Describing Animal Crossing: City Folk’s new features, Eguchi’s face lights up and his speech quickens as he becomes more and more excited trying to explain it all. “Of course, we’ve kept in all the things that people have grown to like about Animal Crossing,” he continues, smiling widely. “The furniture series, the items, the wallpaper – and, as you’ve come to expect, we’ve also added a lot more to collect. Not only do you have new furniture series and new wallpaper to collect, thanks to WiiConnect24 new items to buy or make part of your collection will be downloaded to your Wii. The downloadable items are not already on the disc just waiting to be unlocked. They’re downloaded online to your Wii, so we genuinely will be able to add any new items that we wish to the game.”

In describing the new city location, reachable by bus from the player’s village, Eguchi is at perhaps his most joyful. “The city is sort of a shared space for you and all of your Wii friends. In the city, you can have your hair cut at Harriet’s beauty salon, but there are also new features, for example the Auction House. Gracie also has her own store, there is the Happy Room Academy office, and there’s even a theatre, where you’ll be able to catch a comedy show!”

At Harriet’s beauty salon, first seen in Animal Crossing: Wild World, players now have the ability to have a ‘makeover’ that replaces the face of the traditional Animal Crossing protagonist (usually only ever referred to as ‘boy’ or ‘girl’) with that of any Mii on their system. When we ask why Animal Crossing: City Folk doesn’t make Miis more central to the experience, Eguchi is taken aback. “Well, we could have! We just chose not to. I think that a lot of people have a familiarity, or an attachment, to the Animal Crossing main characters, so we thought that rather than limit them to having Miis as a player character, if we gave them a choice to create a Mii mask, it would give the player the chance to identify with the player character as they saw fit. Because we want the player to identify with their character. The option works better within the framework of the game, because players can say, ‘OK, today I’m going to do this and I’m going to be a Mii’, and on other days they can choose not to.”

This possible attachment to Animal Crossing’s main characters has also influenced another decision, to allow players to import their characters from Animal Crossing: Wild World into City Folk. “They’ll bring with them the ability to access all the things that they’ve unlocked in their catalogue, so it makes the move a little easier than it was from GameCube to DS.” Not as easy as you might think, though, Eguchi laughs: “You’ll still have to purchase those items again – and you won’t be able to bring your bells across with you!”

Eguchi does recognise that some players will have developed rather an attachment to their personal Miis too, however. “Players can spend all their time as their Mii,” he explains, but he’s eager to elaborate on the playful possibilities of his team’s design decision. “Something I think would be fun is to wear different Mii masks and mix it up a little bit! If you were going to visit a friend’s village maybe you could wear the mask of someone else they knew and play a prank? Or dress up as a monster Mii – as Bowser! –and give them a scare! That kind of thing will be a lot of fun, and that’s the kind of thing we want to enable.”

And the team has enabled many ways to visit other players villages, too – not just across Wii’s wi-fi capabilities. “If you want to play with your character in a friend’s town but either don’t have wi-fi or would simply like to do it on their Wii, you’ll be able to put your character on your DS, take them to your friend’s home and move them on to their Wii and visit their town that way,” Eguchi explains. “So you’re not necessarily going to have to have wi-fi to experience what Animal Crossing has to offer in terms of connectivity.”

Though connectivity is important, the coherence of the Animal Crossing world is just as important to Eguchi. “We really want to keep the Animal Crossing world its own special place,” he says. Part of the reason Miis don’t replace the protagonists is also, Eguchi tells us, the reason Nintendo has no plans to offer a Wii Animal Crossing Channel. “It’s a big game, a huge game for the system, and to try and cut off a portion of that to place in a channel, I’m not sure if that’s something we’d be interested in.”

In the same respect, other Wii features such as the Weather Channel will have no bearing on the game. “Weather patterns are not very uniform across the world, so if we included that in the game, some people would lose out on the variety of weather on offer,” Eguchi sighs. “Animal Crossing relies heavily on the feeling of the changing seasons and weather – maybe on a rainy day you’ll catch more fish – and because the game relies so heavily on these aspects, we’ve decided to not tie the game’s experience to the Weather Channel to offer everyone the chance to experience all the game has to offer.”



Players will be able to take photos within the game and transfer them to SD card or send them as letters from within the Wii Menu, but due to Animal Crossing’s status as a “special place” it’s unlikely there will be much more integration with wider Wii features than that. Despite Eguchi’s protests that this was a good example of the expansion of communication options “not only in-game, but outside the game, too,” it’s difficult not to feel that at least in some ways Animal Crossing: City Folk is a missed opportunity to realign the Wii hardware’s frontend to include an almost PlayStation Home-like experience.

“It’s definitely a possibility,” Eguchi relents. “We just haven’t chosen to do it this time. It’s certainly something to think about in future, though.”

The changes that have been made to the Animal Crossing formula for Animal Crossing: City Folk are subtle, and to some that will be a disappointment. But each change has been carefully balanced to fit the series themes – family, friendship, and community – without making Animal Crossing any less a special place. And, if you’ve yet to visit, City Folk looks likely to be the most special yet.