What got you into animal crossing?

[GothiqueBat]

What got you into animal crossing? (that lead up to playing new horizons)

For me, my dad *cough* pirated *cough* I mean magically obtained a whole load of games that i assume were either in some online bundle for kids or he picked out from best recommended onto the original DS for both me and my sister which included Wild World and was defiantly my most played game next to Super Mario Bros. It was actually really sweet of him to go to so much effort since he was a single parent and he even took the time to back up both our saves regularly / let us restart with the safety net that we could return to our old towns. Since then, he legitimately bought us Let's go to the city (aka City Folk) for the Wii and then New Leaf. I've been playing new leaf on and off since then and even spent a few months addicted to the game cube version once I found out emulators were a thing. Pocket Camp has been a weird one for me, until recently I always only had outdated phones and longed to play it, but for ages I could never really get into it and the 'leaf tickets' at first really pissed me off and made me almost hate it. However last week I reinstalled, and found its very easy to earn leaf tickets being free to play, and I'm loving the
out of it. Now, since NH was announced I've been saving up for a switch &NH but I only just saved up for new horizons from spare change/doing chores and odd jobs for neighbours and honestly didn't think I'd ever be able to get my hands on it! My boyfriend said I can use his switch to play so I'm able to play it a lot lot sooner than I thought I would,,,,, still can't quite believe it's going to be soon...

I think I only really started to understand what I was supposed to be doing- as in loans, helping villagers, events and actually reading the dialogue in New Leaf, but I have very vivid memories of playing hide and seek in the museum with my sister and our neighbor (online using the Wii speak thing) and with that neighbor we also went on holiday and all played animal crossing and a bunch of Mario games together on the DS. Fun times.

 

[Your Local Wild Child]

I got CF as a Christmas gift years ago. My parents got the game because it has animal in the name (I really love animals-it was just the same way years ago lol). Funny thing is I didn’t touch it until my sister picked up the game a while later. Since then I’ve played the entirety of the main series at least for a bit (I have the most hours on NH now)

 

[Pyoopi]

When Blockbuster still existed, my family would visit it daily to rent out movies and games. I don't remember how old I was but just being a kid, I grabbed at games that looked fun.

That happened to be the game I grabbed, the gamecube animal crossing version. I was really sad when I had to return it and I asked for it for Christmas or my birthday.

I liked WW but I never got into City Folk, and then really enjoyed acnl. It just stuck after that.

 

[TheKryptoKnight]

Nintendo Power's preview articles for the Gamecube game. I read every bit of that daily journal log over and over and over again.

 

[moo_nieu]

One of my relatives sent me the GameCube version for Christmas when I was really young. I was addicted immediately xD I’ll probably never stop playing this series

 

[Zane]

My mom bought the gamecube game for my birthday the year it was released (it came out in my birthday month actually!), I had never really heard of it but saw the commercials a couple times, the ones where they’re wearing suits to look like the characters. Anyway I’ve been helplessly hooked ever since. :P

 

[xlisapisa]

My oldest sister use to always buy me and my other siblings random games she thought we might have enjoyed and animal crossing gamecube happened to be one of those games. I believe I was in middle school when I first started playing it. It was the only animal crossing game she purchased for us, but I loved the crap out of that game and the real world parody commercials for it was always funny. I was too busy dealing with having a job and high school during the era of wild world and city folk so I didn’t play another animal crossing game until new leaf came out and I was already living on my own. It definitely brought back so many memories of my gamecube days and now here I am playing new horizons, reliving more lost childhood memories!

 

[Uffe]

I saw it in a video game magazine. I think it was IGN. There were some pictures shown inside the magazine of Animal Crossing for the GameCube, and at the time, for some reason, I was fascinated by what I saw. So like @Pyoopi mentioned, I went to Blockbuster and rented the game, only to end up getting it on Christmas. I remember the first time I rented that game. I played it for hours. Then I ended up waking up around 2 am and played it some more. Now I wish I could hook my GameCube up to something and play it again.

 

[SoftenedHearts]

My uncle (who has now passed) had a girlfriend I thought was really cool when I was a little kid (think 8ish). They drank Japanese sodas (which I was too picky to try, lol), and my uncle was HUGE into Nintendo, and video games in general, and they had this in common. She had red short straight hair and a septum piercing (maybe some others?).... and she was SUPER sweet. I was pretty shy with my uncles and their girlfriends, but the one or two times I saw her before they broke up I got along with her well!

Anyways, tangent aside, she had Wild World on her (iirc, ice blue DS Lite) DS and let me play it when I was at my uncle's house. I was blown AWAY by this game. I always liked character creation stuff, and I remember thinking the art was adorable and the fact you could change your clothes was SO cool! I mostly just ran around and shook fruit and bells out of trees.... shook down a beehive and was so scared lol, the bees in WW always gave me anxiety. I remember thinking the art was super cute, and liking the music, and it being nighttime.... I begged my mom for a copy for what felt like forever, but I was so young and it was so long ago, that I have no idea how long it actually was. Maybe a few weeks-months?

Super long and mostly full of unnecessary details, but it's a really happy memory.

 

[TaylaJade]

I was gifted a DS Lite for Christmas in 2006 and one of the first games I got for it was Wild World! I haven’t played it regularly in at least 10 yrs though. I never played City Folk or New Leaf, and hate Pocket Camp, so New Horizons has been like a long awaited homecoming for me.

