Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii)

If a tree falls in a forest...
11/20/2008 7:34 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 2

The best way to describe Animal Crossing is to call it the "Seinfeld" of gaming: It's a game about nothing. There's no world to save, no villain to fight, no puzzles to solve. Yet somehow, the series has struck a chord with Nintendo fans and become of the company's more addicting and successful franchises, first on the GameCube and then on the DS.

Animal Crossing: City Folk is highly reminiscent of another of Nintendo's endless franchises: Pokémon. The main focus of both series is collecting. In Pokémon, players run around trying to collect hundreds of little critters running wild; in Animal Crossing, players run around collecting ... well ... collecting everything -- bugs, fish, fossils, furniture, clothes. Another similarity between the two franchises is that each new release makes only incremental updates. City Folk is less of a new game than a Wii remake of the DS hit, Animal Crossing: Wild World.

As with the previous AC releases, City Folk dumps the player off in a small village with naught but the shirt on his back, setting out to build a life for himself in the great unknown. First stop on this new walk of life? Loan shark -- err, "town merchant," Tom Nook. Once again, Nook basically owns your soul for the bulk of your time in the village, as you're constantly indebted to the guy for remodeling your house. Like a lot of people who will be picking up City Folk, I had already played the previous two Animal Crossing games, and you'd think that by now, someone would have thought to include an option to skip the beginning tutorial. No such luck. Once again, you've got to introduce yourself to everyone in town, post sales flyers, make deliveries, and basically be Nook's little bitch for the first hour or so before you get to actually start the game proper.

Repeating the tutorial is particularly ridiculous for those players that choose to copy their character over from the DS game. For the most part, the character transfer feels pretty useless. Although your character makes the jump from the DS to the Wii, none of his stuff comes along for the ride. Okay, yeah, your old catalogue is available at Nook's shop, but you still have to get the Bells to buy the stuff. Plus, you don't get any credit in the museum for anything you already caught or found in Wild World. Worst of all, after the transfer, no one in the new town remembers who you are. It's like someone hit a global reset button. Oh, wait, they did.

While City Folk may not feel like a full-on sequel to the Animal Crossing series, the game does toss some interesting twists into the same old formula. The game gets its subtitle from the addition of a new city area for players to visit. Now, instead of having to wait around for the many special visitors to pop into your town unannounced, you can go into the city and visit their shops directly. It's essentially a hub to make things a little easier, but it still adds nicely to the experience.