Animal Crossing: City Folk

Animal Crossing: City Folk

Animal Crossing is a gentle, cutesy Japanese life-sim series with a gigantic following. Indeed, so popular is the template that it appears Nintendo has decided to change very little from the previous games for this third entry to the series. For the first hour or so it’s almost indistinguishable from its predecessors. It begins in the same way it always has: with a ride on an old rickety bus into a new town in search of a new life and fortune for yourself.

You arrive jobless, homeless and penniless so you’ll need to get immediately acquainted with Tom Nook, the local landlord and shopkeeper. Nook offers you a house to live in and gives you a job delivering items to the village’s various inhabitants. The income you earn from your job is further supplemented by any number of activities available to you, from fly-fishing (you can sell your catches at Nook’s shop), bug catching and fossil excavating. There are clothes shops to visit, furniture to buy, letters to write, conversations to have, errands to run and of course, a mortgage to service with this money and as such you’re never short of things to do in your little town. There are even seasonal festivities; daily fishing competitions to see who can catch the largest Black Bass and challenges to see who can best match their home’s furnishings to the month’s theme.

The game follows the Wii internal clock meaning that when it’s night in your world, it’s night in Animal Crossing. The shops open at 9:00 am and close at 6:00 and real world holidays such as Christmas and Halloween are celebrated by the town’s inhabitants. Principle amongst the Wii game’s novelties is a new city area although, truth be told, the six or seven new shops don't offer much that hasn’t been seen in previous games. You can get a new haircut at the hairdressers (even using your Mii avatar for a head should you so desire) or get a shoe shine (which changes the colour of your shoes) and there’s a stand up comedy club in which you can watch some awkward routines and learn some new character emotes but the novelty of the titular city soon wears thin.

For players familiar with Animal Crossing’s unique charms there is yet more joy to be found in this latest update. But this is the joy that comes from familiarity, not discovery. Animal Crossing is an excellent, relaxing, distinctive and enchanting game but it’s also one that’s barely changed at all over the course of the series. For fans of the series to date, it’s hard to give a blanket recommendation. However, for newcomers, this is a world that’s absolutely worth investing in - a life sim that offers a gentle sense of exploration and development, but whose depths will ensure you keep playing for months to come.

4 out of 5