A Review of the Fantastic Animal Crossing Book

Animal Crossing is a franchise I missed out on. I wasn’t playing the GameCube when the first game was released, and I was focused on other things during the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS. This is part of why I was hesitant to dive into a book about the games.

I’m glad I read this book from Boss Fight Books. Kelsey did an excellent job of putting this together, blending her story of playing the game with the franchise’s history. While the book focuses on the first game, the other games are mentioned when discussing features and how the franchise has evolved over the years.

Reading this made me want to try the first Animal Crossing. Thankfully, I have it on the GameCube and can experience it, but it would be easier to play the latest release on the Switch. Bringing this up made me think about something I want to go over first.

Everything changes, but memories are always there.

If you play video games long enough, you’ll eventually see your favorite franchise change. The gameplay might get easier, the graphics will improve, and it might go in a direction you don’t like. Kelsey explains her experience with this when it comes to Animal Crossing.

This is something I’ve experienced with a different series. For me, it was how Final Fantasy quickly became something I wasn’t interested in playing. Much like Kelsey’s experience, the games didn’t feel the same anymore.

The two series are very different, but if you look at the overall trend of trying to stay relevant and attract new players, it makes sense that they will evolve. She brings this up at the end of her book and how Animal Crossing: New Horizons doesn’t feel like the earlier games.

The player has too much control over the game in New Horizons. Kelsey explains this by briefly discussing the game near the end of the book. It sounds like Nintendo brought the game closer to simulation games.

I can relate with what she is saying. Many of the franchises I grew up with have evolved and changed over the years. Some have changed for the better, and others have tried to follow a trend. It reminds me of something I told a manager once, “Change can be a good thing, but change for the sake of change rarely makes things better.

I try to remember that not every game is made for me. Making games more accessible to new players can be a good thing. While watching something you enjoy change into something unrecognizable is hard, I try to take solace in knowing that I can always go back and play what I like.

What genre is this game?

This is where the book starts. Kelsey explains how Animal Crossing was marketed as a “Communication” game, which sounds like an odd name for a genre, but how else would you describe something like this? It is a strange game that isn’t a simulation game like Harvest Moon, which might have been the closest console game to Animal Crossing I can think of at the time.

As far as I know, there wasn’t a great comparison for the game on home consoles. The Sims sounds like it could be close, but I’m unsure if that game was on the market as Animal Crossing. It was released a year earlier, but who knows if the Japanese developers knew about it while working on Animal Crossing?

Nintendo’s and even the reviewers’ struggles with marketing the game and explaining why the game was great are fascinating to me. It is right up there with explaining to a person why farming simulators are fun or why a person likes visual novels. Even now, I have no idea what genre the game falls into, and it ends up falling into the catch-all of Cozy Games.

Kelsey does a better job of explaining all of this. The things that you do in Animal Crossing don’t sound like they would be fun. It sounds like every introvert’s nightmare scenario, where you have to go out and talk to strangers and send them letters.

There is also the incentive that the game gives you to be the best citizen in your town. You can fill potholes in the road, plant flowers, and do whatever the game lets you do. You can also ignore most of the things in the game.

The first Animal Crossing is very much a sandbox. Granted, there aren’t many “toys” in the sandbox in the first game. There would be later on in the series, but in that first game, you didn’t have as many things to do.

One thing that I thought was very cool was how you can visit other towns. If you had a friend who played and saved their game in Animal Crossing, you could visit their town. Kelsey describes this experience and how different it was to visit a different player’s town.

This section led to a brief discussion on how people play the game differently. It isn’t just Animal Crossing. Everyone plays games differently, and that is part of the fun of games like this. There is no right or wrong way to play video games.

At the end of the day, I don’t remember a consensus being reached on what genre Animal Crossing falls into. There is a chance that I missed this in the book, but I don’t remember it. I think some of the games can fall into the same genre as Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, and Rune Factory.

There is a large collection of games in the Cozy Games genre. These relaxing games usually avoid combat or make it a secondary feature of the game. Not every Animal Crossing game fits nicely into this group of games, but at the end of the day, there isn’t a nice genre for them to fit into.

Origins on the N64 and Radical Changes

I didn’t know about all of Animal Crossing’s versions before the GameCube release, the N64DD, or the original idea for the game. I love reading about this stuff!

It was surprising to learn that the game was going to be an action RPG where you explore dungeons. What happened is a complicated set of circumstances that followed the eventual downfall of the N64DD. This made the game go back to the N64, and the content was seriously reworked.

There were a few versions of the game released before it was ported to the GameCube and then sent outside of Japan. This ties into the game’s marketing, as Nintendo had no idea how to market it in its final form. They weren’t even sure what genre it was.

I don’t think I can do a good enough job of explaining all of this. Kelsey does it much better than I did. I can say that I love reading about the process of coming up with characters, changing what the game was going to be about, and the changes between the different versions of the original game.

This ties into some of the issues that need to be worked out in Localization. It is also explained that the game wasn’t intended to be sent outside Japan. I found all of this fascinating, and it was one of the better parts of the book.

A Localization Story

This was my favorite part of the book. If you want to, you’ll find a lot of discourse about translations and localizations on the internet. Much of it, like many things online, is driven by outrage and people who don’t know what they’re talking about. It is refreshing to read and hear from the people who did the work explain why they made the decisions they made.

You don’t see this much anymore, but in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, there was a push to make Japanese movies, video games, and TV shows more appealing to a non-Japanese audience. This meant removing the cultural references that needed to be explained for people to understand.

Animal Crossing needed a lot of work to be brought to other markets, especially when it came to the holidays. It might surprise you, but not everyone knows about or celebrates US-centric holidays. Given that Animal Crossing wasn’t developed as a game that was going to leave Japan, the holidays are all Japanese.

You can still see some references to Japanese holidays in the game. The celebrations are different, but the iconography is still there. There was more work to do on the game, but this is a small example of what needed to be changed.

Looking at this now, I wonder if people would care about these changes. Giving stuff like this a literal translation would make the game a little nonsensical. It needed to be transliterated to work for not just the US but for other countries as well.

I always find stuff like this fascinating. Considering the long history of Japanese media being changed for a US audience, learning that the game needed to be changed isn’t that surprising. I love reading about the reasons behind the changes, and Kelsey does an excellent job of cataloging some of the more prominent changes.

Final Thoughts

I could say more about this book, but I would simply be padding out my word count. This is a fantastic book, and I enjoyed learning about a franchise I missed out on. Kelsey does a beautiful job of explaining things and tying the game into her experiences with it.

What I love about the Boss Fight Books series is how they inspire me to work on a book similar to the books they publish. This is no exception. I thought this was a wonderfully written book explaining the game’s history and connecting the author’s experiences.

This book made me want to check out the original game. Not the Japanese release on the N64 but the North American release on the GameCube. I’m sure it will be fun, even if it isn’t going to be the same as the newly released game on the Nintendo Switch.

If you liked this post, check out my review of Minesweeper. You can also buy the book from Boss Fight Books.