 

[Xara]

my mom bought me wild world as a christmas gift one year; i’m not entirely sure what prompted her to pick that one up but, knowing her, it’s likely because it had “animal” in the title lmao. i was pretty young when i got it but i still remember bits and pieces of my first few days with it; i remember it being the first game i loaded up and how i wandered around aimlessly as my tiny little brain was confused about what to do; i remember going into a villager’s house, which just so happened to be tangy’s, making her the first villager that i ever met. i remember how i didn’t save that night because once again,, tiny little brain didn’t know what was going on lmao,, and so when i booted up the game the next morning,,, i got yelled at by mr. mole man but i wasn’t phased by it lmao; i remember him trying to politely chew me out and i was staring at the screen like friend.

bUt yeah,, that’s how it started!! i got more into it once my tiny little brain developed a bit and i wasn’t so confused + i learnt that wild world wasn’t the only instalment and so,, it kinda just went from there c’:

 

[niko@kamogawa]

I only played New Leaf and New Horizons.

I got into New Leaf because of my crush who's playing the game. After a while, I grown to like it. So it doesn't matter now if my crush plays it or not.

 

[WaileaNoRei]

My husband got a Nintendo switch during quarantine to deal with boredom. He found New Horizons when researching what games to get. I watched him start and was just kind of like ‘yes. This is the game I have always wanted to play.” It is super cheesy but it was like an epiphany. Like things I liked about Pokémon and the sims (which I loved at one point), but better. It took me another couple weeks before we caved and bought a second switch (which itself took a bit of work!) and basically I started playing and never looked back! I have 1100+ hours now and somehow I am never bored and never not looking forward to checking out my island. I’ve never played any other game on my switch

I feel weirdly cheated to have missed out on the earlier games and part of me wants to go back and try them out. I still have my old ds and 3ds. But funnily enough, I have the opposite issue everyone else does and when I read about the older games it bothers me what they are missing as compared to new horizons (which is all I know). Like crafting, I feel like I don’t want to buy everything, I really like the crafting feature. And I hear about all the NPCs and it just sounds overwhelming, like there would be too much going on! Plus I love my villagers and wonder if I would like them as much in the older games. The list goes on, but it’s mostly all nitpicky stuff along the same lines.

so anyway, my story is very recent, but it has been a major shakeup for my life because I am so obsessed. It also brought me to this forum, which has become a secondary new hobby, and also a wonderful and new experience for me ☺

 

[Nefarious]

When Toys R Us was still at it’s peak (RIP), my dad took me there to pick out games I wanted to get along side the Gamecube that Christmas. I knew I wanted Pokemon Colosseum, but I kept browsing some more and saw a copy of Animal Crossing, I love animals so much so that it caught my attention right away. Choose that as my second gift and the rest was history.

I’m very happy that they had that one copy sitting on that shelf, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t happen upon it that day. It taught me how to read on my own and not feel so lonely through the toughest years in my childhood.

 

[John Wick]

I searched for DS games in 2005 and found Wild World.

I loved it after a few days.

Wolfgang was my fourth villager and reminded me so much of my dearly departed german shepherd, that I've had him in every town, and every game since.

 

[Mad Aly]

Honestly? The cute and quirky style of the game alone is what initially drew me in. (I'm sure all of us can testify to that on some level...)
Specifically and especially with New Horizons, which is my first official Animal Crossing game, after Pocket Camp. And needless to say, New Horizons has quite a fresh and smooth new look to it that's almost irresistible to both old and new players of AC. I don't mean to sound like I'm advertising the game, haha! But seriously.

Beyond aesthetic reasons, though... The relatively simple gameplay, paired with the cozy social mechanics (like sending letters and gifts) was also hard to ignore. It's both refreshing and somehow nostalgic at the same time? That sort of combination is often found in indie games, which a "filthy casual" like myself is more taken to than anything. (I come from on-and-off gaming periods of MMORPGs, like MapleStory. Or, rather, mainly MapleStory. And then a handful of one-shot indie RPGs, especially indie/horror JRPGs, like Ib and Yume Nikki.)

So, given my not-so-impressive gaming history/background, it was only a matter of time before I quite literally dove in to ACNH. (It was also only a matter of finally -- after many, many months -- obtaining the ever-elusive Nintendo Switch.) And there you have it, folks!

 

[Crowsie]

I saw the commercial for the Gamecube game on TV when I was 10. My sister asked if that game looked fun and I gave her an enthusiastic YEAH.

When I got home from school the next day it was waiting for me.

 

[deana]

My first animal crossing game was City Folk. When my family later got a Wii I got animal crossing I think because I was hoping for something similar to harvest moon (at least in terms of *vibes* not actual game play). I didn't know anything about the game aside from what the disc case looked like so it was a very uneducated game selection. Luckily I made a good choice! Fell in love with that game. Missed out on Wild World because I didn't have a DS. Later bough ACNL for my 3DS. I dabbled in pocket camp a little bit but not a lot. And now New Horizons!

 

[Khaelis]

My introduction to the series is not a pleasant story, but it definitely helped it get better.

 

[Bugs]

My dad used to get up early on the weekend to go to carboot-sales, and sometimes he would be able to get games for me cheap there (we never bought games new) Animal Crossing for the GameCube was one of the games he found, it was exciting trying it out as I had read about it in a magazine I had (also secondhand hahah)

However I wouldn't say I really "got into it" until Wild World came out, by that point my dad figured out he could sell the games we bought cheaply at game stores for in-store credit and therefore buy new games at very low prices, so I got a DS and eventually Wild World (on release!) I loved that game I played it every day.