Animal Crossing is a Life Simulation Game originally released in Japan in Spring of 2001 as the final first-party title for the Nintendo 64, under the name Doubutsu no Mori ("Animal Forest"). While modest in intent and definitely sparse in content, it was popular enough to receive an Updated Re-release on the Nintendo GameCube with a bunch of added content, characters, and dialogue as Doubutsu no Mori+ in winter 2001. This version, albeit heavily modified, is what would be released internationally as Animal Crossing in 2002 in North America, 2003 in Australia, and 2004 in the European Union.

Based on creator Katsuya Eguchi's own experiences with moving away from his hometown for professional purposes, Animal Crossing is a game where you play as a Super-Deformed human avatar living in a village full of Funny Animals. You interact with your fellow villagers, befriending them and doing Fetch Quests. You can also customize your avatar's house, change their clothes, and get a tan.

The English release of the game is notable for being a massive overhaul from the Japanese releases, which were based heavily in Japanese culture, right down to featuring a number of obstinately Japan-centric elements such as holidays and paraphernalia. For the English release, most of this was either replaced with an American equivalent, exoticized, or removed altogether, with an end goal of creating an experience for English speakers that was culturally analogous to what Japanese speakers encountered in the Japanese versions.

The Japanese Nintendo staff were highly impressed with the localization, incorporating its changes and further new content into an Updated Re-release as Doubutsu no Mori e+ in the summer of 2003; many of these added features would gradually be carried over to later installments, through which they would make their belated international debuts. Unfortunately, this is where the story for the original incarnation of Animal Crossing ends, with Doubutsu no Mori e+ remaining Japanese-exclusive to this day. However, the three versions altogether were a successful financial venture for Nintendo. They followed it up by releasing a Nintendo DS sequel, Animal Crossing: Wild World, in 2005, which set the stage for Animal Crossing to become one of Nintendo's flagship franchises.

Animal Crossing contains examples of:

• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • In a meta sort of sense; the in-universe version of Christmas, Toy Day, is celebrated on December 23rd so that it doesn't interfere with your real-life Christmas plans.
  • The GameCube versions feature a number of quality of life improvements over the original N64 release to offer a far less restrictive experience.
    • The re-releases heavily bump up the amount of items you could put in storage from one to three and allows you to put every obtainable aircheck in a stereo at once instead of just one per unit, with the library carrying over to all stereos in your house. Considering that there are 55 obtainable airchecks in the game, it's certainly a huge boon.
    • Wendell will be able to accept any edible items the player has on-hand, rather than being limited to just fish, thus allowing his services to be accessible to a player who doesn't have a fishing rod yet.
    • With the exception of bees, insects are now restricted to the acres they appear in, thus making it easier to chase down and catch them (albeit at the cost of allowing them to fly out to sea); this mercy was ultimately removed in later installments due to the removal of the acre-based navigation system itself.
    • The "Handhelds" section in the catalog is expanded from just featuring umbrellas to include anything the player is able to hold in their hands, including tools and novelty items.
• Anti Poop-Socking: Just like in real life, animals go to bed and stores close up during the night, with the sole exception of the Museum, which is open 24/7 thanks to Blathers being an owl (and therefore nocturnal). Talking to your neighbors in the dead of night often results with them telling you it’s time for bed.
• The Artifact: One of the holidays in the original Nintendo 64 version is the Night of the Thirteenth Moon, which is always guaranteed to have clear weather. The iQue version released in China removed this holiday, but the day it would have occurred on will still always be clear.
• Black Market: Redd runs one in the form of a travelling tent that appears periodically throughout the year, with a guaranteed appearance on Sale Day. Amusingly, his tent actually says "Black Market" on it, but with "Black" sloppily crossed out in red paint.
• Bowdlerise:
  • In the Nintendo 64 version, the "Tomato Juice" shirt is a white shirt covered in dark red stains. Naturally, this makes the shirt looks like it's covered in blood. The shirt would be one of the few pieces of clothing removed for the English release.
