Animal Crossing, page 6
Basic, but timeless. It was mostly forgiven for its sin of forgoing console-generation-busting realism in favor of simplistic charm, unlike the infamous internet-wide meltdown that followed the announcement of the cutesy cell-shaded The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker a year later. “Despite the low-res textures […] Animal Crossing is actually a very pleasant game to look at,” reads the game’s review for IGN. “The vibrant colors and the cute and often humorous animal designs really make the game come to life.”
The game’s designers wanted to avoid making the graphics “too fancy,” as they put it. It was supposed to appeal to a wider variety of people, including those who weren’t as familiar with video games. Anything too complex or dark would be a turn-off for a casual audience, so the style needed to be bold, friendly, and somewhat simplistic.
The style of Animal Crossing’s world is not exactly consistent, though. There is far more realism in the fish, insects, and furniture than in the characters or the ground textures, giving the game a disjointed yet whimsical look.
The Animal Crossing team definitely wanted to keep things cute. Cute, but…with something just slightly unsettling about it. Your character has big eyes, but they’re kind of soulless and doll-like. Your face is frozen in a near-permanent smile, and your nose is a bit like a scarecrow’s. A Japanese journalist called it doku o motsu kawaii—literally “poison-y cute.”
Character designer Noriko Ikegawa may have drawn some of this inspiration from the adorably creepy 3D animated TV program Gregory Horror Show26. “That’s what I think is cute at the moment,” she remarked in an interview about the game’s design. The show, which features blocky anthropomorphic creatures often carrying axes or giant syringes, is more explicitly scary than Animal Crossing, but the chibi-like proportions, doll eyes, and bold colors evoke a similar feeling.
Some characters certainly feel weirder than others. There’s a dog villager entirely wrapped in bandages like a mummy, and a green robotic ostrich. There are also rosy-cheeked bunnies and friendly, scarf-wearing sheep. The tone is all over the place from unsettling to adorable, which keeps things interesting. Even though the villagers are only split into a handful of personality archetypes, their designs help us to project a little extra subconscious personality into them. Derwin and Joey are both ducks with identical personality types, but they look so different: Derwin has dorky glasses and a shock of messy hair, while Joey wears a sporty shirt and a sumo cloth. Even though his dialogue will end up similar to anything Joey says, Derwin somehow seems nerdier and more socially awkward. There’s just so much personality in his physical design that one can’t help but interpret it uniquely.
The variety in designs is one of the ways people seem to deeply connect with Animal Crossing. They get attached to the animal neighbors they find the cutest, or who feel like they have the most compatible personality and aesthetic. Having so many distinct characters, each with their own interesting style, helps make up for the fact that there are literally only six possible villager personalities. While there is a ton of dialogue in the game, you’ll still definitely hear your two “peppy” neighbors echo each other’s lines. They’re functionally identical except for their appearance, and yet you’ll interpret them differently.
The consequence of this is that as people naturally gravitate towards villagers they find aesthetically pleasing, they may also push away the “ugly.” Any Animal Crossing fan can tell you who their least favorite villagers are, and most of the time they’ve earned that spot because…players don’t like the way they look.
I’m not particularly a fan of pigs. I mean, I don’t hate them or anything. They’re not doing anything wrong, sitting around being pigs. Other people like pigs, so who am I to judge? If you have a pig, I’m sure it’s great and I hope it makes you very happy. Go pigs.
But this is Animal Crossing, and I do not like the pigs. There are only so many villagers you can have in your town at once, and when it comes down to it, people just don’t want to have neighbors they don’t like seeing around. Only unlike the real world, where we are (hopefully) judging our neighbors by the content of their character, in Animal Crossing we sometimes instead judge their entire worth on whether or not we enjoy what they look like.
…Kind of messed up, right? It’s not just me, though, I swear. A college professor of mine once told me she hates the goats in Animal Crossing because “they look like they’ve been punched in the face.” She does not extend this sentiment to real goats, and I presume she does not hate people in the real world who look like they’ve been punched in the face, but she just doesn’t want to see goats in her town. This is a phenomenon shared by Animal Crossing fans, and I can’t really explain it in a way that doesn’t make us sound like psychopaths.
It’s all by design, though. The team intentionally created an enormous variety of designs, aesthetics, and styles so that there would (theoretically) be something that resonates and something that conflicts with each player. Some people love the intentionally jarring designs of villagers like Rasher, the wicked scar-faced pig,27 and abhor the overly cute animals, while others prefer sticky-sweet neighbors like Bunnie, the sparkly-eyed rabbit, and can’t stand the more aggressive-looking animals. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what your preference is because you’re not in charge. Villagers you hate could move in at any time. Villagers you adore could move out. They all have just as much of a right to exist in your community as you do, and no amount of bullying them can change that. Who knows, maybe you’ll even learn to make friends with a pig.
“There are people in your real life that you like and some that you don’t like,” explained Katsuya Eguchi in an interview with Game Developer. “People look different, so all of the characters in the game are created to look different.” This wide breadth of styles not only shows off the impressive creative chops of Animal Crossing’s designers, it also accurately reflects the diverse audience playing the game.
