Rank Up! - Ranking the Animal Crossing Series (Again)

It's been quite a while since we've last seen this old relic and staple from SuperPhillip Central's past arrive on the site. It's none other than "Rank Up!" where we take a look at my order of a particular game series's various entries, from least favorite to most favorite.

While I've previously covered the Animal Crossing series many moons ago, new entries have been added since, and I'm eager to see how my opinion of Nintendo's adorably charming series has changed compared to back then (or maybe it hasn't!). I'm ranking the Animal Crossing series through eight games--all the mainline releases and some spin-offs as well. So, without further ado, let's start this installment of Rank Up!

8) Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival (Wii U)

It was difficult being a Wii U owner--take it from a firsthand account. Whether it was with multiple delays, droughts, and few worthwhile releases, to own a Wii U was to suffer. The holiday season of 2015 was a disappointing one, and perhaps that's sugarcoating things. Between a lackluster and content-deprived installment of the Mario Tennis series and this game, Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival, kicking off this Rank Up! countdown, it was a trying time to be a Nintendo fan.

It seemed that Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival was more about having a game release to coincide with selling amiibo figurines for Nintendo rather than putting out an actually entertaining Animal Crossing game. Amiibo Festival did its best to delight with its board game influences, but beyond its cute and cheery presentation was a game devoid of fun or merriment. It was utterly a bore, better spelled a "bored game" instead. (I'm here all night.)

7) Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp (iOS, AND)

Nintendo pursued the mobile gaming audience with a multitude of attempts to enter the market, hoping to have an extra source of income and success. However, few of the attempts actually bore wildly successful fruit. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is Nintendo's take on its series in mobile form, with all of the annoyances and boredom that comes with games of its style. Perhaps it's different now, but I remember at launch that the game took forever to get anything worth value, showcasing itself as a tedious grind. It's definitely not what I want out of the Animal Crossing series, but for those without a Nintendo system to play the more traditional games in the series, perhaps Pocket Camp is a suitable supplement. ..I doubt it, though.

6) Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer (3DS)

Another spin-off in the Animal Crossing series, Happy Home Designer focused on the interior and exterior design aspects of Animal Crossing. The game put you in the titular role of a Happy Home Designer, taking on requests from various animal villagers and doing your best to fulfill them by placing appropriate furniture in and outside of their homes. Though one could just do the bare minimum to pass the requirements for each animal client (and the game did a poor job of rewarding you for being more creative than necessary), I did discover the joy of customizing the appearance of each house--both indoors and out--to look as good as my imagination could make it. The ease of placing furniture and objects with the simple-to-use controls would later be implemented into Animal Crossing: New Horizons in a most welcome fashion.

5) Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii)

Let's go the city, shall we? That was Nintendo's modus operandi for Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii, but outside of the eponymous city setting that players could visit by bus, City Folk felt more like a console version of Animal Crossing: Wild World. That's not to say that City Folk wasn't enjoyable. It just seemed like a super safe sequel and hardly a major evolution in the Animal Crossing franchise's formula. It also doesn't help that the game required a miserable peripheral in order to chat with friends when visiting them online. That said, Animal Crossing: City Folk gave me plenty of hours (see: hundreds of hours) of enjoyment even if it was essentially Wild World 2.0.

4) Animal Crossing (GCN)

I remember having a choice between two games for a gift in September. They were both GameCube games: one was Super Monkey Ball 2, the sequel to a game I loved, so it was most likely going to be a sequel that I enjoyed. The other was Animal Crossing, which was at the time an unknown quality to me. I read about it intently in the multiple previews that spawned from the pages of Nintendo Power magazine, but other than that, getting it would be based on faith.

My choice between the two games was apparently a good one, as I've loved Animal Crossing as a series ever since. While I did later end up also getting Super Monkey Ball 2, Animal Crossing on the GameCube gave me a new franchise to love, and I remember losing so many hours of my real life to my new virtual life in my charming town of Mabel. Between attempting and being successful at catching every bug and fish in the game, making sure I talked to every villager each day, amassing a hefty collection of furniture and Bells, and being ready for each and every holiday, Animal Crossing was as much of my real life as school was back in the day.

I'd also feel so guilty missing a day in the game, too, and would doubly be upset if a favorite villager suddenly decided to up and move. The struggle, as they say, was real. While many games in the Animal Crossing series have since improved on the formula in many ways, it's a combination of nostalgia and liking the simplicity of the original that I adore the GameCube's Animal Crossing so much.

3) Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS)

The second game in the Animal Crossing series launched on handhelds with the release of Animal Crossing: Wild World on the Nintendo DS. Now, players no longer had the need to be tied to a TV to play Animal Crossing. They could now play it anywhere! Not just that, but with the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, now they could play it with anyone, too. (Well, provided they had one another's friend codes, of course!)

