What is your favorite aspect of each AC game?

[Bizhiins]

I have been an avid player of every Animal Crossing game since the gamecube version.
Every single game of Animal Crossing has had its amazing parts, and it leaves us long-time dedicated players with a sense of nostalgia for certain aspects of past games.
So, I’d love to hear from everyone who has played past games - and it doesn’t have to be all of them, if you only started with New Leaf!
What are your favorite parts of past games? Let’s go on a Nostalgia trip!
I’ll start.

Animal Crossing Gamecube:
- The music, especially the rainy day music. I still listen to it often on YouTube.
- All of the custom Nintendo items, including the N64 logo that you would see in Cube’s house.
- The plaza with all four houses and their gyroids.
- The train rides with Rover.
- All of the gyroids, especially collecting sets of gyroids.
- The balls that would randomly roll around that you could kick off of cliffs.
- The pretty town square with the wishing well. I loved interacting with the wishing well, and seeing villagers make their wishes.
- The winter igloos when villagers would come camp, with the giant pot of soup in the middle.
- Putting up items for auction with your gyroid.
- Asking villagers for work at any point.
- Watching Pete deliver mail.

Animal Crossing Wild World:
- Being able to see the sky. And the sky colors in this game! I remember bright reds and oranges, all sorts of bright colors.
- Going to Harriet’s for a haircut.
- The music!
- Festivals: Flower day and Yay day (I love giving compliments).
- Resetti music.
- Phyllis’s terrible attitude.
- The trip to the town in a car with Rover at the beginning.
- Villager attitudes. I think they were spunkier and pessimistic in this game, which I actually o liked, instead of when villagers try overly hard to be friendly and nice. It was entertaining.

Animal Crossing City Folk
- Definitely the city plaza. This was my favorite layout of the city buildings in an animal crossing game, ever. I still wish they kept this layout in later games. It felt so futuristic and modern, and it was nice that the shops weren’t cluttering up your town layout. I also loved Redd’s shady shop tucked in the back corner.
- The music. City folk had some of my favorite songs, especially the 10 pm tune.
- The shopping card you could use to pay instead of bells.
- The theater where you would see Frillard perform.
- Getting balloons from Phineas.
- Making constellations in the observatory.
- Shooting down the UFO.

Animal Crossing New Leaf
- The round town plaza with a tree in the center where events would go on. I really liked when events would happen there. I also liked how the town plaza tree grew over time.
- The colors of hybrids, especially the purple and black roses.
- The music, again. It had some great tunes.
- Being able to pick where your villagers lived (after a lot of work and plotting custom designs on the ground).
- Visiting dream towns.
- The separated town plaza with shops, so that those shops weren’t taking up space in your town.
- Tortimer’s island.
- Town hall renovations.
- Perfect fruit. I loved the look of perfect pears, and would work so hard to get a town full of perfect pears.
- GracieGrace as a 3rd floor in Nookingtons.
- Retail, bringing items there, influencing townies to get a certain item in their home, customizing items.
- Villager petitions.

Animal Crossing New Horizons
- Terraforming. I love the unique ideas people come up with for their towns for waterways and cliffs. Pretty waterfalls are my favorite.
- Cooking DIY’s. I like the idea that you can cook food in this game instead of just fruit.
- Meaningful villager interactions. I like when they remember things, notice things that you are doing, and interact with your reactions.
- Being able to put furniture items outside, only of only public works projects.
- The custom designs portal, for all different types of designs, and the amount you can save.
- The dream portal and being able to search by dream address, name, or visit a random dream.

 

[Xara]

wild world
• the nostalgia of it. wild world was one of my first video games and my introduction to the series, so the entirety of it brings me back to better times of childhood innocence and youth. life seemed really good when i played wild world for the first time, and i miss that.
• the villagers having hobbies and interests that could change was pretty cool. like, peanut loving gray furniture one week and blue the next? made the villagers seem more… realistic, and like they had more personality.
• the tiny little events. i miss and love the bright nights festival, the flower fest and the acorn festival so, so much. i hope they come back one day.
• the random messages in a bottle on the beach and the random bulletin board posts. those things were absolutely hilarious.
• working for tom nook at the beginning of the game. i hated it when i was a kid and always gave nook a hard time, but i miss it now. gave the game more charm, y’know?
• delivering wallpapers and carpets for saharah.
• tom nook and sable’s backstory. they deserve their happy ending, man.
• shooting pete and the UFO down with a slingshot. sorry, pete.
• the dialogue.
• the OST.
• kapp’n driving a cab.
• blanca occasionally showing up and asking us to draw her a face. it was creepy, but still lowkey fun lol.

