I love Animal Crossing on GameCube (the later two haven’t been quite as good), and it has all sorts of neat pieces of trivia about it.
For example, an amusing one is that you can play the entire game with the disc out of the console! After you let the title screen load, the entire game is loaded into the GameCube’s memory, and you can remove the disc. Until you shut the game off, it never has to load from the disc after that one time. Neat!
Another thing with the title screen is that if you pop open the disc tray the instant the title screen appears (before it gets a chance to finish loading the game), a message will pop up and tell you to close the lid. If you leave the message up, you can actually hear the entirety of the title theme. You normally can’t listen to the whole thing because the title screen restarts before it ends each time.
Some may know this and some may not, but Animal Crossing was originally a Nintendo 64 game released only in Japan (called Doubutsu no Mori, or “Animal Forest”). It was then rereleased as an enhanced version on the GameCube and localized. This actually explains many of the game’s strange quirks or, in some cases, irritating limitations.
For instance, the original N64 game didn’t have the museum. It was added in the GameCube version, after the fossil system was already in place. This explains why Blathers can’t identify your fossils, and why you have to convolutedly send them away in the mail instead. The mail was originally the only way you could do it. Upon creating Blathers, they cleverly wrote around that fact by saying that he didn’t have his degree yet and thus couldn’t officially identify your fossils. This was, of course, remedied upon the creation of a true sequel, Wild World.
The N64 game also had a Japanese-style shrine instead of the wishing well that people are familiar with from the GameCube version. This may explain a lot of things about the well. In the GC game, the spirit in the well “talks” to you. The shrine/well likely has a spirit because of the idea that shrines are places people go to for spiritual reasons. It can tell you about the state of your town, and lets you know what villagers are unhappy about. This may come from the idea that at Japanese shrines, people leave wishes written on paper (or make confessions at the shrine). That would explain how the shrine/well can tell you what your villagers are unhappy about and exactly how to fix it. It may also be the reason that you can leave items at the wishing well and ask to be pardoned for not being able to deliver it to a villager—an idea that fits in properly with it originally being a shrine. In addition, many of the festivals take place in this plaza. While it’s not so strange for that to happen around a big area like the wishing well, it fits in with the shrine idea because Japanese shrines are often home to many events.
I like finding out about all the little similarities and differences between different versions of games like this, especially when it reveals clues about things I used to find annoying, strange, or out-of-place! So anyway, there’s a bit of Animal Crossing trivia and speculation for you.
Damn right you are