  • In the Nintendo 64 version and initial Japanese GameCube release, one of the paintings the player could obtain was Édouard Manet's Olympia, which depicts a nude prostitute reclining in bed. While it wasn't the only painting to be axed/replaced in the international release, the mature subject matter (which drew controversy even in Manet's time) ensured that it would be among them.
• Company Cross-References: Copiously so, setting a standard that later games in the series would follow.
  • The Nintendo 64 and Nintendo GameCube logos appear as obtainable furniture items. The Chinese release replaces the 64 logo with the iQue logo.
  • The gold Mario statue that appears as an Easter Egg for the Stone ability in Kirby Super Star makes an appearance as a furniture item in this game (albeit with the pose changed from a V-sign to a neutral stance, owing to Shigeru Miyamoto wanting to make the character seem less "kiddy" in demeanor), with a silver Luigi statue to match.
  • The catch quote for the loach asks "You don't suppose it's Hylian, do you?" in reference to the Hylian Loach, which appears as a rare catch at the Fishing Pond in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
  • One of Kapp'n's mid-song quips is "ye ever spend the night in a Hyrulian prison?"
  • While managing GBA data for Animal Island, Kapp'n might sometimes shout "Why, what in the name o' Jabu-Jabu's belly?"
  • The Master Sword and Arwing appear as obtainable furniture items. Similarly, a whole furniture set of Super Mario Bros. 1-themed items can be obtained through universal item codes officially distributed in Nintendo Power.
  • Several clothing items and e-Reader patterns nod back to other Nintendo games:
    • Super Mario Bros.: the Big Bro's Shirt and Little Bro's Shirt respectively feature Mario and Luigi's emblems on them, the Turnip Top resembles the turnips from Super Mario Bros. 2, and the Toad Print features a Super Mushroom pattern on it. The Shine Sprite pattern is designed after the MacGuffin from Super Mario Sunshine, and the Jumpman pattern is a sprite of Small Mario from Super Mario Bros. 1 (misidentified as coming from Donkey Kong (1981)).
    • The Legend of Zelda: Anju's Shirt and Kaffe's Shirt are based on the outfits respectively worn by Anju and Kafei in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The NES Link pattern is a sprite from The Legend of Zelda I of Link holding a Triforce piece, the Hero's Tunic pattern is based on Link's design in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and the Triforce Tile pattern is designed after the Zelda series' signature MacGuffin.
    • In terms of e-Reader patterns based on other franchises, the Yoshi's Egg pattern is a Yoshi Egg in the art style of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, the DK Logo is based on the design of Donkey Kong's tie from Donkey Kong (1994) onwards, the Kirby Wallpaper is based on Kirby's design from Kirby Super Star, the Falcon Suit is based on Captain Falcon's uniform, the Poke Ball is based on the signature item from the Pokémon series, the Lil' Miser shirt is based on Wario's emblem, the Pikmin Pattern is based on the titular creatures from Pikmin, the Star Fox Emblem is based on the Star Fox logo, and Samus' Suit is based on the Varia Suit from Metroid.
  • Mario appears on both the Autumn Medal and Spring Medal furniture items.
  • When scanning Bob's e-Reader card, the letter it produces mentions Bob having a dream about the player "running around on a tropical island with a water pump on [their] back."
  • Gulliver can sometimes recount a story about "fighting the sea snakes at Pinnacle Rock," before abruptly remembering that it wasn't him who did that. On other occasions, he might mention leaving his pet goldfish in Hyrule or Toad Town.
  • The Flavor Text for the Squid in e+ sees the player confuse it with a Blooper from Super Mario Bros..
  • The "Egg" town decoration in e+ is a giant Yoshi Egg.
  • Two of the favor items are a Game Boy ^note Though it's modeled after a yellow Game Boy Color and a Pokémon Pikachu.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • Your neighbors never actually come into your home, and Blathers never leaves the museum. He's also usually fast asleep during the day.
