Animal Crossing, page 9
April Fool’s Day, introduced in the US release, is a great day to hear some new dialogue, as just about everyone around town will play a prank or make a joke: Tom Nook will advertise a (fake) 90% off sale in his store, and Blathers will tell you that the most amazing scientific discovery of all time—an actual alien life-form—was just donated to the museum. Some of your neighbors will simply tell you to have fun and to be careful of pranks, and Copper, the painfully noble police dog, urges you to beware of your neighbors’ “lies and half-truths.” The dirtiest of these tricks comes from Tortimer, who first jokingly suggests that you become the town’s mayor in his place, and then gifts you a game cartridge called “Super Tortimer”—an item that, unlike the other NES cartridges, can’t actually be played. It’s purely decorative.
Spring ends on May 31, and the most immediately noticeable change is an increase in the insects around town. Summer is an extreme season in Japan—the high temperatures and humidity can be miserable, but it’s prime time for finding enormous beetles and noisy cicadas. It’s also time to break out the parasols if you don’t want your character to get a tan.
In June, the fireflies light up the village at night, and each Sunday hosts a town-wide competition to see who can catch the largest bass. An affable beaver named Chip hosts these Fishing Tourneys, measuring the fish you catch (and devouring them afterwards). Each time you present a fish that beats your previous best record for the day, he gives you a prize, with the grand prize winner receiving a trophy in the mail. My strategy was always to stock up on bass throughout the week and store them in my basement—despite getting their butts kicked week after week, my animal neighbors somehow never caught on (or noticed that I wasn’t even fishing on Sundays.)
In early July, your neighbors gather around the pond for the Fireworks Festival. Because of the camera angle in Animal Crossing, the sky is never visible, so fireworks are instead rendered as brilliant reflections in the water. Explosions of reds, greens, blues, and purples glitter on the pond’s surface, and even the grumpiest of neighbors clap and whistle as they watch. A unique track of thunderous o-daiko drums and bamboo flutes sets the scene for celebration. While I usually run around town equipped with useful tools like my fishing rod, the Fireworks Festival is an opportunity to buy items that are entirely ornamental—colorful balloons and pinwheels. Holding a balloon does nothing, and while you’re holding it, you can’t use a shovel or catch a bug. It’s an item you buy purely to feel a little bit closer to the festival experience: a digital souvenir. It’s certainly not rare for a game to give you cosmetic accessories, and it’s not all that rare for a game to give you an item that doesn’t do much—but for a game to give you a purely cosmetic, useless item that replaces a useful item? I can’t think of many examples outside Animal Crossing.
Summer also brings weeks of morning aerobics. Rajio taisō, literally “radio exercise,” is a popular recreation in Japan. Since 1928, Japan’s national radio station has broadcast morning exercise programs that people perform in unison with family, co-workers, or fellow students. It’s less widespread today than it used to be—more of a nostalgic tradition than a daily routine for anyone but the very old and the very young—but its inclusion in the world of Animal Crossing makes for a familiar pastime to its Japanese audience and an interesting recreation to everyone else. Some of the sportier neighbors attend daily and get really fired up about encouraging you to participate. The police dog Copper leads the exercises, barking words of encouragement while you use your controller to follow the music. Unfortunately, figuring out how to participate is extremely vague41, with no controller cues on the screen to reference. There’s no penalty for not performing the moves correctly, but you do look pretty silly since most of the neighbors execute the moves in flawless unity, save for the occasional slip-up where they’ll react with frantic embarrassment.
Summer winds to a close with the meteor shower, another opportunity to watch some beautiful reflections in the pond with your community. Streaks of light blitz across the water and neighbors fix their eyes skyward. “All those shooting stars really make you feel like one tiny animal in an infinitely huge cosmos,” wizened old Tortimer remarks.