Then again, if you look too closely at the design choices in Animal Crossing, it starts to get WEIRD. Having anthropomorphic animal neighbors is an easy enough to accept concept, even if they don’t wear pants, but I still haven’t quite figured out how to parse characters like Coco, who looks like a partially hollowed-out coconut on a rabbit’s body, or Sprocket, a robot ostrich. They seem just as sentient as any of the “real” animals and no one ever questions their autonomy, so I guess we’re meant to assume that they’re not any different. Why is it, though, that there are octopus villagers, but squids are just regular squids (that your octopus neighbors might actually request to keep in a fish tank in their house)? Why are there both bird villagers and a birdcage item that houses a much smaller, non-anthropomorphic bird?
You might even get a letter from your in-game mom expressing confusion about why you’ve “chosen to live with animals” and closing with, “Don’t they smell?” Your mom seems to think the whole situation is abnormal, but we don’t really know anything about her—all she ever does is send letters, and we never get the chance to visit her or have her visit us. Maybe she’s a weird animal racist on the wrong side of history, and anthropomorphic animals are a fully integrated part of society at large. Or maybe you’re the trailblazer, choosing to befriend animals before the rest of the human world has accepted it. I’m at least 90% sure we’re not meant to think this hard about it. …Unless we are, and crafting your own headcanon from the weirdness is yet another part of the game’s charm.
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26 Gregory Horror Show would later get its own video game for the PlayStation 2 in Japan and Europe.
27 Who, at least according to a Famitsu article, is based on Katsuya Eguchi’s angry side.
Where YOU Are the Famous Fashion Designer!
There is a 735-page Japanese “guidebook” for Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer28. That’s five pages longer than James Joyce’s Ulysses, the most infamous of books that are too long to read. I have it. (The guidebook, not Ulysses.)
The first 23 pages of the guidebook are an introduction to the game and its controls: Everything else is just pages and pages of furniture, clothes, and mock room layouts. I love this book. I think this book made me understand why people love those cheesy home decorating shows. It’s a design inspiration book, but rather than being limited to trendy “open concept” kitchens, “cozy nooks,” and “man caves,” it highlights the Animal Crossing series’ strength as a place for really exploring creative freedom. Some of these rooms look like a hair salon, an overgrown jungle, or the lair of a mad scientist. There are movie sets, indoor bus stops, soccer fields, and ancient Egyptian palaces. Only a fraction of the rooms in this book look like they could be a part of someone’s real house.
For the more recent Animal Crossing titles and spin-offs, the creative possibilities have never been better. The coffee shop I struggled to make look right in my first town now has several types of hot drinks, coffee makers, signboards, and seating. The game’s item list has ballooned to a ridiculous scope, but it was already impressive from the start.
It would have been easy for the original game’s designers to just make a lot of traditional furniture. They did—there are several sets that are quite simple, like “green furniture” and black-and-gray “modern furniture”—but the designers understood from the start that the players’ creativity would go deeper than creating nice, livable spaces. In fact, normal furniture was almost an afterthought, as the designers taped wacky ideas like lunar rovers and frog-faced chairs to a whiteboard in the middle of the room. “The idea board was so funny,” recalled character designer Noriko Ikegawa. “It had no ordinary furniture at all!”
“But the important thing was, even with such silly ideas, there was a chance to express them every day. Even if [an idea] was off the wall, you’d just say it anyway,” said designer Toki Iida. “It could be surprisingly interesting, and when you get some kind of reaction, it’s easier to be talkative and keep sharing more and more ideas.”
The developers working on Animal Crossing were all encouraged to suggest whatever items they wanted. This wasn’t just limited to team members in design roles, either: Everyone could contribute, and some ideas for furniture even came from outside of the project team entirely.
“Having a large variety of furnishings was very important to us, so we didn’t have too many rejects,” co-director Katsuya Eguchi explained. The result was what seemed like an endless catalog of furniture, full of creative possibilities.
Customization is a huge motivator for players of so many different types of games. Even in single-player games there are often purchasable costume packs, while games like Fortnite make a killing off of selling virtual outfits that have no bearing on the actual gameplay. But the avatars of Animal Crossing are probably the least customizable part of the game.
When you begin your Animal Crossing journey, it’s from a first-person point of view—nearly the only time the game is ever shown from that angle.29 There’s no character customizer. Your appearance is based entirely on how you respond to your seatmate, an intrusive cat named Rover’s many questions. In the first game, there’s absolutely nothing you can change about this appearance except your clothing, so if you don’t like the face that steps off the train, you’ll have to reset and try a different set of answers. For the female avatar, if you answer everything sweetly and politely (even in the face of being asked, “You aren’t a psycho, right?”), you come out looking like a sugar-plum cupcake fairy princess doll—your avatar will have gigantic, twinkling eyes and pink hair. On the other hand, if you answer everything rudely, your avatar is given lazy, half-closed eyes, punkish blue hair, and a devil-may-care smile.
