Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS)

Animal Crossing: Wild World is the best Animal Crossing game I've ever played.

It's also the only Animal Crossing game I've ever played - thankfully, or else I'd probably have never gotten anything else done.

Usually I only review a game here once I actually finish it, but this is a game that doesn't really have an end to it. Like The Sims, Animal Crossing just keeps on going.

Unlike The Sims, however, the focus is less on building your own houses and more about running around doing small tasks to make friends and money. It's not so much "gameplay" as it is a series of activities, but there's something quite addictive about it all. Whenever you think you've seen all that Animal Crossing has to offer, something new and totally unexpected pops up, or one of the residents moves town, leading to someone else moving in.

One of my favourite things about the game is the totally oddball nature of it all. The characters are charmingly well written, and conversations are blissfully free of any concern for keeping it sensible. Considering other life-sim games (such as The Sims) don't even really allow characters to have much of a personality or individuality, it's endearing to be walking around town and have the local fitness/coffee fanatic tell you how he swam laps in a pool full of java all morning, or find amusing messages washed up on the beach.

This brings the game to life, it makes what would otherwise be a series of various collection tasks interesting and fun. Animal Crossing without the quirky sense of humour and random events would be one of the dullest games I can imagine. And yet, the characters are very simply written - they have their basic personality traits and they stick to them. It almost feels like procedurally generated dialogue flavoured with a few embellishments to spice things up. All the conversations you have will be based on a standard format, and you'll notice them repeat eventually, but the little characterizations throughout are what keep them from getting too stale.

I like this a lot for the simple reason that I can see the potential this simple tactic has. It allows even minor characters to be given actual character with very little effort - and while I am certainly not saying this is how characters should be written in general, it is a potentially useful way to write interactive dialogs for even the most unimportant characters in a game and still make them a unique character.

Animal Crossing: Wild World is the sort of game that I played even though I wasn't really quite sure why I kept coming back to it. It compelled me to find out more about it's inhabitants, to work until I had the best house and paid it all off, to get all the varieties of fruit tree growing in my village and collect all the different fossils. And yet, there's no end game, no point at which you can put the game down and say "I accomplished the main goal in this game".

Perhaps the main goal is simply to have fun, and spend some of your day inhabiting this little town full of unique characters, even if you don't really know why. That is something I can certainly feel that I accomplished.