The grass and trees turn from pure greens to muted yellows, and eventually to shades of dusty pink and auburn. Autumn in Animal Crossing has some of my favorite events. In early October, if you wake up early, you may find a handful of mushrooms sprouting up around town. They sell for high prices, but your neighbors know it, too, so it’s a race to see who can find them first! At Tom Nook’s store, candy lines the shelves, preparing for Halloween at the end of the month. I’ll never forget sneaking away from my mom’s real world Halloween party to attend my town’s Halloween festivities instead. I sat on the carpet fully costumed, sticky hands gripping the GameCube controller, and ran around town seeking the pumpkin-headed visitor Jack so I could trade my digital candy for exclusive Halloween furniture.
The Harvest Festival, Animal Crossing’s culturally nonpartisan version of Thanksgiving, is…actually rather dark. At the wishing well, the neighbors gather around lavish spreads of fruit (and uh, what appears to be wine—don’t tell the ESRB), but the main course is missing! Big, garnished platters sit empty on each table, although the neighbors don’t seem to mind as they chat away about table manners, thankfulness, and good food. Wander around a bit and you’ll eventually find the reason for the empty plates: an old-fashioned turkey named Franklin cowering in fear. He explains that he was invited to the village to be the Harvest Festival’s guest of honor, but that the invitation included a still legible, half-erased word under “guest”: dish. Yeah, your goofy grandpa mayor Tortimer invited a completely sentient, civilized turkey to town to murder and eat. Okay, it’s terrifyingly dark. I can’t begin to describe the implications of this. Several neighbors of mine are walking, talking birds, looking forward to eating another walking, talking bird—but even if there was no cultured-bird-on-cultured-bird cannibalism, it would still be fifty levels of f*cked up! Is this what my mom was trying to warn me about when she sent me a letter about “choosing to live with animals”?
Don’t worry—Franklin survives. And he comes back again next year after falling for the same invitation, so maybe he’s not quite as educated as I’ve given him credit for. Tortimer, on the other hand, is clearly the most horrid, twisted villain ever for trying to murder and eat the same poor turkey every year.
Finally, it’s winter, and snow starts to fall in town. Your footsteps now make a pleasant crunching sound on the fresh snow, and lonesome snowballs spring up occasionally for you to roll into huge snowmen. Your neighbors might abandon their houses for a day to camp in sloping igloos,42 softly lit by candles and a fire cooking chowder (or bubbling blocks of yakimochi in the Japanese version). Everything is serene and lovely, and we can forget all about the narrowly-avoided nightmare that was the Harvest Festival. Towards the end of December, several holidays happen in fairly quick succession. Toy Day is a McDonald’s Happy Meal of holidays, where your character’s gender determines whether you get a super sweet model car or a plain ol’ doll. Thankfully, the very next evening, a festive reindeer named Jingle shows up to dole out exclusive furniture and reward everyone for being good citizens.
Leading up to New Year’s, the town is buzzing with excitement as neighbors reflect back on their year. As the clock ticks down to midnight, there’s an explosion of fireworks, party poppers, singing, clapping, and laughing. “Happy New Year! I’ll be counting on your friendship this year, too,” says one of my grumpiest neighbors, Lobo, in a rare moment of joy. Following a celebratory tune played around the pond, New Year’s Eve is capped off with a tender rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” the traditional New Year’s song in many English-speaking parts of the world. The song is absent from the original Japanese version of the game, but it’s become a hallmark of the New Year’s celebration in Japan, too. They call the tune “Hotaru no Hikari,” (“Glow of the Firefly”), and it’s sung each year to close out the major televised New Year special.
It’s impossible to feel in a day, a week, or even a month, but as the days pass and you realize you’ve spent the better part of a year seeing the same neighbors every day, passing by the same rocks, with the shared memories of all of these events, you’ll come to feel a deep connection to your community. There’s a sense of camaraderie and belonging that can only be built through this slow, deliberate participation in a community. Animal Crossing excels in this in a way that no other media can replicate. No other media can force you to experience community bit by seemingly inconsequential bit. Sure, there are better-written characters in books and other video games. There are incredible fleshed-out worlds with deep lore and politics. But no amount of talented writing or world-building can replace the way that time and shared experiences grow one’s attachment to a community.
