Nintendo DS - Animal Crossing: Wild World

Format
Nintendo DS
Publisher
Nintendo
Developer
Nintendo
Country of origin
Japan
Genre
RPG

Animal Crossing : Wild World (Spring 2006 Update)

By David Rasmussen
23rd Apr 06

We’re leaving the winter behind, and forging ahead into spring. And, as such, the snow has vanished from the lands of Animal Crossing as spring comes to the world of talking animals.
And as we take a look at Animal Crossing : Wild World, and as Spring blooms in the world, new revelations come to light.

Festivals & Holidays
First off we have an update on festivals.
It seems that, as time goes on, we realize that festivals are of the generic variety. No actual holidays are celebrated in this game. While we do have strange holidays of one kind or another, including a new holiday type (as you’ll soon see) there are no traditional holidays like in the GameCube version of Animal Crossing!

By now we should have had… what… Valentine’s Day? Maybe St. Patrick’s Day or Easter and yet none of these is happening yet (though Easter is a few days away as I write this so it might yet happen).
In place of traditional calendar holidays we have rotating special holidays, split into two categories : day holidays and week long holidays.

Day holidays are events like Yay day (day of complimenting others), LaDiDay (day of creating a new town theme song), Flea Market day (more shortly) or probably others that I have to see (or remember).
Flea Market day is unique. The night before you clean out your front room (1st floor) and you set up all the stuff you want to sell, then you host animals who come into your house and sell these items to them (but at a “discount” meaning a low price). You can sell furniture, and you can sell t-shirts. You can also sell fish and bugs, but you can’t sell carpets and wallpaper (so you might as well forget it).
This (like a good amount of events) last all day and night until the day ends at midnight, which is good since you can take advantage of a “loophole” in the game to continously sell all day long.
As you sell items to animals they’ll take stuff to the Town Hall and dump it off at the recycling bin. All you have to do is constantly check over at the recycling bin and pick up stuff the animals dumped at the Town Hall and resell them again (sometimes you end up reselling the same item to the same animal for some reason, as if they can’t remember buying it from you in the first place).

Week holidays, a new twist to the game, are events that start on a Monday and last all week.
These are mostly village competitions pitting the animals against one another in themed events, though I suppose there might be other events that I haven‘t seen yet. One event (a time of year specific event) is the Bright Lights festival. Taking place in the new year (sometime after Christmas), animals set up christmas lights all over their houses and have you “vote” for them (you place your votes with the Mayor) until the end of the week when the Mayor announces who won (by who had the most votes cast for them during the entire week). Another event is the Flower Fest. This one you have abit more control over than the Bright Lights fest, because you can plant flowers around your house and even help other animals by planting around their house until Sunday when somebody is picked as the winner. Nice, eh? I don’t know what the winner gets since I lost (Tipper beat me), but I’m sure it’s something useful… maybe it’s an award or something you can display in your house. All I know is that the award is the “Green Thumb“ award.

The Businesses of Animal Crossing
Next up is the few buildings of interest in the game.
Eventually you’ll find out that Tom Nook stores different stuff in each village, but not just the way as in the GameCube version. In this version specific furniture pieces for specific sets can only be had from certain Nook stores. This is supposed to compel you to make friends and travel from town to town, but considering how hard it is to gain the necessary “passport” (Friend Code) to travel I have to wonder what they were thinking when they made that aspect into this game.
Yes, Animal Crossing : Wild World has the most potential for being abused by others what with the system that allows people to really communicate with each other via the game, and thus opens the scary potential of children playing the game running into pedophiles in the game, but at least the makers of the game could have set aside a set of “Hub Villages” where people can meet depending on their ages (verified by Nintendo when the people submit to use the Wi-Fi Connection option of their game to go online to meet others).

Another thing is that you’ll find out that Mable (of Sable & Mable’s tailor shop) is not the only one who opens up and says more over the last version.
Eventually you’ll start hearing animals tell you that Blathers is acting odd and they want you to go visit him, which has you finding him wide awake (insomniac like) worrying about something or another. This is when he’ll tell you abit about himself and his likes, which is not something he did in the GameCube version.
Unfortunately there really isn’t anything you can do to aliviate his problems, all you can do is listen to his worries and that’s about it. Too bad, really, especially since one problem concerns Crazy Redd trying to rip off Brewster (the bird that runs The Roost, the town’s only hangout).

Another person you hear abit more from than usual is Pelly & Phyllis.
When you find them hanging out at The Roost (belly up at the bar) you’ll get abit more dialogue from them than you usually do. The best times to find them is before their shifts at the Town Hall starts.
And while you can’t meet Pete here at The Roost (though I have seen him in the air once) you can meet the annoying cat from the train, aka Rover, who is as annoying here as he is on the train. Oh, and drop by before 8PM on Saturdays and you’ll find K.K. Slider warming up for his performance that night on stage.

