of the year, so we will have to stick with it if we care about collecting everything!

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Posted by kerry on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 7:01am.
Categories: reviews.