  • The cover◊ for the Chinese-exclusive iQue release features the special character Blathers, as well as the islanders Maelle and O'Hare. However, the iQue version is based specifically on the original Nintendo 64 version, which did not feature these characters, and as a result, don't appear in the iQue release.
• Cultural Cross-Reference: July 4th is the anniversary of the opening of the town's train station. This "holiday" is celebrated with fireworks, Redd giving out balloons and pinwheels, and Tortimer giving you a model bottle rocket. While fireworks shows have been in all later installments, this is the only time when they're specifically intended to coincide with American Independence Day; in the N64 version, +, and Wild World, they occurred every Saturday in August, while from City Folk-onward they'd occur every Sunday in August.
• Cultural Translation: The original Japanese releases were heavily influenced by Japanese culture. For the Western localization, much had to be replaced by something the Western market can relate to, like a Japanese fireplace being replaced by a barbecue grill, during localization; what Japanocentric elements did remain were typically exoticized or presented in more Western-friendly terms. However, the Japanese team liked the changes so much they released the game as Dōbutsu no Mori e+ in Japan as well. Many of the Westernized changes ended up being used even in Japan in the sequels, due to the first game having proven the viability of the IP abroad as well as in Japan.
  • The Japanese version features a fireworks festival every Saturday in August; while the English version only has fireworks on the 4th of July.
  • The Japanese version of the igloo features a hot pot with bubbling mochi; the English release changes this to a pot of chowder.
  • The Bell Shrine was changed to a Wishing Well outside of Japan. In Japan, players shake the rope on New Year's Day. In other versions, they throw a Bell into the well.
  • During the Cherry Blossom Festival, villagers in the Japanese version have picnics on tatami mats. In the localization, they dance around the Wishing Well.
  • In Doubutsu no Mori+, Tom Nook is officially a Tanuki, and Kapp'n is a Kappa. The English release changes them into a raccoon and a sea turtle, respectively, but they have Punny Names that reference what they're really supposed to be.
• Dub Personality Change: The various localization teams apparently felt the need to spice up the original Japanese script of the game, and this lead to the infamously rude villagers it is known for today, who insult you over the smallest things, use verbose vocabulary, and tell adult jokes every so often. Contrast to the Japanese version, which has a much more polite cast of characters.
• Early-Bird Cameo: K.K. Slider (under the name Totakeke), Tom Nook, and Resetti appear as collectable trophies in Super Smash Bros. Melee, with their source game being marked as "Future Release".
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Many of the game's villagers and special characters featured considerably different designs in the N64 version and Doubutsu no Mori+; Animal Crossing altered them to what would become commonplace for the series, though a few characters' designs wouldn't change to the current standard until Wild World.
  • Tom Nook's design in the original Japanese versions didn't have a leaf on his apron. It instead featured the Japanese character for "shop" (店). Likewise, Redd's apron in all versions of this game features a large "B" rather than a ginko leaf.
  • In the Japanese versions, Resetti and his brother don't wear overalls over their shirts, instead opting for haramaki (a stomach warmer). The plain white shirts wouldn't reappear until Happy Home Designer.
  • In +, Tortimer wears a red zucchetto and blue-lensed glasses. This was changed for Animal Crossing and e+ to a black top hat and clear-lensed glasses.
  • In the N64 game and +, Katrina wears a white robe and matching headband. She became a Magical Romani in Animal Crossing and e+.
  • Several villagers received tweaked designs in the transition from the N64 to the GameCube. The most noticeable is Jane: in Japan, she has white fur, brown skin, and large pink lips, which accidentally resembled racist imagery of black people (not helped by the fact that she's a gorilla, an animal often invoked in anti-Black rhetoric), so Animal Crossing changed her to have purple fur, pink skin, and smaller lips. Notably, her older design was brought back in Doubutsu no Mori e+, but she hasn't appeared since.
