Create the perfect life
Addicted, like many others, to the daily rituals of visiting local stores to purchase goods, or dropping into one of the quaint houses of my anthropomorphic animal friends with gifts in hand, or simply just carrying out routine duties around town in order to pay off my mortgage, I’ve spent more time than is healthy playing Animal Crossing Wild World on Nintendo DS.Although the Animal Crossing games never end, have no real-storyline to speak off and no real purpose other than for you to exist in its virtual world working in real-time to pay off your debts by doing all sorts of - what on paper appear to be - menial tasks, it’s an addictive and proven formula that has the innate power to trigger obsessive behaviour as you seek to improve your lifestyle and your standing in the community by partaking in such trivialities as fishing trips down at the beach, digging for fossils, planting trees, picking apples, catching insects or trading and forging friendships with town-folk.
With a brand new title and a new platform to showcase it on I was firmly expecting Nintendo to pull out all the stops for Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City, taking everything that we love from the series and expanding on it to make this latest game the biggest and best in the series so far. What I wasn’t expecting was a lazy port of Wild World, with a few added features that add little to the experience, a couple of extra shops and a new and very modest, area to explore - not actually a “City” at all.
Despite the title suggesting that there’d be a metropolis to explore and do business in, it’s disappointing that the actual setting in Let’s Go To The City is the one ripped straight out of Wild World, with the same beach, pathways, gardens and buildings, alongside the same faces and identical tasks. Aside from the introduction of Wii Speak, which I’ll come to later, there’s been absolutely no evolution of the series. If you’ve played any of the Animal Crossing games before you’ll be sorely disappointed at the lack of innovation. Nevertheless, Let’s Go The City is now open to a brand new audience of Wii gamers and those who have never played a game in the series thus far will soon be sucked into its charming world where all of a sudden you’ll find yourself thinking about what’s happening in the world of Animal Crossing long after you’ve turned your console off.