new leaf
• rover greeting our character on the train, and the fact that it’s implied that he was supposed to be the new mayor. he was the only other person on the train with us, so unless the new mayor didn’t even bother to get on the train at all…
• the pwps. i know we have similar items in new horizons, but i miss the tulip topiary, the illuminated pwps, etc.
• the part-time job minigame at the roost.
• club tortimer, tortimer’s island and minigames.
• blanca and april fools day
• the random mini events and holidays (ex. winter and summer solstice) and the photo cutouts at the town plaza.
• the town tree and how it would grow over time and tell you information about your town.
• perfect and tropical fruits.
• the new animal species (especially the deers! they’re my favourite animal both in-game and irl).
• main street.
• having to escort katie to other towns.
• playing hide-and-seek with villagers.
• certain tracks on the OST.
• the furniture items (especially the ones that didn’t make it to new horizons… rip).
• phineas and his badges.
• streetpassing other players and getting balloons, ice-cream cones, etc.
• your player reacting to weather conditions, such as them shivering after diving during the winter.
• the tent at the campsite becoming an igloo in the winter.
• ores.
• the nook’s cranny upgrades.
• how the fishing tourneys and bug-offs were conducted.
• a train occasionally coming along the tracks. it was annoying when you wanted to get to main street, but again; it gave the game more charm.
• resetti’s underground home.
• the 4 museum exhibit rooms we could buy and decorate.
• the police station and the roost building.
• villagers smiling when we would sit next to them on a bench if our friendship was high enough.
• carnations and violets. why aren’t they in new horizons?
• dr. shrunk teaching us new reactions. i don’t like that the villagers and diy cards teach them to us in new horizons. i miss shrunk and his jokes.
• playing bingo with snowmen in the winter.
• the building exterior customization options (both for our house and town hall/the train station).
• the dream suite, especially visiting random towns or towns with the same name as mine; i loved seeing the differences lol.
• the special unorderable stationery.

pocket camp
• fantastic items and clothing. like, absolutely insane.
• an easy way to get an animal crossing fix whenever i don’t have the energy for new leaf or new horizons.

new horizons
• terraforming.
• the fact that villagers no longer move out without your permission.
• nook mile islands and island hopping for new villagers.
• the ability to relocate buildings.
• the museum and how stunning the exhibits are.
• the quality.
• going on treasure hunts with our villagers.
• crops and cooking.
• the new villagers.
• the character customization options.
• wardell and flick.
• not getting stung by jellyfish whenever we go idle for too long while diving.
• the items and clothes.
• the amount of custom design slots we have.
• the bug and fish models.
• kapp’n’s daily mysterious tours.
• the happy home paradise DLC.
• the absence of lyle.
• zodiac star fragments.
• villager posters.
• villagers going “?” if you enter and exit their home without talking to them. it made me laugh the first time it happened to me lol.
• cornimer being brought back in the 2.0 update, even if only briefly.
• gyroids and their new designs/size.

i excluded the gamecube version, city folk and HHD as i’ve never played them. i’m also probably missing a thing or two from each game.

 

[Introspective Onlooker]

I'll keep this brief. This might seem long, but this is how concise I can be:

​

Animal Forest (N64) and its GameCube Ports

• The music is what drew in the game in the first place. It's diverse, catchy, and gives you the sense of actually being in a forest. I appreciate that it goes for something unorthodox, and doesn't try to mimic live music, as in the other games.
• The localization — not the quality of it (though it's the reason why the developers re-released the game in Japan to begin with), but because of how different it was compared to the localization of the other games. It's very interesting to see just how much was changed from the Japanese versions when the game was localized, and I still wish the Japanese elements were retained in Animal Forest e+.
• The Morning Aerobics (though I could never fully figure out how to have good timing and I still stumble a bit with the controls).
• The Shrine (JPN)/Wishing Well was way more useful in pinpointing which Acre needed attention than the Pelican Sisters or Isabelle.
• This last one is exclusive to DnMe+, but villagers would wave to you and give you their favorite K.K. track if they liked you well enough. It's similar to pictures, though this is definitely more rewarding than say, Wild World, in which picture quotes would be reused a LOT in that game.