Wild World's big deal was obviously online, so players could explore each other's towns, but so much more was added, as well. There was a higher level of character customization, touch screen support for a myriad of uses (such as inventory, inputting messages, creating various clothing and sign designs), and a new camera perspective which was more level with the player, allowing the view to show both the ground and sky. Various games in the series have since run with all of these ideas and many have done them better, but that doesn't stop Wild World from being a solid game still.

2) Animal Crossing: New Leaf (3DS)

The latest two Animal Crossing games focus more on customization and quality of life features to make for better games. It only makes sense then that these latest two entries are the ones I prefer the most. The first of which is Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which had its biggest new feature being that of serving as your town's mayor. As mayor, you could start public works projects to create new buildings, places of interest, and objects in your village, such as cafes, police stations, windmills, lighthouses, streetlamps, wells, bridges, and more. Ordinances could also be started to better suit your playing style, such as opening and closing shops earlier or later--depending on your preference--or asking your fellow villagers to help water plants so they wouldn't perish so easily.

The added freedom that was granted to players in crafting their own town experience in Animal Crossing: New Leaf is one of the major reasons why I adore it so much and can return to it to this day. Even with the newest game out now, New Leaf still has various reasons to keep coming back to its beautiful, auto-stereoscopic world.

1) Animal Crossing: New Horizons (NSW)

A game that couldn't have released at a better time, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the perfect getaway when most people can't literally "get away" from these chaotic times. And calling these times "chaotic" is a bit of an understatement. Regardless, with the pandemic and need for social distancing, players have found their islands in New Horizons to be a wonderful place of refuge for our weary world.

The amount of freedom that was found in New Leaf was exponentially increased in New Horizons, offering the ability to customize one's island to insane lengths. You can not just only place where you want buildings for island residents and places like shops and the museum to be located, but you can also terraform the heck out of your island, too--creating the paradise you've always dreamed of living in. The only obstacle is your imagination, and perhaps your patience, too, considering how long and lengthy of a process fine-tuning one's island can be!

Between amassing a massive collection of furniture, catching all of the local fauna through the game's four seasons, donating finds to the museum, participating in the Stalk Market, and the immense amount of updates provided by Nintendo, I've yet to grow bored of Animal Crossing: New Horizons through my nearly 200 hours of playtime. It is without question my favorite entry in the Animal Crossing franchise, and one of my favorite games in 2020 thus far.

All-Star Franchises, Underrated Entries - Part Fourteen

If you've been around SuperPhillip Central for a little while (it's still okay if you haven't, so no harm done), then you know that I like talking about underrated and overlooked games. I've done various series on the subject. However, most of the time, the games mentioned in these articles are from wholly new or overlooked franchises themselves.

There are also a multitude of series that I can think of that have one, two, or a handful of games in it that aren't viewed as highly as the others, whether just or not.

These ideas are where the concept of All-Star Franchises, Underrated Entries comes from, and since our 13th edition, I've come up with six more underrated entries to big-time franchises, some bigger than others. If you'd like to see past parts of this long-running series, check them out here:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

Part Ten

Part Eleven

Part Twelve

Part Thirteen

Sonic - Team Sonic Racing (PS4, XB1, NSW, PC)

Let's strike while the iron's hot popularity-wise as the Sonic the Hedgehog movie is fresh on moviegoers' minds. Team Sonic Racing comes from the same sub-series of racing games as Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, but it's not seen in the same caliber as those titles. Part of that reason is the total absence of SEGA's all-stars, instead having Team Sonic Racing adhere exclusively to--as the title of the game would suggest--characters within the Sonic the Hedgehog series. That said, the arcade racing gameplay remains in top form despite the lack of characters like AiAi, Samba, Ulala, Nights, et. al, and the added team mechanic works well for the game. Unfortunately, many snubbed Team Sonic Racing due to being seen as a step backwards for the Sonic racing franchise, but rest assured, the game is as high of a quality as you'd expect from the racing game masters at Sumo Digital.

Yoshi - Yoshi's Crafted World (NSW)

We're going to change from the fast, high octane realm of Team Sonic Racing to the more slow, plodding, and methodical pace of Yoshi's Crafted World. Most still believe that the original Yoshi's Island is the pinnacle of the Yoshi platforming series, but if you ask me, Yoshi's Woolly World surpassed it. As for its followup from Woolly World's developer Good Feel, Yoshi's Crafted World may have part of its charm removed from the lackluster soundtrack included (a massive step down from Yoshi's Woolly World, moreover Yoshi's Island), but everywhere else, charm pours out like water from a sugary sweet fountain. The multi-tiered level design, offering oodles of activity in the foregrounds and backgrounds, as well as constantly delivering new platforming gimmicks and challenges within each stage, made for some marvelously happy memories for me through playing Crafted World. Just how well Good Feel--for lack of a better word--"crafted" its levels from real life household objects much like a child would make for an elementary school diorama just oozed with creativity. Yoshi's Crafted World may not have been the best the Yoshi series has seen, but it's hardly a weak effort.

