My Animal Crossing wish: can we have the grid system back?
Animal Crossing is, like Tetris, a game that is constantly evolving in quiet ways while seeming - superficially and to outsiders - to be a game that never changes at all. Holding a piece, the instant drop, even the number of pieces visibly queued up ahead: these are all elements that have fundamentally changed the way Tetris plays. Equally, in Animal Crossing a new type of store, a new focus for your collecting, a subtle tweaking to the economy can transform the overall experience of living in a village and trying to get Spike to come back home.
And no change, I would argue, has been as important as an alteration to the camera. It's a change that's clearly stuck. People love it. I loved it at first. Now I want it to go away, though. I want things back the way they were. When Animal Crossing Switch is finally upon us, this is my wish. My Animal Crossing Wish, placed in a bottle and dropped into the surf. (And while we're wishing, would it kill Spike to come visit some time, or at least send a letter?)
It's all Wild World's fault. Wild World! Here was the Animal Crossing I had spent hundreds of hours on when it lived on my Gamecube, but now I could take it with me wherever I went. But it had changed! The Gamecube Animal Crossing is a world you look down upon. You hover in the sky and the world is spread out below you, and it's divided into little squares, each with their own coordinates. These squares are bigger than the screen of your television, but you still can still tell as you move between them because the camera snaps over some kind of elastic boundary and you feel, in a subtle, almost intangible way, that you are somewhere new.
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