How Animal Crossing teaches us the benefit of having good neighbours
Animal Crossing (2004)
Animal Crossing (2004)
Just like you can never really know what your workmates are gonna be like until you’re deeply entrenched in the low-pay grind with them, it’s pretty difficult to consciously choose the neighbours you’re gonna live beside. Mind you, in this day and age you can at least go onto local neighbourhood watch pages on social media, and do a quick reconnaissance of the street or estate you plan to move into.
If there's barely any mentions of your desired area on there, then you can rest assured; your children will be able to practice the dulcimer and eat their activated almonds in peace. But if your finger gets tired scrolling through all of the reports of anti-social behaviour, then you might wanna think twice about moving in. Your home life could easily shape up like a scene from the Walking Dead.
Mind you, it's entirely possible that you've never even properly met your next-door neighbours. Certainly the ‘girl next door’ doesn’t exist anywhere near as frequently as you'd like her to, and even if she did, you’re probably a bit too close in proximity to find an ideal vantage point for perving, not that you’d do anything like that.
I now live on a street where the average age is about 65, which is fantastic. It means there’s no trouble, and it also means I won't ever have to help next door out with their DIY, because their kids will feel obliged to come up and help the old man themselves.
Of course, that logic cuts both ways; if anyone tries to bust into our house or otherwise does some sort of offence against me, my person or my SNES games, the old deafies next door won’t have heard a thing and help won’t be coming.
So, I live on Pensioner Drive. But it could be an awful lot worse. My childhood home was situated in a housing estate full of top people, don’t get me wrong, but many people from all walks of life frequently moved in and out, and this meant you’d occasionally get the Clampetts rocking up.
Sometimes it all reaches the point of ridiculousness as well. One summery day, a particularly scurvy family around the corner hired an Elvis impersonator for a birthday party, booming out The King's songs on a sound system so loud it was even drowning out the local skangers and the planes overhead.
An Elvis impersonator in a back garden party, how gauche can you get? I didn't think we were actually in the ghetto. To be fair, the man was a good old impression-er. And anyway, I couldn’t be too annoyed, because even though old Elvis was so loud he might as well have been standing in front of me, not to mention that he completely ruined my own evening, at least it’s given me a story to tell for the ages. I just wish I'd gotten an invite.
Obviously the worst thing that can happen is that you get lumbered with bottom feeder neighbours. Hearing the rows and screaming through the walls is always fun, but it’s a big price to pay for what they’ll cost you - you’ll end up avoiding them completely, not even giving them any eye contact, because they’ll always want something from you. Cut their grass once and they’ll expect you to do it forevermore, as well as take care of their bastard children, that sort of thing.
Boy, you certainly get some needy neighbours in Animal Crossing, although fortunately most of them aren’t wasters or riff-raff. Animal Crossing is much more etched in the collective consciousness these days in its New Horizons form on Switch. And if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that game brought about lockdown all by itself. But I won't knock it, at least New Horizons made that dreadful period a lot better (and 300 hours poorer) for millions of people.
I was more fascinated by the original Animal Crossing for GameCube, although that’s not quite correct - this game originally made its bow on the N64, in Japan only of course, featuring a quirk I’ve always liked of having you sign the name of your town on the cartridge label itself.
A couple of years later, this “communication” game from Nintendo (and it could only ever be by Nintendo) was ported to GameCube, with the same N64 graphics which were quite basic, but I always thought people maligned them unnecessarily - the style worked just fine for me.
Animal Crossing really was like nothing else that had come before. You could try to liken it to The Sims but you’d still be miles away. It’s not quite the same as farming games like Harvest Moon either, even though the goal, if there is any, is to make money and improve your means. Animal Crossing is just its own thing, and I’m not sure if any game has ostensibly tried to emulate it.
In truth, although I played a lot of this game back in the day, I always felt like I ought to have been doing something more productive. It was like I doing the wrong thing, that perhaps I should have been sacking it off and going out and making real friends instead.
Actually, me playing Animal Crossing did indeed coincide with a period of my life where I simply stopped going out anymore, which lasted about 18 months. I lost all my friends of course, so I had to go out and get new ones, and what a comeback story! Nowadays, as you know, I’m a social butterfly. But even in those hikikomori days, I always thought to myself that playing Animal Crossing on, say, Halloween night or the New Year's Eve countdown would be the height of sad.
Apart from those special occasions, you probably know Animal Crossing as a second life, but not in the sense of poopsocks and dungeon raids with other nerdlingers at 4 in the morning. This is a game that you can play at your own pace, or you can even indulge in a bit of time travelling if you like, preceding an absolute dressing down by that wretched mole Mr. Resetti. Otherwise you can fish, catch bugs, dig up fossils, shop for new furniture, and… not a lot else, really.
Oh, you could always speak with your neighbours - sorry, this really is a different world, isn’t it? Socialising with next door, just imagine. But the problem with the first Animal Crossing, and it still persists in the series today, is that even with 200-300 animals, there are only a scant few personality types.
This means that they each have a quite limited pool of dialogue, so even socialising with them gets rather repetitive. But then, so is speaking with people about the weather, right? I’m no use at small talk, I can’t stand any of it, but some people live for it, so who am I to tell them what makes life enjoyable?
That’s why it’s always difficult to judge a game like Animal Crossing, even more difficult than judging a street, an estate, a postcode, a city. You might think you have all the answers. You might have read what other people think and say. But only when you dip your own toes in will you fully realise what it’s like. You might think Animal Crossing is the worst use of an-hour-a-day ever, or maybe you’ll dive right in and love the world it crafts.
There’s probably no reason to play this particular one anyway, now that several sequels have come along and built not-a-lot on top. But I feel obliged to mention to any Elvisphobes out there that the Animal Crossing character named Elvis, a lion in a king’s robe who says “unn-hunh” to everyone, didn't make his debut until after this game. Do you think he does impressions...?
23 May 2023