Upgrades
The upgrades to the house are not the same as they were before.
For instance you apparently don’t have a choice how you want to modify the house, you’ll just get told what is next on the agenda for building. The second is that you’ll have new rooms to add to your house.
First off is the upstairs second floor, but you‘ve seen this before. Next is the new rooms, taking the form of two upgrades to your first floor. These upgrades are two new rooms attached to either side of the house, and by then you’re dishing out over 700,000 bells for your upgrade payment and then you have to pay over 800,000 for the other matching first floor addition… and that’s where I am now.
Who knows? I might get upstairs additions, but I doubt it. As long as I get a basement I’ll be fine, especially since I bet they won’t be putting a statue of the four of us house owners out in front of the Town Hall anytime soon even if I pay off the last debts (but I could be wrong).
Guess you’ll have to wait for my Summer 2006 update to see what happens with this.

Random Visitors
Not much. We still have Saharah, Sow Joan, Crazy Redd (the only one that announces his presence before he arrives, like in the GameCube version), new character Lyle (who works with Crazy Redd), and that strange otter thing that replaced Gulliver. Oh, and Gracie (who now quizzes you instead of having you play a mini game, which should have been easier considering washing a car with the stylus would have been faster than rapidly beating on the A button) rounds out the guests I have seen so far.
I have seen random appearances of Pete (flying high in the sky), and a ufo (occasionally seen doing a flyby during the fall leaves sequence in the original ending credits roll in Animal Crossing (GameCube), carrying Resetti as it’s lone passenger) but that’s about it. No Wisp, no Wendell, and Kapp’n only appears to deliver you to your new village and that’s it. The game seems to have less random visitors than it’s bigger version.
Also you don’t have old residents returning to the village to visit (which was one of the things you saw in the original GameCube version). This is kind of sad since you can’t exactly up and visit these animals in their new villages, what with the whole Friend Code thing keeping you from leaving your home village.
But one new thing to this, and this is a bad thing, is that festivals tend to distrupt the appearances of these random visitors. When you have a week long event like the Flower Festival you’ll notice that nobody visits your town. Even Crazy Redd will not show up during a festival for some reason (even if you schedule a visit with Lyle). Maybe it’s because the game can only handle one thing at a time (festivals or visitor, not both).

TV
You get something you didn’t get before, actual TV programming.
While you used to have only the single image on Tvs before (which was annoying) this time out you get an actual line-up of programs. Here’s the line-up that I discovered so far…

Drama - A love story between a boy and a girl.
Action - Somebody is shooting something and a building explodes
Game Show - Some chubby guy gets the answer wrong, only for the next person (a black lady) to get the answer right.
Yellow Man - Some Yellow Power Ranger thing is running and posing.
Futbol - They’re playing a game of futbol on the tele (place names of your favorite teams in the blanks).
News/Weather - Somebody is getting their picture taken, and something which may be the traffic report or something is being talked about… and then there’s the weather. Believe it or not the weather is an accurate forecast of the day’s weather. Tune in daily to see what kind of weather your village will be receiving. And yes, if the weather report says rain it will rain on and off during the day, even if the report happens to be while the sun of blazing outside.
Talk Show - Some guy and woman talk about things and randomly speak dramatically and in unison, like a real Japanese talk show!

The Weather
Unlike the GameCube version the weather is unpredictible! It can suddenly cloud over and begin raining without warning, or you might wake up to a mist covered early morning after rainfall. This is an improvement over the generic 24 hour weather seen in the GameCube version.

Well that’s that for now! More updates on the ever changing world of Animal Crossing : Wild World in a few months when I give you the Summer update! So take care and keep on playing… is anyone really playing? Because…

Where Are My Notes In A Bottle?
I’ve been at this for months and I have not seen bottle 1 from any actual players of this game!
Now, according to the game notes, you are supposed to be able to send out messages in a bottle that’ll wash up on the shores of other villages, only I’ve been playing for nearly 4 months and so far not one bottle has surfaced! Yes, I have seen a few bottles, but these are randomly generated messages from the game’s AI and not from real people (you can tell because they’re not messages you’ll likely see from a real player)!
When will I ever see a real message in a bottle from a real player! Please somebody write me!!

Err…uh, that’s that… .sorry for the begging, I won’t do it next time… maybe. Bye.

-- David Rasmussen 23rd Apr 06

Nintendo DS Animal Crossing: Wild World Images