starting on 10th August last year, 2023, i have been playing animal crossing wild world on my nintendo 3ds (new 2ds XL, sorry) every single day, with today being my last day. okay, few exceptions, i did not play on my 27th birthday, nor did i play on the 10th, 15th, or 24th of november, 13th, of december, 2nd of january, or 2nd of february. so admittedly that's like a week or so of days i didnt actually play on, but considering i started in August of last year and it's May now, i THINK that can be forgiven!!!!!

anyway here's the good old OLD days of animal crossing! it's not quite the good old days, because that's New Leaf, and it's not the good old OLD OLLLD days because that's Population Growing (if you want to be insane like me and call ti that)

as someone who really struggled with New Horizons i wanted to see how possible it would be for me to play Wild World, my first animal crossing game again. i wanted to play it properly, you know, i had goals of what i wanted to achieve. it wasn't maxing out absolutely everything, but rather just the stuff i was interested in. i thought that in the interest of animal crossing being a relaxing game, i shouldnt force myself to do the stuff i didnt want to do, like catch all the fish and all the bugs. so i didnt do that! i caught a lot of them when i started playing but then as the seasons changed i thought "fuck this" and stopped. delightful how you can do that! i did pay off my entire mortage though, and i got the framed photos of all my favourite villagers who moved in. i gotta say, i got LUCKY a lot of the time in this run. ACWW's town variation is surprisingly in depth and there are hundreds of different layouts you can get. there's a few where the river forks and meets the sea at two points, creating a sort of island in your village. i LOVE the island. so my first demand of ACWW was a village with an island. then it was to have cherries as my native fruit - don't ask me why. then it was to have the town hall in the northern most quarter of the map, so that the village wall was against the back of the town hall. and finally, the different functions of the town had to be seperated, as to create a town that felt liek every part of it was worth going to. i mostly got my wishes! i would've liked the museum, or my house, to have been on the island. i dubbed it "orange island" because the only fruit i let grow there were oranges. the museum and shops were a bit too close to each other, and my house was also kinda close, but it was fine... i got very lucky with who moved in too! a lot of the time in AC if you don't like your villagers you just wont talk to them, and as it turns out, the villagers are important! i got cube, coco, octavian, snake, and tangy (although not in that order), and was only missing one of the good snooty girls, like olivia or ankha (dont even think about saying anything about ankha.)

i loved talking to my villagers in this game. they're all so obsessed with food! there's clearly a random food generator baked somewhere into the game's code so that cube can be like "oh man did you try out that spaghetti gazpacho strawberry soda they mentioned on TV the otherday?" or some kind of other insane shit. and the villagers actually talk about stuff. they're not always happy, they'll be like "oh FUCK dude when were you planning on telling me that you'd be recruited into the FBI?!" and you'll just have to go along with their dellusions. makes conversations fun and memorable, and you actually get a good idea of what they're about! what's NOT fun is when tangy is like "hey I could really do with a very specific item of clothing only" and will ask you about it every day for two weeks. like jsut ask me for a fossiL! any fossil or bug! or at least the ones where it's a furniture item from a set works better. but overall i liked the villager interractions in this one. makes the most sense that when tangy asks me to deliver something to snake, she's the one to give me my reward, not snake? i dont know why they changed that in later games. the only way to get nookingtons requiring a second cartridge is fucking evil and i'm glad they took that out of the Wii-U port of the game, but also, who the fuck is playing ACWW on Wii-U, especially these days?!

the soundtrack fucks, and bells are basically worthless! easily 99% of my money only ever went onto my mortage and THEN to donating to boondox. the last three/four months of gameplay were just me logging in every day to hit the money rock and sell foreign fruit to nook for 500 bells a piece. i used my second cartridge to make about 200k every three days and it was booorrring :)
i wouldn't recommend doing this yourself!
i did also accidentally complete the fossils in my town, and that was okay too!!

weird how when i was a kid, decorating my house was so easy. even when i was like 19 and moving to wales and playing New Leaf everyday... but now i can't do it! had no interest in it. maybe it's because decorating is easier in newer titles and ACWW's is more difficult. oh yeah, turnips are worthless in this too! even with the exploit of never-dying turnips, the market just isn't worth it because of how random it is. so don't bother!

ACWW produced a lot in my head when i was a kid. i did a lot of imagining and pretending of things. i used to pretend there was a killer hiding in the cedar trees in the north side of town. i'd dress my villager up with a hockey mask or something, give him an axe, and make him chase my friends when they visited. we used to play sumo wrestling by making a 3x3 grid surrounded by pitfall seeds. and obviously in a double bed we'd make them BUMNP UGLIES IF YOU KNOW WHAT IM SAYING AWWHHYEEEAAAHAHH

special game. really special game. 399 hours logged on my 3DS, but that's not just this town. also, i would've played at least 100 hours more on a DS and DS Lite when i was a kid. long car journeys. playing before school, waiting for nooks shop to open. sharks as something rare and special. those momens with blathers and nook where they'd talk longingly about something. getting to know sable and brewster. hearing about this big city they all lived in, how it hurt them and harmed them and maybe them a little more cold. but that the small village with its flowers, its silly residents, and you, made them all better. that's animal crossing. like having pets they make you softer, i think, and maybe that's been lost with the over nicification in the newer games. idk, its not like this one isnt nice. but it says that your town, your little place, is special. and thats why it's nice. the world is wild, man, but your town is home, not just for you, but for everyone

goodnight