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Monday:
The Review
I have a basement, and the Nintendo Gamecube controller’s Z button can turn the lights on and off. Let us consider, then: this Z button as a very, very badly placed light switch.
So I’m walking around town, and I meet a rat named Anicotti. She has a long, pointed nose, and no house. She attaches the word “cannolli” to the end of every sentence, and it makes me think of complicated pasta. It’s almost lunch time. That Charlie Brown piano jazz sounds like lunchtime. It’s raining in my Naptown, and it’s raining in Billy’s, too. Billy opens his flame umbrella and trots around town.
I stop every few steps to mash the A button, twirling Billy’s flame umbrella. There you have it: the only useless frill this game offers (aside from trapping the neighbors) the person who’s just walking around.
Right there, the inspiration hits me:
I’m going to review this game.
So Billy’s standing, right now, on the bridge over the river, the bridge that leads to Curly’s place. And I’m going to review the game a little bit. Bear with me:
When Super Mario 64 was first put on public display at kiosks at Toys R Us, the front line of N64 controllers became greasy with the hands of toddlers playing on a mercifully short time limit.
Many people didn’t even get inside the castle; those who did get inside the level hardly had time to enter a level. Most people, however, did not care. When their game cut off, when Mario screamed, “Thank-a you-a for-a playing-a-a!” they smiled, and said, “You’re damned welcome.”
Super Mario 64 thanks us for playing, every step of the way. It thanks us for being alive, thanks us for having the strength to hold the controller. It thanks us by being purely, utterly, groove-tastically joyful. It thanks us when we run around outside the castle without any purpose in mind. It thanks us for practicing our triple jumps, thanks us for climbing trees, thanks us for swimming in the moat, thanks us for wall-jumping to the roof of the castle without using the cannon. And boy, are we welcome. We don’t need some Italian Mickey Mouse telling us thank you. Even so, when he thanks us at the end of a short demo, we appreciate it, and the true gamer feels tempted to say “You’re welcome.”
Playing Animal Crossing, from its opening to its neverend, feels like being repeatedly thanked by Mario’s squeaky voice.
“Thank-a you, thank-a you, thank-a you, thank-a you, thank-a you!”
And we blush, and feel sheepish, and say: “No, no . . . really, it’s . . . it’s nothing.”
Or even, “I . . . I didn’t do anything.”
Animal Crossing is a joyous game. Perhaps too joyous -- it’s so joyous it’s devoid of violence, or goals. It is a simulator of a cartoon life you, a real person, can lead while eating vegan burritos on your sofa in soccer shorts.
“Get your own place!” it advertises. “Live by your own rules!”
Indeed. In getting your own place, and living by your own rules, you will spend much time shuffling your inventory, much time pushing ping-pong tables toward potted coconut trees, much time rotating your cabana dresser, much time mailing fossils to a museum you won’t ever see.
So you ask me, “Is Animal Crossing fun?”
And I say, “In a way.”
And you ask me, “In what way?”
And I open my mouth, and I don’t really know what to say.
I think about it for a bit, and I tell you:
“It’s as fun as cleaning your room.”
And you say, “Cleaning your room isn’t fun.”
And I shake my head, and I say:
When you’re a kid, and your mom tells you to clean your room, it’s not fun. That someone else can be so presumptuous as to tell you how to live your life.
As Animal Crossing boasts, however: Get your OWN place. Live by your OWN rules.
Playing Animal Crossing is as fun as cleaning your OWN room. It’s as fun as cleaning your room when you CHOOSE to clean your room. You pick up that jacket you never wear, and -- lo, what is this? -- it’s Bangai-O! for Dreamcast! I’ve been looking for that forever!
When you finish cleaning your room, and you put your hands on your hips and take a good look -- you feel accomplished. You feel like you feel when you finally pick up all the odd pieces of stationery on your bedroom floor in Animal Crossing, and put them into the basement you spent hours of fishing money to build.
So, you ask, again, is Animal Crossing fun?
And I say: it’s as fun as finishing a job you started of your own accord.
No one is making you play Animal Crossing (and if anyone IS making you play this game or any other games, you should rethink a few things). Though the game is, essentially, all about work and equity, it is not work you NEED to do.
Animal Crossing is as fun as running to Starbucks to get your boss coffee. Or to Blimpie, to get him a sandwich. (That bastard loved Blimpie sandwiches.) It gets you away from all the other shit you have to do, and it gives you time to yourself. Time to think about your future, your girlfriend, your college loans.
It is, in essence, a videogame, and a way to spend free time.
Except no one is telling you to do it.
