The Animal Crossing series has been offering up some fantastic choice gaming to play over Winter for over 10 years now.
If you’re unfamiliar with the franchise… Animal Crossing is a laid back virtual life experience. You do chores, fish, catch bugs, dig up treasures, interact with a plentiful of personalities, make friends, and in the process you earn money, items, and open up more options for what you can do, see, buy, etc.
You can then use the money in many ways to either improve your own highly customisable home, or make improvements to the town you’re surrounded in.
Job systems and also fetch quests in video games are rarely ever what you’d consider fun, you simply do them for the rewards to help you with whatever that games ultimate goals are. However with Animal Crossing you’re never under any pressure to do anything. You can be as lazy or as productive as you want. Find your own fun and just do whatever charms you.
Another beauty of the Animal Crossing games is that you can either play for hours a day, talking to your villagers, fishing, collecting bugs, whether to sell for cash or to try and catch something rare you don’t already have in order to fulfill your OCD collectors side and add to your museum database. Or you can simply just check in for about 15mins or so daily, hit up one or 2 errands, then save your game and be kept fresh of your towns on goings that way.
Undeniably, the game isn’t for everyone. Some people just fail to get hooked by the whimsical offerings the series is rich with. On the flipside though, 30 million Animal Crossing games have sold to date across the entire series. 1/3 of those numbers comes from “Animal Crossing Wild World” on Nintendo DS, and another 1/3 comes from “Animal Crossing New Leaf” for 3DS. Firmly showing were the fanbase resides.
- Animal Forest – N64 – Japan Only
- Animal Forest+/ Animal Crossing – GameCube – Japan/ Worldwide
- Animal Forest e+ – GameCube – Japan Only
- Animal Crossing – Wild World – Worldwide
- Animal Crossing: City Folk/ Lets go to the City – Wii – Worldwide
- Animal Crossing: New Leaf – Nintendo 3DS – Worldwide
2 Spin off games and an upcoming smart phone game round off the releases, but aren’t a focal part of today’s particular post.
The reason Animal Crossing fits like a winter glove in this ongoing daily feature is because Animal Crossing is a game based around your real world clock. The time of day and the date all occur real time with you. Now when you pair that with an astounding number of seasonal events, and the attainability to many of the items that make the game so special… Well you can imagine it all adds towards the long tailed nature of the games replayability.
Come winter, your town in Animal Crossing will begin to look like the picturesque holiday season setting. Regardless of where you live in the world, you’ll get some snow, and occasionally you’ll get the chance to make a snowman with said snow. I fondly remember stumbling upon that fact myself in the GameCube version. The daily music you’d hear gets in on the act too.
A sense of excitement will overcome your town in preparation of Toy Day on the 24th (meaning no pressure to play on the day if you’re celebrating Christmas). Toy Day is organised by a Reindeer named Jingle who’ll ask for your help to ensure your whole town is happy, as well as netting you some cute limited time festive furniture for your home. You can also ring in the new year in game too if New Years Eve is to be a quiet occasion this year.
If you’re never played one of the games before, you can pretty much start anywhere and potentially have a great experience with it. As for others I’ll assume you already have New Leaf on 3DS and are enjoying the recent updates added to the game.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Animal Crossing smart phone “game” turns out in 2017, and fingers crossed Jingle will have us an Animal Crossing game on the Switch in the not too distant future. Rumours have suggested Animal Crossing GameCube will come to Switch as a downloadable classic though.