  • A number of villagers only ever appear in the various versions of this game, being axed from Wild World onward for no discernible reason. Some villagers only ever appeared in Doubutsu no Mori e+ (while others, most notably Ketchup, belatedly returned in the Welcome amiibo update to New Leaf), and some villagers who did appear in later installments were renamed (e.g. Hazel being renamed Sally, the other Sally being renamed Cally, Bliss being renamed Caroline, etc.).
  • The player characters themselves are considerably different design-wise compared to the standard Wild World set, with both male and female characters perpetually wearing a stylized hat that matches whatever shirt they have on (be it an actual clothing item or a pattern). Boys wore dome hats with horns, while girls wore conical hats with tufts of hair sticking out of the sides. Wild World would introduce the ability to customize the player character's headgear, with the N64 and GameCube-era headgear only appearing as an option for wearing a pattern.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Enough for its own page.
• Easter Egg:
  • If you request an invalid song to K.K., he will randomly play one of three songs, all of which would become valid requests in later Animal Crossing games. One of these songs is "K.K Song," his cover of the recurring "Totaka's Song" that sound designer Kazumi Totaka sneaks into most games he works on.
  • By default, your inventory has a polka-dot background. The game never tells you this, but you can change the background by putting clothing in a hidden slot in your inventory, below the bottom-right corner. Drag and deposit the clothes there and the background will change to match whatever clothes you put in, while the shirt that was formerly your background will be deposited back into your main inventory.
  • Attempting to step on the cockroach in the museum will result with a message telling you not to do that.
  • Pushing a lawnmower while it's on a backyard lawn will cause it to shoot out grass clippings.
  • Ringing a judge's bell while having the ringside seating up on the wall will cause the audience to cheer.
  • When Mr. Resetti forces you to apologize for resetting, you’re supposed to repeat what he wants you to say. But you can say certain hateful things (such as “I hate you”, “You suck”, or “Butthead”) to really piss him off.
• Fell Asleep Standing Up:
  • At night or in the early morning, villagers can be found standing asleep outside their house.
  • Blathers can be found sleeping standing up during daytime hours.
• Flip-Screen Scrolling: Unlike later games, the town is strictly divided into "acres." The later games ditch the system and have continuous scrolling, but still internally keep track of acres for building/planting/spawning purposes.
• Funny Foreigner: Gulliver is depicted as one in the Japanese version, where he's known as "Johnny". On top of his goofy personality, he speaks entirely in katakana, a visual shorthand for lack of fluency in Japanese, and occasionally lapses into coherent English. The English-language localization omits the "foreigner" element while keeping the "funny."
• Furry Confusion: You can catch frogs with a fishing rod and have frog villagers in your town. In Doubutsu no Mori e+, you can also do the same with octopuses, though in this case there's only one octopus villager (Octavio) and one octopus islander (Marina, introduced in e+).
• Furry Reminder:
  • Joey, a duck villager, has a pool instead of a bed in his house.
  • Blathers the owl sleeps all day and stays awake throughout the night.
• Game Within a Game:
  • All versions of this game feature the ability to collect various Nintendo Entertainment System games as furniture items and play them using an emulator developed in-house by Nintendo. The vast majority were arcade-esque titles released very early in the system's lifespan, with only a select few (Wario's Woods, Punch-Out!!, Super Mario Bros. 1, and The Legend of Zelda I) having been released past this period. The NES games are fairly rare, with the methods required to obtain them ranging from getting very lucky with the game's RNG to outright having to use hacks.
    • Balloon Fight, Clu Clu Land, Donkey Kong (1981), Donkey Kong Jr. Math, Excitebike (Mahjong in Doubutsu no Mori +), Golf, Pinball, and Tennis are normally obtainable only through Crazy Redd's, Tom Nook's lotteries, or from having villagers bury them in town. It's also possible to obtain them by sending the password printed on a villager's e-Reader card to that specific villager in the mail; doing so will result in a 60% chance of receiving one of the games in reply, rather than the item you'd normally get.