Jeff, an Animal Crossing content creator who goes by “JVGS” online, has kept up with his original town for well over a decade, occasionally posting blog updates or YouTube videos about what’s happening around town. “It’s like a piece of your past that you can visit at any time,” he told me via email. “You can still visit with your old friends, and they’ll still be carrying around that letter you wrote them twelve years ago. The villagers you don’t like are still around too, like annoying family members you can’t get rid of.” Seasons change and holidays come and go, but Jeff says his town and its residents haven’t changed all that much.
But eventually, something in Jeff’s town will change, because the game’s internal clock counter stops in the year 2030. Animal Crossing keeps meticulous track of holidays, making sure things could be converted from the lunar calendar to the modern solar calendar where applicable. For instance, Tsukimi, the moon-viewing festival, traditionally falls on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese calendar. Because this calendar isn’t perfectly synchronized with modern calendars, calculations have to be made to determine what day it falls on each year. “For all that, we couldn’t create the correct correspondence tables beyond 2031,” said Katsuya Eguchi in an interview with Nintendo Dream. “That was the biggest reason to stop at 2030, but more generally, we also just wanted to stop it somewhere.”
What happens when the clock stops? In the Nintendo 64 version, the game does continue counting the years into 2031, but should you ever go into the clock settings, your town will be forcefully reverted to 2030 or earlier, marching forward in time until the cartridge’s battery runs out. In the Western release of Animal Crossing on the GameCube, the countdown ends on New Year’s Eve of 2030 and…simply reverts to January 1, 2030. You’ll be stuck in a perpetual Groundhog Year until the end of time, never moving forward, which kinda seems like the opposite of the point of Animal Crossing. You know that famous adage: Time and tide wait for no man… until the year 2030.
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38 There are probably several countries and at least 20 US states that would beg to differ.
39 A ritualistic holiday to celebrate the changing of seasons and drive away any bad fortunes of the previous year.
40 The music during this event was changed between the Japanese and Western releases, though, playing a more traditional song based on Japanese folklore in the original version, and a more whimsical and sweet song overseas.
41 Participating at all was new to the GameCube releases. Although the morning aerobics were present in the Nintendo 64 version, there was no way to participate in it—you could only watch. In an interview with Famitsu, Katsuya Eguchi cites it as his favorite addition to the game.
42 Or more accurately: traditional Japanese snow domes called kamakura. In Japan, kamakuras are used in winter events and often hold shinto altars inside.
Na Me Moh, Me Mow
The first time you boot up Animal Crossing, you’re immediately introduced to the strange animal “language” of Animalese. All animals speak in a voice made up of jumbly, electronically processed sounds set to different pitches—and yet it sounds like a perfectly believable language.
“Since these are animals, there was no need to make them talk like normal humans43,” explained Taro Bando, who directed the game’s sound effects. “Maybe it wasn’t so important to know exactly what they were saying; maybe all the players needed was to know the feel and tone of what they were talking about.” Animalese mimics natural speech. There are pauses when the animal can’t quite find the words to say, and upward lilts when they ask a question. It strikes just the right chord between realistic speech and strange babbling. “That’s how we came up with their language,” Bando continues. “We actually used a unique technology that we filed a patent for!”
“I was blown away the first time I heard it. ‘Whoa, they’re really talking!’” said co-director Katsuya Eguchi in an interview. “We wanted to use something ‘sound effects-y’ for the speech, but we had no idea [the sound team] would come up with something so impressive.” All of the voicework that composes these Animalese sounds was done by “the wife of someone on the sound team,”44 and it’s simply pitched up or down for various levels of gruffness or peppiness. “They recorded 50 different sounds,” Eguchi explains. “When they’re strung together quickly like that, it sounds like speech.”
