After Viva Pinata was essentially finished, I decided that my next DS game would be Animal Crossing: Wild World.  I remember really liking the original for Gamecube, so I’d been wanting to get at this one for awhile.  The game starts with your character in the back of a cab, on your way to your new home.  Through your conversation with the driver, the game lets you name your character, as well as the town that you’re traveling to.  After a few more seemingly bizarre questions, my character Chopin was dropped off in Tenuto, and I was ready to play.  Once you arrive in the town, the owner of the local store comes to present you with your mortgage.  Turns out you’ve basically mortgaged yourself into slavery, and you have to go work for Tom Nook at his store.  In addition to planting flowers around his shop, and delivering a few items, Tom asked me to go post an ad for his store on the town bulletin board.  “Attention Tenuto: Tom Nook eats babies”.  So that was fun.  After running a few errands for Tom, he fires you because he has no more work for you, and you’re left to find your own means of paying him off.  There are lots of orange trees in Tenuto, and I was able to pay off almost my whole mortgage by selling fruit, as well as some seashells that had washed up on the shore.  So in addition to being fun, this game also teaches people how lending works in the real world.

The next day, I flipped on the DS, ready to harvest enough fruit and shells to pay off the rest of my debt, only to find that Tom Nook’s store was closed.  For the entire day.  Here began my first problem with AC:WW: when I’m playing a game that I paid for, I generally expect that I will be able to play it whenever and wherever I want.  That’s just logical.  If it’s my game, I own it, and I should be able to play when I want to.  Animal Crossing disagrees.

On this particular day I wanted to play. That is why I bought the game in the first place, and that was why I had turned on the DS at that particular time.  It’s bad enough that the store has “hours” that make me unable to play late at night, but closing the store for an entire day is just pointless.  Their explanation was that the store was being renovated, but I fail to see how that would take actual time, since Animal Crossing is a GAME.  Due to this misguided lesson in patience, once my inventory was full, I had to either stop playing, or cheat and wind the DS clock ahead.  This was something that I had promised myself I wasn’t going to do this time around.  In the original Animal Crossing I fell into that trap, and in addition to precipitating a few run-ins with Mr. Resetti, it basically ruined the game for me.

Since AC:WW slapped me in the face and told me I couldn’t really play that day, I decided to spend a few minutes meeting the other inhabitants of my town.  My first encounter was with someone who looked kind of like a duck, and requested that I help him figure out his new superhero catch phrase.  I decided “Suck It!” was appropriate,  and now he says that every time I see him.  I also met a beaver/squirrel who wanted me to write her a letter.  Sadly, certain expletives aren’t allowed in this kid friendly game, so I couldn’t tell her to f-off, like I wanted to.  I discovered there are quite a few “objectionable” words and phrases that the game doesn’t allow.  I settled for “I wish you were no longer alive.  I’m watching you.  Sleep tight.”  She was delighted, and gave me a table for my house.  Yay!

In the original AC game, one of the things that stands out most in my mind is running errands for town residents.  You start the game with just a few neighbours, and over time as your town improves, more animals come to live there.  I remember spending a lot of time delivering letters for the inhabitants of my town.  I mean a LOT of time.  Any conversation started would immediately lead to being asked to carry a letter for them.  Then, when the letter was delivered, you would receive a reward, either of cash or furniture or clothes, or whatever.

AC:WW, on the other hand, is full of snobby douches who don’t want me to carry letters, or even talk to them.  When you try to start a conversation, everyone seems annoyed at the interruption, and their thinly veiled contempt for your existence is pretty apparent.  Also, these delightful town residents serve as yet another way for Nintendo to tell me when I can play.  One townie might say “Hey, we should have a fossil finding competition sometime” and then walk away.  Hey, I have an idea, how about we do that now, while I am actually playing.  Even worse is the stupid beaver girl who wants to make dates with me all the time.  After suggesting a get-together, she prompts you with a clock to decide on a time for your meeting.  You have to choose a time that is at least two whole hours after the current time, or she says that she’s not free yet, pick another time.  Excuse me DS, but I believe that I own you, and you cannot tell me that I have to be back in two hours to play.  I’ve had to break dates with this girl three times already, and every time she’s a little bit bitchier about it.  I get my revenge by sending threatening and/or insulting letters to everyone, and ripping up and selling any flowers that they plant outside their houses.

Ridiculous time wasting aside, I have two other main beefs with AC:WW.  Number one is the use of the DS.  I don’t know if they originally made this to be a GBA game, and then switched over to the DS halfway through development, but that’s what it feels like.  Want to know what the top screen is used for?  It shows you the sky.  Occasionally there are clouds, but most of the time it’s just a solid colour.  Wow,  way to utilize your own technology Nintendo.  As an afterthought, a couple times per day a balloon will float across the sky, and you can shoot it with a slingshot to get it to drop something.  So if you happen to be staring at the solid coloured screen where nothing is happening, you might get a reward.  (Interesting fact: The first time I saw a completely clear sky in the middle of the day, I instinctively thought that something was broken.)

In addition to not using the dual screens, the stylus is also ill-served in this game.  It is almost impossible to move furniture around in your house without resorting to the d-pad, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to hit A to cast my fishing rod, because tapping the stylus was just making me walk instead of cast.  These are things that I might overlook, except that this is a first party title, and there’s no reason that it shouldn’t be flawless.

Other than poor use of the DS, my other complaint is the inventory system.  You only have 15 inventory spots, and most of those are used up by carring equipment that you need to have all the time, like your shovel and fishing rod and bug catching net.  So not only are they filling up spots that I would rather use for sellable items, but you have to be careful not to sell them accidentally when unloading at Tom Nook’s.  I try to keep these no-sell items in the first row of my inventory, but if I am carrying my fishing rod, and then catch a fish, and then unequip the rod, it goes into the slot after the fish.  If I had designed this game, there would be a separate inventory space for these permanent items, with just the right number of slots for every piece of equipment you can have.  In addition to that, I would have put the inventory on the top screen instead of the stupid sky so that I don’t have to click to it when I’m not sure if I have more room or not.

Of course, I also wouldn’t have filled my town with assholes, and designed the game around preventing people from playing.  So I’m obviously not on the same page as Nintendo on this one.

Fans of angry Julie posts, rejoice!