Animal Crossing the Line

We should probably talk about the officially announced Animal Crossing: City Folk.

It is ‘Animal Crossing: Wild World’ with what appears to be no design advancements whatsoever. That’s nice. To be fair, there is still much to learn about ‘City Folk’. While the game appears to be nothing new both graphically and according to Nintendo’s feature set for the title, we do at least know that there is a city in the game where you can do things. We just don’t know much more about the city. Is it an online hub world where you can meet up with friends? Is it a randomly generated land like your town that is tied specifically to your game save? Nintendo claims you can “watch shows at the theater”. Is this going to be a small bit of fun like KK Slider or are we getting something more worthwhile?

I don’t like to ask so many questions, but ‘City Folk’ appears to be nothing but a Madden-esque upgrade to a fun game I’ve been playing for years already. Instead of talking more about the city aspect Nintendo’s E3 site seems content to go on an on about how your animal neighbors will miss you if you leave town for a while. That’s great, but it was a feature in the first game and unless you improved the animal AI I’m not going to be as fascinated by these animal relationships as I used to be. But hey, maybe you did improve the AI and failed to boast about it. You certainly failed to boast about anything but sales numbers this year so perhaps you simply forgot to sell me on this game because your executives were so busy breaking their legs. It turns out that you can’t swim in money, Nintendo, unless you’re Scrooge McDuck.

Aside from the city area, the only seemingly new features are the ability to wear your Mii face in game and use voice chat via WiiSpeak.