There are only eight visual outcomes for each gender, and they all have the same light skin tone. Fair enough, maybe, for a game that didn’t initially intend to be released outside of Japan, but after the first game, the decision not to include any other skin tones raised some eyebrows. Not until the spin-off games in the late 2010s, like Happy Home Designer and Pocket Camp, did any true avatar customization become available, allowing a choice of hairstyle, color, and eye shape. This was also the first time you could choose a skin color other than light, unless you count the very unsettling addition of “Mii-face30” that you could give your avatar in the games Animal Crossing: City Folk and Animal Crossing: New Leaf. (It’s exactly what it sounds like—you could replace your avatar’s cute, doll-like face with any Mii design you had saved to your device. And yes, it looked very out of place.)
It’s odd that in a game brimming with customization elements and the means to share them, your avatar was not more personalizable. I can somewhat appreciate that you can’t choose your eye shape or eye color: It’s another one of the ways the game subtly suggests that you accept your lot in life and focus on the things you can change, like your clothes and your personal surroundings. Animal Crossing avatars are quirky, disproportionate caricatures anyways—they’re not meant to look exactly like you. But shouldn’t they still approximate you? For some, the disconnect between their avatar’s pale skin and their own dark skin led them to spend extra time and effort “tanning” their character by spending time outdoors in the summer or on the island year round. Tanning in Animal Crossing is time-consuming and temporary, and yet it was the only “remedy” available in the series for over a decade.
Other types of personalization were implemented fairly quickly, though. The mandatory strange hats went away in subsequent installments of the series, replaced by a plethora of (optional) headgear and other hats. A hairdresser, the perky but blunt poodle Harriet, could be unlocked in later games to change your hairstyle and color, and then was put out of a job by a regular old mirror in Animal Crossing: New Horizons that can change your appearance on a whim, free of charge. Shoe color—and then eventually your shoe style, socks, and full outfit—could all be changed as the series moved away from the chibi-like look. Characters in newer games would have bodies long enough to show off anything from skirts with leggings to shorts and sandals.
At the very least, the clothing options in the first Animal Crossing are plentiful. There are cute fruit patterns, grungy-looking t-shirts, and cozy sweaters—all kinds of ways to change up your style. There’s also a dark spot or two, like the “Tomato Juice Shirt” that ultimately got scrubbed from overseas releases. Why? Well, aside from looking like a blood-stained white shirt, it was also apparently literally a blood-stained shirt. Designer Michiho Hayashi said so herself, speaking about her love of horror manga artist Kazuo Umezu in an interview.
Even without real character customization, you can still use clothing to express yourself and even confer status. Clothes received from the famous fashionista Gracie—a stuck-up giraffe who occasionally shows up in town to insult you and make you wash her car—are difficult to collect and therefore cool to flaunt. There’s also the option to design your own clothes at the Able Sisters tailor shop using a big pixel grid to draw. You may even find that some of your neighbors start wearing your designs, too.
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But the design and direction are so much more than just what the game looks like—it’s how you interact with it. Your play style is unique to you, and your choices matter. If you cut down a tree it won’t grow back. If you destroy flowers they’re gone forever. No one will pick up the trash you leave lying around town (although they might comment on it)—it’s your life and your responsibility. In other games, the towns you visit are little more than a backdrop frozen in time. You’ll see the same glassy-eyed NPCs wandering aimlessly back and forth on one path, never reacting even as you sprint circles around them or barge into their cookie-cutter homes. No one ever moves out or moves in, and time doesn’t pass. The problem is not that it’s not realistic, it’s that it’s not believable. A lot of games, especially at the time of Animal Crossing’s release, simply don’t succeed in making their settings feel like they really exist. They’re just a series of places you pass through on your journey—plot points rather than real towns.
That’s fine for most genres! It’s probably even the right choice for most games, in order to keep your attention focused on the story or the action, but it wouldn’t work for Animal Crossing. All of the tiny details are what make people subconsciously find their village life meaningful. It’s not a backdrop for fishing or for some plot point—it’s a living, breathing community.
That part of the game’s design expands to a more individual level, too. This isn’t SimCity, so it’s not like you can make every decision about your town or move its buildings around, but you can make a lot of changes to suit your personal style. You can paint the roof of your house pink, plant an orchard of cherry trees, and fill the town with flowers. You can also plant pitfall traps to prank your neighbors, fill your house with dinosaur bones, and design your town’s flag to look like a bleeding heart. You can make things weird, or you can make things beautiful—and your town takes on some of your personality. You’ve got a say in Animal Crossing’s design, too. You may not be the designer, but you are a designer.
Katsuya Eguchi sees customization as a motivational tool. “Customization is the key to making players want to play daily,” he said at a GDC talk. “There’s a secret behind this. Players want a feeling of satisfaction, but if we give it to them, that’s the end of it, and we’re done.” It’s a part of the game that is constantly in flux—players inch closer and closer to their customization goals by picking up new furniture and clothes, but it’s not something that can be easily finished. The goalposts shift. The internal monologue moves from “If I could just get that last piece of this furniture set, I’ll be happy,” to “If I could just get this rare wallpaper, I’ll be happy,” and beyond, making players return to the game day after day.
