A happy environment where anyone can be successful, helpful to their neighbors, and do a good job decorating their homes
Controls
Controls are simple and there is no threat of dieing, so younger players can play without worry of getting into a difficult situation. The worst that can happen is getting stung by a bee, this leaves the player with a swollen mark on their face, but has no other effect.
What do you do?
Players can spend their time doing a wide variety of fun and simple tasks in town. The main list of things players can do include Running Errands for towns people, Digging Holes looking for bones, Shaking trees for fruit, Fishing, Catching Bugs, Picking Weeds, and making clothes. Players can also make the town look better by planting flowers and trees. There is also a benefit to chopping down trees sometimes.
The other cool thing you can do is donate lots of things you find in the game to the local museum. It's a cross between museum and zoo. Painting you find or buy, Dinosaur Bones you dig up, and Fish and Bugs that you catch can all be all be given to the museum. Then you can go into the museum and see all the things that have been donated by all the players.
It's All About Your House
Then there is the main goal of the game, paying off your house and decorating it. At the beginning of the game you get a house given to you, but because you have no money you go into debt. Once you pay that off you can expend the size of your house. You can eventually get an upstairs and a basement added to you house allowing for lots of expansion and decoration possibilities.
You home can be decorated with anything you want, from beds and chairs to statues and strange dancing cacti. Walls can be covered with special wall paper, and the ground can have any floor you might want.
Every month you get scored on how well decorated you home is. This is done in some obvious and not so obvious ways. Having furniture that matches is good, but there are some hidden things like where an item is placed, and what color an item is.
The Down Side
Unfortunately, there are some down sides to this great game.
Where's the Blood? Where's the Fire?
I sat my girlfriend down with this game thinking it's a good safe choice for a girl's first foray into video games. She players for about 10 minutes and then asked, "When do I get to kill something"? I immediately turned Animal Crossing off and pulled out God of War for her. There is no action or excitement in this game…you don't fight any enemies or battle huge boss monsters. So if you are looking for an action game, this is not the game for you.
Talking to Much
Speaking with the characters in towns can be tedious. There is no way to speed up dialog and so reading the same dialog from a towns person for the 10th time, with no way of quickly escaping the dialog can grate on your nerves.
You get to play when we want you to
One of the cool features they try to sell you on is actually a negative in my book. They have set the game up so that time passes in real time. So when you have finished everything there is to do, you have to turn the game off and come back tomorrow. This is an interesting concept, but I would have preferred to let me character go to sleep and then have time pass so I can keep playing when I want to play, not when they want me to play.
The biggest problem with this play model is that if you are playing with other people in your town then you can enter they game after they have played and discover there is nothing for you to do.
Also, because its based on real time, you might be a late night player and all the shops are closed and all the towns people are asleep until morning. So you can't play unless you change the clock on your game system. This is how people just ended up playing the game in the end. Here is how it works: You play the game for a while, then when you run out of things to do you turn off the game and change the system clock on your machine, and then load the game back up and keep playing. The game now things it is the next day and re-populates the town with items.
Final Rating
Animal Crossing is a fantastic game, but its not going to be good for everyone, and there are some frustrations with dialog and being forced to play on a locked clock time.
8.5
While I would give it a higher ratting, I found that the longer I played it the more frustrated I got with some of the minor problems. Also, I felt that there were some obvious things that got neglected from the original design that I found myself wanting.