Animal Crossing - Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer (3DS)

Moving on from one mellow franchise to another, we have Animal Crossing, which recently saw a full blowout for its newest entry which launches on March 20th. Part of the customization features seen in New Horizons can be traced back to the options available in a spin-off entry in the franchise: Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer for the Nintendo 3DS. Now, perhaps this is damning the game with faint praise, but first and foremost, Happy Home Designer is by far a better game than the sickly and quite frankly, insulting Wii U spin-off, Amiibo Festival. To give better praise to Happy Home Designer, the amount of customization  was massive with placing furniture and channeling your inner Property Brother to make a magnificent floor plan for each and every animal that asks for your interior design services. While one could easily do the minimal amount of effort to satisfy a given animal's request, it was more enjoyable to put in the work and the effort to create a gorgeous happy home both on the inside and the outside for every animal that came your academy's way.

Professor Layton - Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy - Deluxe Edition (NSW)

Professor Layton may be missing, but his daughter Katrielle is more than capable of following in his footsteps to solve (decidedly more menial) mysteries! The game with such a long title that I will just shorten it to "Layton's Mystery Journey" features a dozen or so short, self-contained cases to solve instead of one major overarching one. This is better for short, bite-sized portable playing sessions, but it can also put off those hoping for something more complicated and convoluted that was previously the Professor Layton series's penchant. Still, you do get a multitude of brain teasers and puzzles to solve from a plethora of personality-rich characters to enjoy. The original Layton's Mystery Journey released on the Nintendo 3DS, and this Nintendo Switch version altered some of the puzzles around, even replacing several that required some of the 3DS's hardware capabilities. Despite removing several fan-favorite features and characters from the franchise, Layton's latest in the series is one not to miss.

Frogger - Frogger: Helmet Chaos (PSP)

Frogger is well known as a franchise that has players controlling the titular frog, hopping across hazard-filled rivers and streets, hoping not to fall in or get flatten, as the locale may permit. Frogger: Helmet Chaos on the PlayStation Portable took the franchise into familiar territory while also adding a whole new adventure element to the series. It was a mix of new and old while not straying too far away from the series's arcade roots like the home console iterations of the time for the Frogger franchise found themselves doing. Instead, Frogger: Helmet Chaos featured a top-down view with exploration elements, adventuring parts, and a unique level-based system that affected which level you'd stumble on to next depending on route choices made in the adventure. The latter offered an abundant amount of replay value for the game, and made it more than worthy of a second or even third play, depending on how much one enjoyed the chaos of Frogger's helmet-related adventure.

Soul Calibur - Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny (PSP)

Speaking of the PSP, let's turn to a well known fighting game franchise that didn't really have any favors done to it for being placed on Sony's handheld system. Being stuck on the PlayStation Portable meant that Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny languished in sales, but those that did get the privilege to play it found a meaty game worthy of the Soul Calibur name. It was essentially a well made version of the arcade and home console games put to a portable format, and it worked insanely great. You had a full fledged fighter that you could place in your pocket. The addition of Kratos as Broken Destiny's exclusive guest character was just the cherry on top of this sweet sundae of weapons-based combat goodness that was Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny.

Review Round-Up - September 2015

Build your own Mario masterpieces with Super Mario Maker,
SuperPhillip Central's Game of the Month for September.

SuperPhillip Central didn't receive its biggest total month of reviews-- far from it-- but it did have quality over quantity. We kicked off the month with Solatorobo: Red the Hunter, as a retro review that earned a B-. Then the Game of the Month, Super Mario Maker, scored an excellent A. Following that was another Nintendo DS retro review with Tony Hawk's American Sk8land, a much better product than what Activision recently put out with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5. Sk8land ollied into a B. Finally, two Nintendo 3DS reviews capped off the month, LBX: Little Battlers eXperience and Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer. They earned a B and a C respectively.

Solatorobo: Red the Hunter (DS) - B-
Super Mario Maker (Wii U) - A
Tony Hawk's American Sk8land (DS) - B
LBX: Little Battlers eXperience (3DS) - B
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer (3DS) - C

Not all was happy with Happy Home Designer, but I enjoyed
the customization options enough to give it a mild recommendation.

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer (3DS) Review

The other of the Nintendo 3DS reviews I was speaking of yesterday is for Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, a game that quenches my thirst for the fun customization options of the Animal Crossing series. However, as you'll see with my review, this thirst-quencher is quite shallow.

