It’s a brand that’s long in the tooth and beloved by many, but Animal Crossing has been the very same thing from the very beginning, and it’s long overdue for a change. Joe Fourhman and I have put some thought into what’s right and wrong with Animal Crossing and put together some thoughts on how it can become what it should have been all along.

WHAT MAKES IT ANIMAL CROSSING?

The important thing about changing something like Animal Crossing is make sure it doesn’t cease to be everything we love about Animal Crossing. There are important characters like Totakeke and concepts like tree shaking and hole digging. Most importantly, there are calendar and clock-based events which can only be accessed when the time is right.

Many of the things we love can remain intact with some important changes. We’re not proponents of an art style change. I spent a lot of time thinking about a toon-shaded Animal Crossing, in the style of Wind Waker, and I’m no longer on that bandwagon, though admittedly I may have been the only passenger there to begin with. The detail in the myriad of small objects in the game would not lend itself to a toon style, particularly not at standard definition, and I think the brand needs a consistent look across its products.

ANIMAL CROSSING IS MADE OF PEOPLE

That said, Fourhman and I agree that the player characters in Animal Crossing are a little strange looking. I think the style could be evolved a little, but we both would like to see more customization options. Part of the charm of games like The Sims and even (dare I say it) PlayStation Home is being able to make a character that is distinctly you. I don’t like Miis, which are usable in City Folk on Wii, but Fourhman does with one caveat: he’d like to see them able to wear hats and other accessories on their heads, which they can’t do now. I would instead like to see a robust character building system for the Animal Crossing kids where we can choose gender, eyes, hair, and more directly, rather than by playing a vague quiz game on an interminable car ride.

ALL YOUR BASE CHARACTERS ARE BELONG TO US

One of the weirdest experiences in Animal Crossing: Wild World was walking out of your own town for the first time, between police dogs Copper and Booker… only to arrive in another town on the other side between Booker and Copper. The problem is that when Animal Crossing made the leap – which, come to think of it, was more like a shift – to multiplayer, the base cast of characters from the original game no longer made practical sense. Tortimer is a cute mayor of your town, but when he’s the mayor of every town, it’s pretty darn creepy.

Fourhman’s suggestion is to make Tortimer the president, so he’s still in charge without the ridiculousness of him being the mayor of every town. Instead, he and I agree that the randomly selected residents of your town can hold the various important positions in the town. The elected offices, I might add, could be voted for on an Animal Crossing election day. Capitalist overseer Nook, Fourhman points out, would make a great franchise owner for the town shops… like a Donald Trump type of thing. Meanwhile, the store could be run by a townsanimal, who answers to Nook.

On the subject of the townsanimals, there are not enough of them. While there are dozens, if not hundreds of different premade townsanimals in the various Animal Crossing titles, I think they need to be replaced with a character generating algorithm. Come up with a large database of names for a kind of animal (horse, penguin) and then randomly generate their specific appearance, dress, and personality. It’s OK for a town to have a penguin named Friga and the next town over to have one too. Just ask Aeropause how many humans named Joe are on staff. The problem comes if they have the same personality and dress… in both examples, it becomes very, very weird.

As someone who clearly struggled with the Goofy vs Pluto conflict, Fourhman feels that we need to remove such things from Animal Crossing. Here’s how he puts it.

Drop all philosophically confusing anthropomorphic conflicts. IE, either keep frogs as a Villager type, or as a catchable Fish type. I always feel terrible when Cousteau comes over; I’m afraid he’ll see the frog I keep as a pet.

This could only be done by either eliminating one or the other. Either you can’t catch frogs, or you can’t befriend them. My view on this one differs, because I equate it to having a pet chimp while being a person.

THIS CITY IS FULL OF ANIMALS

But where will players find the property master Nook, or president-of-the-world Tortimer? Fourhman and I agree that the central City Folk hub idea works well. This could be converted into a persistent world, a smallish city populated by an assortment of townsanimals and any other Animal Crossing players who happen to leave their town. Other characters like Totakeke could appear at venues in the city, on street corners, or even by your train station from time to time.

I also like the idea of having player towns interconnected, or at least apparently so as in the Facebook game Farmville. In that game, your friends’ farms appear to border on your own, giving you a sense of connectedness and community. I think that being able to walk to your friend’s town, which could be stored online so you can visit even when they’re not playing, would be great. Since these would only be people on your friend’s list, you should be able to trust them not to ransack your town. If you don’t, you can set permissions on your town. When you’re away, can others chop town your trees or dig up your fossils? Can they teach your townsanimals to end all their sentences with their new catchphrase, “in bed?” Maybe they can only take a combined total of 10% of your town’s fruit. This isn’t that hard.

