City Folk is great but it is an undeniably lazy effort
For those who are not familiar with the game, Animal Crossing takes you to a virtual world where there are plenty of things to do. You start by moving into a village where you meet a Tom Nook, a Raccoon that is the local businessman. He proceeds to sell you one of the four houses available on the village until he discovers you do not have enough money to pay for your house, so he makes you his assistant on the local store for a day.
This assistant job serves as a tutorial to show you the vast possibilities the game has. Animal Crossing is one of those endless games with really high replay value, which will last for as long as you want it to. While living your life you can buy furniture to make your house look great, fish, catch some bugs, dig up fossils, interact with the villagers, plant different kinds of fruit and help villagers with some errands and much more.
Your virtual world will interact directly with your Wii internal clock, which means that if it is 7 pm in real life the same will happen to your village. This brings a lot of variety to the gameplay as there are events, and other secret happenings that only occur at a certain day, at a certain time. As the seasons change your village's environment is affected and the fish and bugs that can be caught also change. This makes the game a long lasting experience that could take over a year to be fully enjoyed.
Your village has four major buildings: Tom Nook's store, where you buy and sell things, the Museum, where you donate bugs, fish, fossils and paintings to fill a huge collection of exhibits, the Town Hall, where you can pay your debt with Nook to get house expansions, send letters to villagers or make donations for new constructions around town, and the Able Sisters which run a clothing store.
As you can see there are indeed many different things to do around town which is absolutely fantastic but there is a major problem though. Those activities are exactly the same previous versions of the game presented, sadly Nintendo was lazy enough not to change anything about it. Everything is the same the fish you catch, the bugs you see, the fruit you plant, the sets of furniture you can purchase even the game's presentation.
Even though I do agree that the game's graphical art fits it pretty well it is hard to be satisfied with no changes at all in this aspect. The Wii's hardware is powerful enough to improve the visuals which are exactly the same as the DS version, with better frame rate and less grainy visuals. The same applies to the sound effects and music that even though are quite nice are still being reused. The developers could have easily enhanced the graphics while keeping the game's atmosphere and original art intact, but the lazy approach becomes quite clear once you turn on the game.
The "big change" on this version appears on its title, the so called City. On City Folk you can catch a bus on your town and head to a square that is away from your village. There you will find Crazy Redd's shop - ran by a fox that sells suspicious merchandise at a very high price - the Happy Room Academy – an institution that gives you points based on how well organized your house is – a theater – where a crazy character teaches you facial expressions to show your emotions – Gracie Grace – a fancy store with very expensive clothes and furniture – the auction house – where you can put some of your items up for auction – a saloon – where you can get a haircut or make your human character look like a selected Mii – and a fortune teller.
The City may seem like a very nice feature at first, but truth is all the buildings and stores found in the area were already present on past versions of the game. What the city does is simply gather all those buildings – which indeed add a lot of new possibilities – around a square with a fountain.
Even the online aspect of the game is basically the same as it was on the Nintendo DS version. You can exchange Friend Codes with other people so that they can either visit you or you can go to their town, there is a limit of three visitors per village though. Visiting other people and noticing how two villages can be completely different from each other is a very nice experience.
While visiting you can either communicate by using the cursor to slowly type your message on a keyboard-like input, or you can make use of Wii Speak which is the microphone that comes bundled with the game. Wii Speak works incredibly well and it captures sound effectively, it is perhaps the only major improvement that can be found in the game. What is annoying about the device though is that it will sometimes capture other sounds other than the player's voice and make communication a little bit confusing, but other than those rare moments it works very well.
After visiting another town some nice interactions between two different villages can be triggered. For example, the items displayed at your auction house will appear on your friend's City. There is also a female cat that will appear on the village telling you that she lost her daughter on the village you just went to. So one can say Nintendo did work on improving some small aspects of online interaction.
The final verdict on City Folk is that it is a fantastic game if you have never played any title of the series. The game has lots of depth and options, with great dialogue, amazing humor, many activities to do, special visitors, special events and a huge replay value that is really hard to be matched nowadays. Unfortunately if you have already tried any of the past games you have already seen everything this game has to offer and there will be no surprises here, still you may end up enjoying the game.