    • Wario's Woods and Baseball are only obtainable from having an islander bury them.
    • Soccer (Gomoku Narabe in Doubutsu no Mori +), Donkey Kong Jr., Donkey Kong 3, Clu Clu Land D, and Punch-Out!! were only accessible through Nintendo of America giveaways.
    • Ice Climber and Mario Bros. were only available through scarcely-distributed e-Reader cards.
    • Finally, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda are only obtainable through outright hacking the game, having apparently been intended for distribution via e-Reader cards, only to be shafted once the e-Reader itself was deemed a commercial failure outside of Japan.
    • The discovery of universal item codes and creation of code generators have made these games much easier to obtain, but Ice Climber, Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda cannot be obtained through this method, with the aforementioned e-Reader cards and external cheating devices being the only way to access them in-game.
  • There's also a fake NES furniture item, Super Tortimer, obtainable from the eponymous mayor on April Fool's Day; interacting with it simply produces a text blurb mocking the player for trying to play a game that doesn't actually exist.
  • One curiosity exists in the form of a blank Famicom Disk System/NES furniture item with no games attached to it. Normally, interacting with it produces a blurb saying that nothing's available to play on it; however, dataminers eventually discovered that this specific furniture item is actually meant to play NES ROM files stored on the N64 Controller Pak/GameCube memory card, indicating that additional NES games were originally meant to be incorporated into the game through distribution of special Controller Paks/memory cards with their ROMs pre-installed.
• Give Me Your Inventory Item: If you talk to a villager and ask them what's up, there is a chance they will force you to give them something from your pockets, whenever it may be furniture, clothing, or even Bells. Sometimes they'll even initiate a trade you can't back out of, and what you end up with is nowhere near as valuable as what your villager takes. Later entries prevent your villagers from outright taking your items without asking first, and you are allowed to back out of any prompt or trade they suggest.
• Iconic Sequel Song: Kapp'n sang a different song in Doubutsu no Mori+. It was changed to an entirely different tune in the American version, which has been his leitmotif ever since. The original song became the aircheck "Marine Song 2001" instead.
• Improvement +: In Japanese, the GameCube version is called Doubutsu no Mori+, representing how it added a lot of new features and isn't just a straight port. The Updated Re-release is called Doubutsu no Mori e+, referring to the expanded e-Reader functionality.
• Logo Joke: The N64 release has the console logo pop up like a piece of furniture being dropped, accompanied by the game's speech synthesizer shouting "Nintendo!" in one of several possible configurations. The later GameCube ports replaced the N64 logo with the standard Nintendo logo, which simply fades in.
• Long Song, Short Scene: The title theme goes on for another good thirty seconds after the intro cuts it off and loops. The only way to hear it is to either tilt the cartridge on the N64 version or eject the disc during the very first intro when booting up the GameCube versions. The song will continue, but the intro will be interrupted until you close the lid again.
• Luck-Based Mission: Gracie's car washing minigame. It acts like you just have to mash the A button enough times, but it's possible to fail using a turbo controller.
• Minus World: The original has four pre-loaded towns (technically three since one is a test version of the island) that can't be accessed without Action Replay. One of these pre-loaded towns can, however, be accessed via a glitch, by paying off one's debt and exiting the Post Office right when the announcement for the beginning of the Sports Festival occurs; because two cutscenes attempting to run at the same time, the game freaks out and defaults to a single pre-loaded town.
• Never Bareheaded: The player cannot remove their hat.
• Old Save Bonus:
  • A month after the release of Doubutsu no Mori +, Nintendo opened a Data Moving Service where, for a ¥630 fee (approximately $6 USD), players could send them an N64 Controller Pak with save data for the original Doubutsu no Mori and a 59-block GameCube memory card with save data for + and transfer over their player data to the latter game. The Data Moving Service eventually shut down a few years after it began; no information exists as to when exactly occurred, but the site for it went offline in 2005.
