Let me tell you in advance: no matter how hard I try to describe the brilliance of this game, you will not understand until you play it. You may frown at the idea of buying items, fishing, catching bugs, and doing chores for townsfolk, but it gets to become a lot of fun.

AC was released a year ago in Japan with the name Animal Forest, but it has only come out in America now because of the large amount of text that needed to be translated. The best way to describe this game would be a mixture between The Sims and Harvest Moon, with a splash of crazy-looking graphics.

In Animal Crossing, you start out with your happy-go-lucky character arriving by train to a new town. Once you stop at the station, the shop keeper Tom Nook allows you to buy a house, and work off the debt that you have collected. For the first few tasks, the game gives you a tutorial of all the cool things you can do in the town, such as talking to townspeople, doing jobs for them, and sending out mail messages. Once you complete those, you get to do whatever you want to get the money to pay back your loan.

You can get money, which is called Bell in this game, in a variety of ways. The easiest way would be fishing; you can catch different kinds of fish and sell them to the store for money. Selling off insects, shells, and items that you find can also net you some money. There are also things hidden each day in the town that can give you a little bit more money.

Once you obtain a good amount of cash, you can spend it on hundreds of items for your house. There are couches, beds, tables, chairs, and anything else you can put into a house. There are also some non-interactive items that you can put into your house, to have your neighbors awe at. My favorite part about the houses, though, is the collection of NES games you can collect. Nintendo has added about 8 full games, that you can put into your house and play at your leisure. It is like having an arcade in the game, and I find that really cool.

Animal Crossing has an in-game clock, so every time you boot up the game, you are playing in real time. For example, if you play the game early before school, you can find different types of fish in the rivers. There could also be a special event, that you can only see if you log into the game at a certain time that day. Of course, you can mess around with the game's clock settings, so you can go back and see anything that you have missed.

You can have up to four human players in one town, and this is where the game really shines. You can trade and send message to other residents of the town, although only one person can be playing at a time. For example, you could send your friend a message, telling them of a secret item that you have hidden in the landscape, and then see if they can find it. Also, if a friend has also has a copy of the game, you can put their memory card into slot B and visit their town, where there could be different items in the store and other townspeople you can chat with.

You can see by the screenshots that the graphics are very, well, different. Nintendo has used an art style that hasn't been used very much before in a video game, and it definitely doesn't work for me. This game is so much fun, though, that you will completely ignore the bad graphics and just concentrate on doing all the fun things in your town.

I would definitely suggest this title to anybody with a GameCube, but it will not appeal to everybody. There is a lot in the review that I didn't have time to touch on, because there is many, many things you can do in it; it literally can never get old. So, go out to your local Blockbuster and rent this game, and see if you will enjoy it.