Animal Crossing: Wild World Review - DS

Animal Crossing: Wild World is a life simulation game for the DS, and the second Animal Crossing in the series released in Europe, being on GameCube before now, and eventually having the third iteration released on the Wii. It was released in 2005, but I forget when I purchased it.

StoryMan, this is hard. Animal Crossing’s story is very limited, what with it being a life simulation game. You could either see that it has a continual story, evolving as your village goes on, or that the story essentially ends once you’ve finished paying off the loan on your house. I choose to view it as the latter. Once you move in to the town and create a character you are given a house, which you have to pay off and expand as the game goes on.

Gameplay

The controls are absolutely sound for a DS game, but the gameplay element depends on what game you want to play. I use it as a “collection game” as there’s tons of stuff to collect ranging from fossils to t-shirts and there’s also great rare items that may take you years to amass as well as bugs and fish that appear and change monthly. You can also visit other people’s towns to trade villagers and things, which is always good fun to do.

Graphics

I can’t knock the graphics, they’re very similar to the GameCube version but I suppose they could have made certain elements better.

Soundtrack

There’s not much of a soundtrack to speak of. You decide the town tune, and there’s little stings of music here and there, but the main attraction is K.K Slider, who performs many songs on a Sunday night at the town’s coffee shop. You get to keep these songs and play them on your CD Player/cassette box/stereo in your home provided you’ve purchased one.

Replayability

Let’s see, it’s 2009 and I’m still playing this in spots. The community behind it is great and collecting all of the items takes a damn long time, it just depends on whether you can bothered to play at least every other day for a bit to keep your town in good shape.

Story: 3.2/10
Gameplay: 6.3/10
Graphics: 5.5/10
Soundtrack: 7/10
Replayability: 8.7/10

61.40%

• 0 – 19% Unplayable - why the hell did I even buy this?
• 20 – 49% Poor – Certain elements of the game hold it back
• 50 – 69% Average – More good than bad, but you might need to be a fan to really get in to it.
• 70 – 84% Good – A nice franchise or single game, that just misses out on being great because of a few flaws.
• 85 – 89% Excellent – You could play this for ages and be happy
• 90 – 100% Fucking Excellent – You should have this game and play it every single day.

Want me to review a game? Comment and let me know and I’ll see what I can do.