The other benefit of online storage of your data is in the event of a data loss locally, you’d still have your town safely stored online. This satisfies Nintendo’s desire to protect it from those sharing it… without making people like Fourhman lose everything when their Wii breaks.

LET’S TAKE A TRIP

In the Gamecube game, you could travel to someone else’s town by plugging two memory cards into one Gamecube. Only one of you could play at a time, which made the experience pretty dry, but it was a nice concept. Being able to travel to other people’s towns is a necessity, but they need to be able to be there too. Wild World did this pretty well, and so did City Folk, but Nintendo could expand this, even without abandoning their grip on the Friend Code structure.

What if you want to catch a fish that’s indigenous to another part of the world? Befriend an Animal Crossing player from another region when you meet them in the city, add them to your friend list the way you can in Wild World and City Folk. Then, fly to their town, and go fishing. They could come to your town to catch something indigenous to your region if they need to. You may notice it’s raining in their town while it was snowing in yours. That’s because their weather channel says it’s raining, and yours says snowing. You might also notice that due to the time difference, the general store is still open in their town. Now, you can sell that armload of fruit you’ve got, and since you came as a friend to them, maybe they get a percentage of the bells you spend in the store.

WHERE’S MAH STUFF?

A big part of Animal Crossing is all the stuff. I don’t think the database of objects needs to be expanded. The one in the Gamecube game was large enough. Fourhman and I both feel the inventory is very frustrating. Having to stuff letters with dressers in order to be able to carry your belongings around becomes really irritating really fast. If we can’t have an infinite inventory, at least make it a lot larger. I also want to be able to sort the inventory in various ways and I want things to look like what they are. Does every piece of fruit look like a throw pillow? Then why should every piece of furniture look like a leaf?

But what if you could walk into the city and find another human who’s got an inventory full of items he’s selling? Maybe he’s got the whole Cabin set of furniture, and he wants to trade it for the one item he has yet to find in the game.

BUT WHAT’S IN IT FOR NINTENDO?

This may be the best part. Not only would this game be heaven and crack rolled into one for Animal Crossing fans, but it could make Nintendo a lot more money than it may appear at first. Since the general mechanics of Animal Crossing are solidly established, a lot could be reused. That could be a big money saver to start with. You might be surprised to hear I would like Animal Crossing to be a subscription based service, and here’s why.

Rather than making it a service that’s paid with money, like World of Warcraft, I think access to the online component of Animal Crossing should use the coins that Club Nintendo members earn through purchases of Nintendo’s products. Think of this game as “free with purchase.” The simple fact of buying a new copy of Animal Crossing would earn players 50 coins, which could amount to perhaps five months of play. By purchasing more Nintendo products and registering them, players earn more coins, which can be used as game time. Wii Points could be used too… by purchasing Virtual Console and WiiWare games, which also earn players coins. In this way, Nintendo is providing what feels like a free service to the player, because they are earning access by buying something else they can play, but at the same time they’re encouraging purchases, which makes Nintendo more money.

Further, an intangible being used to pay for access means Nintendo has ultimate command over the economy. They could offer coins as prizes in contests, like worldwide fishing tournaments. Online minigame competitions could net those who place high significant amounts of play time in the Animal Crossing world, encouraging those who play the game to participate online in order to play without having to purchase more software to do so.

GET OUT YOUR UMBRELLAS, CAUSE NOW WE’RE BRAINSTORMING

Fourhman offered the idea that Nintendo might consider integrating other IPs into Animal Crossing. I think this is already done to some extent, as some of the collectibles are Nintendo related, like arwings and master swords and the like. Nintendo’s animal chracters like those in Starfox might appear as guests in the city from time to time, that might be interesting. It could work especially well if those animal types exist within Animal Crossing already and these have been built specifically using those models. Of course, we’d need Slippy to be OK with our pet toad.

Fourhman surprised me with one idea. We would both like to see NES games return to Animal Crossing. While we respect Nintendo’s Virtual Console service and understand that they’re not about to give these games to us for free within another game any more, how about letting us launch VC games directly from within Animal Crossing, then exit back into the game? It was great fun going into another townsanimal’s house and finding an NES on the floor, then playing Soccer on their TV. If we could have a game system in our Animal Crossing home that lets us play these old games while remaining within the Animal Crossing environment, that would be great, even if they can only be games we bought on Virtual Console. Alternatively, Fourhman suggests “8-bit knockoff games starring AC characters.”

I want Nintendo DS connectivity. While the GBA connectivity was scoffed at by some, having a small portion of my Animal Crossing experience to cart around with me, even for a little while, was a lot of fun. An idea Fourhman had really dovetails with this. What if the DS could behave almost like a PDA for Animal Crossing? You can look at your town’s event calendar, browse your collections using the convenience of a touch interface, send and receive messages, see who’s online, even scan Animal Crossing trading cards using the DSi camera.