While several games, including Eguchi’s Star Fox, had used distinct synthetic noises to “voice” characters, the noises lacked the inflections and intonations to feel natural. Some games had voice samples (“It’s-a me, Mario!”) or expressive but nonverbal articulations (like the grunts, giggles, and “hyah!”s from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time), but Animalese took a more prosodic approach. It’s gibberish-adjacent, but it feels like an entire language because the rhythm and patterns share similarities to our own. You’ll likely even be able to pick out some words, especially short ones like “yes” and “good,” since the sounds are strung together programmatically based on the game’s actual text. In Animal Crossing, words are matched to basic letter sounds, so Animalese sounds different between Japanese and Western releases—the villagers are essentially speaking a strange version of English or Japanese, depending on your region!
Animalese leaves a striking first impression. This very first voice, K.K. Slider’s welcoming monologue, hints that Animal Crossing is going to be an experience equal parts strange and charming.
Taro Bando is both of these things, too. “Walking around outside recording sounds with a microphone…people might sometimes think you’re a real weirdo,” Bando says of his job, laughing. Because most of the sound effects a game like Animal Crossing needed were quite natural, ordinary sounds—things like footsteps and running water—he recorded them straight from nature. He admits there’s some awkwardness if other people are around, sometimes having to explain himself to people wondering why the heck he’s crouched in the grass with a recording device.
“Sound effects are like air,” Bando explains, echoing a similar sentiment that Shigeru Miyamoto has expressed many times. You shouldn’t notice them, but not because they’re weak. They should be so natural that it’s almost invisible. There are over 500 different sound effects in Animal Crossing, some more noticeable than others.
As the seasons change, the insects that appear both in Animal Crossing and in Japan change, too. The shrill buzzing of cicadas are loud and distracting, just as they are in real life, motivating you to either scare them away or catch them. “It was a real pain getting a recording of the cicadas,” Bando laments in a 2001 sound interview. “I actually went to the mountains in Fushimi and recorded the local insects there.” Most of the game’s sound effects probably go unnoticed, as in Bando’s air metaphor, but it’s an important layer that makes the game world feel alive. The fishing rod makes a splashing sound as it hits the water, and the bug net moves through the air with a whistling thwap! as it traps an insect. There’s an echoey heel click when your character steps on stone tile, and a knocking sound when on wood floors. In fact, Bando claims that there are at least 100 different footstep sounds in the game, which likely counts individual steps for the walk cycle on each type of terrain rather than referring to over 100 different types of surfaces characters walk on.
But like the language of Animalese, the sound details don’t always maximize realism. Some sounds border on cartoonish, like the jarring someone-slammed-their-entire-palm-on-the-piano-keys effect when a character is shocked, or the staccato chime when they have an idea. There’s a short, brightly toned string of seven notes in a minor key that you’ll somehow immediately recognize as the sound of scheming. These sounds replace the need for exaggerated facial expressions, never feeling absurd or out of place with the otherwise realistic sound design.
The realism in the ambient sounds and the exaggerated “action” or “social” sounds working together is very Animal Crossing. It’s part of the distinct personality that pops up everywhere from the visual design to the dialogue: offbeat, and yet unquestionably natural.
The game’s music falls closer to the quirky side, although it’s really pretty varied, with each of the game’s several distinct composers adding something different. The soundtrack is one of my absolute favorites—it’s timeless and easy to listen to, but full of funky surprises.
Like the other design elements of Animal Crossing, its music was a collaboration of several composers led by sound director Kazumi Totaka. One of the game’s most beloved characters, the guitar-playing dog K.K. Slider, is even modeled after him. (K.K.’s “real” name, Totakeke, has been Totaka’s nickname in real life at least as far back as 1993.45 “Totakeke” is just his name and first initial: Totaka, K.) Not only is he one of Nintendo’s most talented composers, he lives and breathes music in his life outside the company, too. You may be able to catch him at a gig jamming out a vibraphone solo with his band A Slice of Life, or performing alongside other Japanese music groups.