  • Doubutsu no Mori e+ would later offer a similar system as the Data Moving Service, in which players could copy their characters from + into the newer game, along with their name, birthdate, encyclopedia information, personal patterns, and catalog information. Admittedly, the feature considerably less comprehensive than the Data Moving Service but still useful, plus the player can import the data themselves this time (thanks to + and e+ being released on the same console) and doesn't have to worry about sending anything over to Nintendo.
• Renovating the Player Headquarters: The player is provided a small 4x4 cottage at the start of the game. Paying Tom Nook a few thousand bells will have him expand the house with a bigger house with 6x6 floor space, then 8x8. There is also the basement addition that is also 8x8, and is capped off by adding a 6x6 second floor to your home.
• Socialization Bonus: Traveling to another player's town is one of the easiest ways to get fruit that isn't native to your town.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the phrases normal villagers can shout after being woken up from a nap is "this is not my beautiful house, [catchphrase]! How did I get here?"
  • When delivering furniture to a cranky villager while working for Tom Nook, the villager's response will include the line "So ask yourself: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well? Do ya, [catchphrase]?"
  • One of Kapp'n's mid-song quips is "ye ever spend the night in a Hyrulian prison?"
  • If the player maxes out the Post Office's letter capacity during the daytime, Pelly chants "rain, sleet, snow, or hail, we deliver what you mail," playing off of the United States Postal Service creed, "neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
  • When Wisp talks about the retribution he may face if he doesn't recover the runaway spirits that he asks the player to collect, one of the superiors that he can mention is Large Marge, the ghost trucker from Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
• Stage Names: The first time you meet K.K. Slider, he mentions that his real name is Totakeke, but he prefers to go by his stage name. The name Totakeke is from then on only ever brought up sporadically by Copper and villagers in the English version for the rest of the game — or the franchise, for that matter. This localization quirk is likely due to his Early-Bird Cameo in Super Smash Bros. Melee giving him a trophy under the name Totakeke, which is actually his Japanese name.
• Temporary Online Content: In the North American release, the player could obtain the NES games Soccer, Donkey Kong Jr., Donkey Kong 3, Clu Clu Land D, and Punch-Out!! through secret codes generated for the player's specific character and town on Nintendo of America's official website for the game. The site eventually shut down, rendering the items inaccessible outside of third-party code generators or hacking.
• Thematic Sequel Logo Change: Doubutsu no Mori e+'s logo contains the e-Reader logo to represent the expanded e-Reader functionality.
• Thinking Wheels: In this game, during a conversation, animals will occasionally pause for thought with a little animation of gears ticking over their head, complete with the sound of a clock ticking. Later entries replaced this with an animated ellipse inside a thought bubble.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: By going out of your way to arrange furniture and pattern-clothing in a particular way while your inventory is full^note The linked video failed to consider escaping by dropping an item on the table, but this method can be closed by either not using tables for this or filling your inventory with items that can't be dropped on tables., you can trap yourself in your house with no possible escape. Future games, having to be designed for multiplayer, were more careful about shenanigans like this — furniture can't be arranged while other players are present, and it's possible to save and quit anywhere, which would move the character outside.
• Updated Re-release: The original Nintendo 64 game received a re-release on the GameCube later that year, which added many new features such as e-Reader support, the museum, the tailors, the island, and service characters to go with them. Then, the American version added even more content such as new holidays, which was later imported back into Japan with even more new features, such as the ability to scan e-Reader cards to make certain villagers move into one's town.
• World of Jerkass: Not only do the villagers get upset and insult you for the smallest reasons, some of them (particularly peppy, normal and cranky villagers) can even steal your items and money for no reason.
• You Are Fat: It seems this is one of the villagers' preferred ways of insulting the player. Lazy villagers in particular will often question if the player has put on weight and can even mock the player if they get "defensive".