If you haven't played an Animal Crossing game, you should go play one. New Leaf is probably the best one and I recommend it. Wild World and City Folk (with the Deluxe patch) are also very solid and still hold up as well.

I'll always vouch for GCN though, and that has a neat Deluxe patch too.

I dunno. It's just odd to have watched this series change over the last twenty years, and I'm not really happy with where it's at currently, which sucks because it is a series that's been with me since I really started playing video games.

This thread is a whole lotta nothin' lmao

trend I dislike the newer Zeldas. It became more about decorating your island, making it pristine to show off to others, rather than... A virtual town that is fun to just hang out in with your villagers.

And don't fucking get me started on crafting.

While I felt WW sacrificed a lot of the small things to create a better framework that would lead to the franchise's best entry, I can't say NH has ever evoked that same feeling. The simulation element is probably more absent here than it's ever been - instead, NH adopted that "make your own fun" --

And it's really odd to me that after reaching a """perfect""" Animal Crossing game, they felt the need to try and reinvent themselves for NH.

I guess it's to appeal to a new audience, or maybe it's because they didn't want a repeat of City Folk, but it's odd to me they didn't just make more NL.

Honestly though, despite me missing a lot of the oddities and weird stuff that was left on the cutting room floor, I think Animal Crossing generally became a much better series from Wild World onward. I don't think it's a controversial opinion to say New Leaf is the peak of the franchise.

But it was the shift away from that tightly packed experience that I think made me realize the series was probably never going to go back to the direction it was taking back in DnM/GCN.

I dunno! It's weird to think about how different just the first generation of AC is compared to even WW.

I remember booting up Wild World for the first time and being in shock for how much bigger the town felt, which was crazy on DS hardware, but in another sense, I do remember it feeling kind of... Barren.

That isn't to say it WAS barren, hell, I think WW generally had way more to do than GCN.

But also a lot of those things I mentioned earlier were also heavily changed or outright removed, and the change from the acre/grid system to the rolling log system always made the game feel less... Compact, for a lack of a better term.

Anyways, I've always found it interesting that in pursuit of "perfecting" the formula, Nintendo has always been tweaking and sanding down certain aspects in the subsequent games.

Rude villagers got basically nuked in the transition to Wild World, which everyone always talks about.

Honestly, I just started a new town (using Deluxe rather than base game, though) and I am genuinely surprised how much of the core experience still holds up, and it's kind of reaffirming that this is my favorite one in the series.

It's a game much smaller in scope than what came after, but it still amazes me how much life is packed into it. At the time, I really hadn't played anything else like it. I hate to use "cozy" to refer to my experience... But honestly that's how I can best describe it. It's cozy, relaxing, and homey.

There's a lot of little things I love in this game - personal Gyroids outside your house, the town dump, searching for the money rock and buried money, how much personality villagers have, getting statues for paying off your house, all the neat Nintendo items, aerobics in the town plaza, etc.

GameCube/Population Growing has, and probably will always be my favorite entry in the series, and I'm more than willing to admit nostalgia plays a factor in this - almost all of my memories and time playing it were from when I was incredibly young, and before Wild World even came out.

amiibo festival sucks but it's a gimmicky one off game trapped on the wii u and can ultimately be forgotten about

new horizons sucks because it sanded down whatever sim complexities were left from new leaf to make room for being able to turn your island into an interactive diorama