Story:

• Not much of a story, no missions, no conflicts and no real ending.
• Total free form gameplay.
• You arrive in a town (which you name) where you first meet a raccoon named Tom Nook.
• Tom owns a local convenient store.
• Realizing that you are new to town and without anyplace to live he offers to sell you a very small house. Call it a “studio” if you will.
• He then tells you how much you owe in “Bells” (the game’s name for currency) and gives you a job at his store to start earning money to pay him back.
• You’ll run small errands from planting flowers, to picking fruit, and through this you will learn a small portion of what you can do in the game.
• After a few errands he lets you go out on your own. From there what you do is entirely up to you.
• Some people might find this open ended gameplay without any forced goals to be “boring” or “slow”.

Gameplay:

• The first couple of days of playing Animal Crossing there isn’t much to do.
• They’ll be a couple of neighbors in town that you can visit and run errands for.
• You can collect some fruit to plant or sell to Tom.
• Raid the town dump.
• Buy a couple of items in the store.
• As time passes the game will change. The game actually grows with gameplay invested.
• Animal Crossing uses the system clock to manipulate the game.
• A planted piece of fruit will grow to a fruit tree in a couple of days time (real time)
• You’ll notice new animals will move in every so often.
• Likewise some will eventually move away.
• Each day Tom’s shop has a limited number of items for sale. And his inventory changes each day.
• You might want to buy a fishing rod, but it may not appear in Tom’s store for over a week.
• In the evening, animals will sleep, and the town will grow dark.
• If you play in January, then you’ll most likely have snow on the ground, as the seasons change in the game as they do in real life.
• I wish more games would utilize the system clock like this. It really makes for a more immersive experience.
• You’ll want to keep an eye on the calendar in the game too.
• Holidays like Christmas and the Fourth of July have their respective celebrations on their usual days.
• There are other in game holidays and festivals too, like the Cherry Festival.
• Since most of these events only come around once a year, you’ll want to make sure you play for a few minutes on that day.
• Usually, special days give you the chance to find or buy very rare items.
• Once you get used to your town and have explored a bit, you’ll find that there are many different gameplay directions to choose. Most though involve collecting something.
• Collect fish, insects and fossils.
•  Take the new breads to the museum and sell the rest to Tom.
• Find items in the trash, buy them from Tom, or earn them by running errands for townsfolk. Then use those items to decorate your house.
• Some items found or bought can be extremely rare. Among the rare items are old NES games that can be found.
• Excitebike, Golf, and Donkey Kong Jr. Math (what the $%@*, who ever bought that game?!?) are some that you can find.
• Dig up treasure and money.
• Pick up shells on the seashore.
• Don’t forget to sell unwanted things to Tom so that you can pay off your loan.
• Doing so will earn you a larger house, and unfortunately a larger loan to pay off.
• Another main aspect of the game is letter writing. Nintendo refers to this aspect of the game when they call it a “Communication Game”.
• Writing letters to townsfolk might help bud a friendship. You might even get a gift from someone if they like the letter enough.
• While this is a novel idea, it quickly becomes obvious that this can be more trouble than it’s worth.
•  In order to get a good response back you’ll have to be sure to use simple language as there are key words that the responses must look for.
• Even then sending a garbage letter might produce an interesting response.
• Writing letters then becomes a little more useful when you play with other people.
• There is also a bulletin board in the center of town. Every once in a while another animal will post a message, perhaps a scavenger hunt. You can also use it to write public messages to other people who might be in your town.
• If you have a Gameboy Advance and a link cable, you can use them to travel to a tropical island.
• It’s always summer on the island.
• There is one inhabitant which you can talk to and make friends with.
• Do something like leave him a shovel and watch him dig up bags of gold for you when go back to the mainland.
• If you stay too long you’ll get a tan, and the mainlanders will notice.
• The best thing about the gameplay is that there are so many secrets and little details, which makes you want to keep playing just to see what else can you do, or what else you can find.