Animal Crossing: City Folk, now available on the Nintendo Wii (were you expecting Xbox 360?) may well be the most absurd game I’ve ever played. And considering not so long ago I was writing about a game called You Have To Defecate Upon King Bhumibol, that’s saying a LOT.
As for the plot, you play a random traveler on his way to a certain city that’s populated entirely by cheerful anthropomorphic animals despite the fact that your character is clearly human. Those of you wondering if your avatar is, in fact, some kind of closet furry join me in wondering the exact same thing. Your new town is admittedly rather small and quaint, but boasts a clothing shop, a museum, a bus station, and a general store run by everybody’s favorite loan shark / raccoon, Tom Nook. A word about Tom Nook–he operates the general store Nook’s Cranny (ba DUM bum!) and will give you your first home loan to purchase a place in the small town. He will then offer you a job in Nook’s Cranny to get you started paying down your debt, but he’ll promptly fire you after one day with a huge amount in mortgage left. At least I think that’s the currency of choice there; I’m a little spacey on that detail. Anyway, the good news is that Nook’s Cranny deals in pretty much EVERY ITEM KNOWN TO MAN OR ANTHROPOMORPHIC ANIMAL, and thus, you’ll be able to sell Nook any random piece of garbage you find anywhere to pay down your house debt, despite the fact that he could literally stay within sight of his shop and get the exact same thing himself for free.
Seriously–it’s actually quite possible to pay off a home loan in Animal Crossing City Folk with cherries you find on public trees. No wonder Tom Nook’s a loan shark–people can pay him off with shiny rocks and sticks they found on the ground and he’s required by some kind of law to take them. He’s got to charge ridiculous fees just to keep ahead of the deflationary curve! If I went down to MY bank and asked if they take cherries on a mortgage payment they’d probably have me arrested. Or shot. Possibly both!
This game is just the epoch of absurdity. For instance–after getting fired from Nook’s, I went to the town’s bulletin board on my first day and left a rambling, profanity-laden diatribe about how I wished every resident of the town would die in a series of horrible tragedies just to see what would happen. Sure enough…they greeted me with cheerful smiles and sunny waves and offers to join them for dinner or bridge or knocking over garbage cans or whatever giant anthropomorphic animals do for fun. You can’t get a rise out of these people, thus you’re left to play the game as intended.
Which is, sadly, boring. You go fishing. You find fossils which you take to the museum where they make appropriate oohing and aahing noises over before putting them on display. Occasionally you can go into the city (hence the name, City Folk) and see a movie or go shopping. It’s like life, if your banker were a raccoon that accepted tree bark on a mortgage payment and your neighbor were a five foot tall pig that walked on its hind legs and sent you a vase on your birthday.
And frankly, if I wanted my games to be more like real life, I think I’d just stop, you know, playing games.