The game is very thankful. It creates a cartoon world that breathes and evolves. There is much fun to be had with shovels and miscalibration of Wavebirds. Though in this world squirrels will often swipe ambiguous picture books in the middle of the night from their piggish neighbors, this is a world where the police station’s only function is as a lost and found. This world is peaceful, brightly lit, a little bizarre, and wholly escapist.
I can almost understand the popularity of this game in Japan -- a business acquaintance of mine, twenty-eight years old, had been playing the Nintendo 64 version since its release date. When I finally asked him about it, he blushed. When he sensed I was truly interested, he began to speak about his game house in a manner that suggested boasting. He’d been working on it for over a year. He still visits the town at least once a night. You wouldn’t believe how much there is to do, he said. Nintendo really has created a whole world in this game.
When asked what his wife thought of the game, he blushed again.
“She doesn’t understand it,” he said.
Living in Japan, I began to detect that people speak of videogames as frequently as they speak of animated fetish pornography -- not such a striking analogy when the basements of all the game stores in Akihabara are full of pornographic DVDs and shoulder-to-shoulder businessmen. These businessmen don’t talk to each other -- not when looking at pornography, not when bumping into one another in bars.
Thinking back on this, I realize that Animal Crossing, while silly to us Americans, is a gravely serious thing to the Japanese who played it and continue to play it. It is a game -- no, a playground -- no, a world -- where it’s okay to talk to your neighbors when you don’t need something. Where it’s okay to walk around, enter other people’s homes, lie down in their beds; the rearranging of furniture in one’s own room resembles positioning capsule-machine-bought toys atop one’s computer monitor in one’s cubicle. Except, in Animal Crossing, one has the option to upgrade one’s space.
I’d like to ask this acquaintance of mine, today, if he ever played Animal Crossing with a friend. I’m guessing he’d say no. I’m guessing he probably created a different city, so he could pick pears and plant pear trees, just as I did. Or maybe he didn’t. If he were playing the Gamecube version (which uses the system’s adjustable internal clock as opposed to the permanently set clock of the N64 cartridge), would he skip forward a few years to obtain all the goodies he couldn’t get otherwise, as I know many American kids are doing . . . right now?
Is this really what Shigeru Miyamoto wanted? Did he want kids to hack into Pokémon and come out with uber-monsters? I’m guessing not. Alas, at least the intentions were honorable:
Animal Crossing promotes talking to your neighbors -- both the ones in the game, and the ones in your real life.
I’m a little perplexed as to how it was so successful in Japan, and I honestly don’t see its American release as a “risk.” People like my fifteen-year-old brother will play it all day, every day. Maybe they’ll even have friends who play it. For the older, “hardcore” gamers such as me, maybe an internet feature would be welcome -- it sure would give me plenty more things to do. Naptown would make one HELL of a chat room.
As it stands, as a lonely, vegan-burrito-eating single-player experience, Animal Crossing holds up as a postmodern, new-school gaming experience worth your leisure time. It is, at its core, a wild revamping and fusion of the “email” feature of Front Mission 3 and the real-time clock of Pokémons Gold, Silver, and Crystal, set to the tune of an Earthbound-inspired soundtrack. In this game, you collect items that do nothing other than earn you the envy or money of your imaginary neighbors.
And there’s something sickly satisfying about it.
To put my major gripe into perspective, we have to revisit Super Mario 64. We have to revisit the stupid look that was on your face when Mario thanked you that one day in Toys R Us in September of 1996. You read impressions in magazines: “It’s such a joy to move Mario around -- you don’t even have to enter the castle.”
Though it’s been said before of Luigi’s Mansion, I’ll say it again of Animal Crossing: it’s like playing Super Mario 64, only you don’t get to enter the castle.
Or . . . no, is that right? I’m not sure.
Let’s narrow it down further: it’s like playing Super Mario 64, not getting to enter the castle, and without the joy of free movement.
Yes, that sounds right.
Moving Mario was a joy in Super Mario 64. It’s still a joy in Super Mario Sunshine. It’s a joy, yes, to roll over a fire truck or pick off cops from the casino rooftop in Grand Theft Auto III. What I’m thinking is . . . how great Animal Crossing would be, if it were a joy to move your main character around. It’s a joy to dress him in a skull shirt, sure. It’s a joy to equip him with a flame umbrella, sure. It’s a joy to do things you end up doing for no reason other than to look at it. Oh, if only there was joy that MOVED . . .
. . . Then again, I wanted full-on Mario controls for Final Fantasy X.
Tidus jump! Tidus triple jump! Tidus slide!
At least his voice isn’t . . . AS annoying as Mario’s.
Does anyone else feel me on this?
Yes?
No?
[Next: Day 7; Animal Crossing lives on]
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