Home, Sweet, But Repetitive and Shallow Home

One of my most loved aspects of the Animal Crossing series outside of interacting with the various villagers of my town is the customization options allowed to me within the games. I adore updating my appearance through clothing styles, updating my house with the coolest furniture and decorating in smart ways, and keeping my style up to date. When Nintendo announced Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, a game focused on the customization aspects of the series, I jumped for joy... well, not literally. However, the final product is mired with shallow and repetitive gameplay despite having some glimpses of brilliance inside.

Starting out with Happy Home Designer, the character customization allows you to create your character your way without the traditional way of the series of some traveling cat asking you questions with the answers influencing your appearance. In Happy Home Designer, you get a selection of faces, hair styles, and skin colors (and yes, there's finally something for darker folks out there) to choose from. Like many things in the game, you can design your character your own way.

The internal clock isn't used like a typical Animal Crossing game. Instead, in Happy Home Designer, you go to your desk at the Happy Home Academy to save your data and progress to the next day. Each day you can do just one project, whether it be for the town plaza or for a villager.

Mingle with the townspeople (aka perspective clients)
and admire your handiwork in the town plaza.

Each villager that frequents the town plaza has a particular request for you to fulfill. This is always to get a themed room or house of some sort. For instance, starting out, a villager wants something as simple as something with an exotic series of furniture, while later on, the desires of the villagers get a little more complicated, perhaps a wedding themed house. However, as long as you use the two or three furniture pieces that are listed as must-haves you can go crazy and do whatever you want, sadly. Happy Home Designer does not punish you for otherwise going outside the particular vision your villager in question has.

Eat your heart out, Baskin Robbins.

Town plaza requests are a bit more involved due to having more than one room to worry about for the most part. You start out by choosing from a handful of building designs, and then you enter the building to your designing. There are projects like schools, shops, restaurants, and more to create delightful designs for. Again, though, you can go outside the box with your designs and won't be penalized for it.

Looks like a suitable waiting room for this hospital to me!
Let's open it up to patients, shall we, Isabelle?

This brings the question of what the point is for designing a room properly because it's impossible to fail a design challenge. Isabelle will simply inform you that you need to include a certain piece of furniture to satisfy the brain-dead simple conditions. Really, the only point is to satisfy yourself with a proper design. What you put into Happy Home Designer is what you get out of it. The experience is quite shallow, but the fun comes from designing a cool room to show off to your friends.

Ah, the great outdoors. Customize the house,
place trees and flowers, and just let your imagination run wild!

And you can show off creations not just to your friends but anyone in the online universe. You can upload your house designs to Nintendo's servers either after you've designed a creation or in between design sessions. The option to upload online designs does not appear until a good way through Happy Home Designer. However, viewing designs and getting people to like your own designs is quite fulfilling. It's just sad that the base game doesn't feel as rewarding.

What is rewarding, however, is how simple, easy, and intuitive it is to design homes both outside and indoor with Happy Home Designer's interface. No longer are you stuck pushing and pulling furniture in place like the traditional Animal Crossing games. Instead, you use the stylus to choose furniture, plop it down, and you can move and spin it around with pulls and taps of the stylus. Copying either furniture or patterns on the ground is as simple as holding the L button and tapping the desired item to be copied. You not only design the indoors of homes, but you can customize each villager's lawn with decorations, furniture, and even customize the appearance of their house with a large range of options and features. It's a great interface that I hope is used in future Animal Crossing games. It'd be an absolute travesty if it's not.

It's fulfilling to make a design that is appealing to the eye--
even if the game doesn't care how well you do it.

When you're not designing homes and town plaza projects you're unfortunately doing much. You can return to past creations and visit villagers, but sadly they only have about two lines of repeated dialogue to offer to you. Still, you can admire your work, and even add to it because new furniture options unlock as you take on new villager requests. For instance, that wedding themed house I mentioned earlier gives you a bunch of wedding themed furniture options to utilize. There is no need to purchase furniture yourself this time around. You can also use Play Coins to purchase new lessons in a book, which unlock new things like soundscapes for homes, fossils, fish, bugs, gyroids, and ceiling and window options, for starters.

Getting an early start on next month's Halloween holiday.

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is unfortunately shallow in its gameplay. Making a successful project is as simple as including two or three required items, making for a game that can sometimes feel as going through the motions. The only real reasons to make competent designs is to challenge yourself (because the game certainly won't) and impress the worldwide audience via the online sharing function. Overall, I enjoyed my time with Happy Home Designer just because I love the customization options so dearly. However, many will need something more to have a very good time, and it's a shame that Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer doesn't have it.

[SPC Says: C]