How did you first start loving Animal Crossing? Origin Stories!

[BobRocks20]

It was nothing too special, really… My first exposure was from seeing my siblings play Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The Wild World theme song there has been nostalgic to me… I also liked to look at the trophies they collected, which included a few AC characters.

Come the age of the 3DS. By 2018 (late, I know) I've had mine for almost a year. On Christmas I got New Leaf, my first AC game. It was fun and relaxing and it clicked with me and now I really like Animal Crossing! ("love" would be overstating it for me...)

I didn't really expect myself to be part of the fandom though. I can be pretty reclusive, and in the past I had a guilty pleasure of reading these wiki articles bashing stuff like video games and movies. At one point there was a wiki like this that was about fandoms and hatedoms. My memory's hazy but I'm pretty sure the Animal Crossing fandom was in there. It was in this wiki that I ended up with a bad first impression of the community and learned about some certain questionable content (which we shall refuse to speak any more of).

Thankfully, joining The Bell Tree has helped me come to realize that not everyone in the Animal Crossing fandom is toxic after all.

Still, saying I'm part of a fandom makes me feel nervous because of everything I read back then, but now I'm slowly but surely transitioning out it. Just give me, like, a few more years...

 

[KittenNoir]

I first started loving animal when I saw someone post a town tour video of their town in New Leaf I thought it looked so cute and immediately bought the game.

It was such on release for New Leaf and I’ve been playing animal crossing ever since

 

[Late Night Thoughts]

A friend from my childhood had both WW and CF and would show me her town, so I really wanted to have my own. After begging my parents so much, they finally got me City Folk, and then later on New Leaf came out so I became obsessed with the franchise.

 

[moonbyu]

i saw the trailer for animal crossing new leaf on the internet and instantly wanted it. after playing new leaf and enjoying it a lot, i began getting into the other installments too. still love it to this day!

 

[sashoo]

I was given a DS by a very distant family friend, and I got Wild World. I was quite small and I just remember getting stuck every time I tried to play because Resetti would shout at me and I didn't understand...

A couple of years later I got into it a bit more and I found out that I needed to save my game and he wouldn't bug me () so I played more often, and then ACNH came out.

I got it in August 2020, so a little while after it came out and I LOVED it. Honestly animal crossing was what got me through lockdown. My first island ended up a bit of a mess, but now I've restarted and I'm going to spend more time and put more effort in.

 

[Yoshi155]

One day in late 2020, my older sister showed me a cool little mobile game called Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. It seemed fun. It had to be because it was made by Nintendo. So I picked it up and played it for a few months… and then dropped it. I was aware of the New Horizons hype but I didn’t really care about it because it wasn’t Mario or Sonic. Which meant that it was totally lame.

Anyway, cut to a year later, in late 2021, and I started getting back into the game. I don’t really remember why, but I was becoming more open to other video game franchises so I decided to play it. I actually really liked it and continued playing it. Since I connected my Nintendo account, I could just pick up where I left off. After a month or so, I was kind of bored of only playing this Animal Crossing game and wanted to branch out more and play other games in the series. So I decided I wanted to play New Leaf But first, I started watching a playthrough of the game made by the one and only ZackScottGames. And it just made me want to play even more. This was around November 2021, so in late March 2022, I decided to ask my parents to get the game. And it arrived just in time for spring break.

I don’t think anything will match how it felt to play the game for the first few days. It was so fun to play a new kind of game that wasn’t anything like Super Mario 3D Land or New Super Mario Bros DS or Sonic CD, or even Kirby Super Star which I’d also started playing recently. And those games were really fun when I first started them. But this game was different. You probably know what makes a life sim different than a platformer, but Pocket Camp is really different than mainline games, and that was my only exposure before I played this game. After that, it became my favorite video game series (which you probably know isn’t the case anymore), and I became obsessed with consuming Animal Crossing content, including all of the other games. While I’m not nearly as ecstatic about the series anymore, probably because I’ve played for more than two years at this point, I still have fond memories of playing for the first time.

I guess the reason I like the series so much is because it’s different and relaxing. Like, after I’m done raging because I was trying to beat Champion’s Road in Super Mario 3D World, I can play something that’s just chill, and then go back to platforming or playing an RPG, or trying to solve a puzzle to escape a dungeon.

Hmm. Another paragraph or so and this could easily qualify as an essay.