Wild World

• While I don't think the series ever had good dialogue, because it's ultimately something that was never prioritized in any of the games and villagers repeat themselves in every game, I can make the case for this game having the best writing, not from the villagers (because I still find the unneeded insults and verbal snipes towards my characters annoying, maybe even worse than the NA version of the first game), but because it really fleshes out the special characters in the game. Mabel gets depressed during winter, reminisces about her time with Tom Nook. Nooky Boy himself has quite a fair bit of dialogue concerning his past, and there's even some light-hearted banter of him keeping the Nooklings in check. Blathers actively wants to get rid of his entomophobia because he's worried his sister would be too embarrassed to be around him. This is all so simple, yet it makes these characters actual feel like characters, and not just vendors to talk to. This needs to return. Now. I encourage everyone that reads this to take a look at this script for these episodes; they're a great read.
• I love that the game got a bit creative with its events instead of basing them off on real-life ones. Not all of them are winners, but it adds to that small town life the series is known for, and I wish La-Di-Day and the Acorn Festival returned in later games.
• Every so often, some random comment or whatever would get posted on the board. It was irrelevant, but at least it was funny. Gave me an incentive to check the board everyday just to see what kind of weirdness I would read.
• Having only eight villagers might've been because of limitations, but I wish they stuck with that number in later games. If you have eight personalities, it makes sense just to have the capacity of villagers to be eight, so you don't have duplicate personalities. That's part of the reason why dialogue can get so repetitive in these games...

City Folk

• Don't have a lot nice things to say about this game, and I've been pretty critical about it on here, already, but this game probably has my favorite iterations of Snooty and Cranky villagers. Snooties aren't as snide and rude towards you as they were in the previous two games, but unlike WW, they still retain some of the elegance in their language from PG!, while not being totally obnoxious and patronizing about it. It was subtle and the snobbish behavior was handled well in this game. Crankies are just great. They aren't the belligerent grumpy old men who could steal and overcharge things on the GC. They don't have the wackiness attached to them as they do in WW. They don't constantly go "GAHAHAHAHAHA!" like they do NL, and act as the complete opposite of what they're described as, and they don't have this weird Southern accent that NH gave them. They're just guys with a bit of snarkiness to them, but it's not toxic as it was in the previous games, and they aren't out-of-character as they are in the games after it.
• Precipitation. I hated it in the first game because it was a 24-hour ordeal and that theme wouldn't change. It's actually useful in this game because when it rains/snows, all the plants get nourished and it saved me a bunch of time whenever it did. Bonus points that if it happens in the City, it still counts. I guess I can give another positive to City Folk for turning my least favorite mechanic in one game into something I love seeing later in the series.

New Leaf

• This game is such an improvement over the other games that I could spent a good hour, alone, just writing down the things I loved most about this game. The very first noteworthy aspect of the game was the decision of having your main PC be in charge of the town. That was a sensible direction. The gameplay is virtually untouched, but now you had all the benefits of being your own mayor, with a very helpful secretary to walk you through the process of becoming one during the beginning of the game. Speaking of the beginning...
• ...This game has the only good tutorial in the entire series. It's also the only one where you don't do a bunch a mundane tasks for Tom Nook.
• Perfect Fruit. Makes fruit grinding much more bearable, and it's nice to look at.
• Why did it take so long to stack items?
• This game pays several homages to the first game. Tents and igloos, the day and night themes of the post office, going to an island...
• Tortimer's Island — yet another great addition to the series. I'm glad I was still able to have other people to play with, even if the 3DS is on its last legs and the servers are bound to be shut down sometime during this decade.
• Being able to wear whatever you want was what grabbed my attention so many years ago. The fact that you can have boys wearing dresses and skirts and girls wearing trousers and shirts. I always have my Mayor looking as feminine as possible (skirts, female hairstyles, and pink), and I had my ALT character sport a lot of boyish attire.

New Leaf is my favorite game in the franchise. If I ever take a break from the series altogether, this game will be the first one I come back to.

New Horizons

• Customization is completely free without any restrains. Nothing is locked, and you can change your character with no cost to your bells.
• Being able to design the island the way you want it is nice for people who don't care for the default layout they chose and want to terraform their island.

And... that's it. I haven't played much of the game to really pinpoint anything. It's a shame because I want to love the game, but I'm not even sure if I "like" it or not. I hate feeling this way, because at least with CF — there's so much that irritates me about that game, but I still find an alright game, all things considered. Eh, I might add more to my list later, who knows.

 

[oddbear]

the music is probably one of my favorite things in all the games… i can sit there and listen to the 7:00 am from animal crossing gamecube for an hour. i really like 12:00 am from new leaf too but it’s really hard to find a video of it on youtube