Some Other Hassle: Animal Crossing

Ever since college, I’ve completely lost the taste for Japanese games. I was condemned to live with a handful of socially bankrupt, self-proclaimed “otaku “ who spent every waking hour watching horrible Japanese cartoons in a language they couldn’t understand with the volume turned up to eleven, dropped Japanese words like “otaku,” “bishounen” and “top ramen” into everyday language whenever they could, and made a general habit of making their hobbies as unappealing as possible to everyone else. Yeah, totally not bitter or anything.

Even so, I still made time for one remarkably Japanese video game to be my guilty pleasure and general distraction (between being totally popular and dating just about every woman on campus, of course). My roommates had spoiled the overwhelming majority of Japanese culture for me, but I still had my childhood memories of Nintendo games to tell me what franchises I could continue to totally dig.

It was The Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Two, and Nintendo’s purple lunchbox had surprised the hell out of me. It was in that little-known period between Super Mario Sunshine and Metroid Prime when I went to the mall looking for something I could play to chill. I’ve even, occasionally, been known to chillax.

I came back with Animal Crossing. I cannot explain why this game had completely overtaken my common sense and much of my free time. It’s just so bizarre that I couldn’t begin to find a genre for it. It is among the most boring, infantile, tedious and obnoxious games that I have ever played, and yet, I cannot get enough. I played the game religiously for about two years.

In fact, the addiction spread. It was one of the very first video games I could get my then girlfriend (and now wife) to play, and she is even playing it right now, as I am typing this sentence. I can’t recall the events that led to this outburst, but early on in our marriage, at some point she loudly exclaimed, “All we do is play Animal Crossing and have sex!” I’m still trying to figure out how this was a bad thing. I believe that was when we had two televisions with two Gamecubes hooked up in our living room. We had it bad.

At some point, we realized with a start that spending our social time running errands for pixelated anthropomorphic raccoon slavedrivers, collecting cabana furniture for our Island house (which required a connected Gameboy Advance [sold separately] and the e-Reader attachment [also sold separately] and the collectable cards [try eBay, bitches!]) was rather sad and pathetic.

A few weeks later, the DS version came out. It threatened to ruin us again, but we were stronger. Well, the DS version had also drastically reduced a lot of the charm of ye olde Gamecube game. And so, in the grand tradition of rehashing stale old things, Nintendo brought this game from the Nintendo 64 to the Gamecube, then to the DS, and finally, to the Wii.

And since, for some stupid reason, I still own a Wii, I was compelled to purchase this game. Looking back on my relationship with Animal Crossing, I have to wonder what sort of crazy they have in the water in Japan. Not being able to adequately explain this game, I present an average day in my town, Nutley (yes, it’s a Futurama reference).