Title: Doubutsu no Mori Double Pack
Classification: Tablets of Life
Date obtained: September 3rd, 2024

Description: ok, look, i know i made a big deal in the Onett Map entry that i want to stick to a "one item per entry" standard, but like... come on. these two arrived together in the same package, wrapped in the same brown paper, and are two different versions of the same game. and that game is the original Animal Crossing, though since these are Japanese versions of the game, it'd be more accurate to call it どうぶつの森, (Doubutsu no Mori) or, Animal Forest, as it's often called by fans. I'm quite a big fan of the series myself, and while i do really like the other games in the series (and fucking despise New Horizons for dumb old lady "back in my day" type reasons) there's no denying that my favorite game in the series is Animal Crossing for Gamecube.

there's something just so utterly fascinating about ACGC that just speaks to me on a different level. before AC had a set vibe, before they had a formula, before everything was standardized, ACGC was this weird, experimental game that just sort of came out of nowhere and had all these crazy ideas for a game that came out in the 2001 gaming landscape. in this era of games getting bigger, badder, more mainstream, more violent, here was this quirky little lifesim with all these weird little guys in it, looking like a Nintendo 64 game, (because it was) housing all these weird little secrets that you just sort of had to figure out on your own or learn by talking to the animals in your town. the game punished you for resetting because there's no resetting in real life, so why should you be able to in this life sim? you had to keep track of dates to make sure you didn't miss out on any events, you could form a daily routine, there were things in the game that, without messing with the ingame clock, would take you a full year to complete, at minimum. and on top of all this, there were buckets and buckets of features and mechanics and ideas that lived and died in this entry alone. monthly raffle tickets, a journal you could write anything you wanted into, a museum you had to mail your fossils away to so they could be identified, a minigame where an androgynous giraffe would make you clean her car, a gyroid outside your house that you could put items up for sale in?? and teach it a message to say to people when they talked to it??? and the list just goes on and on and on... and that is why i love ACGC. it feels so completely different from every other AC game, not just in terms of gameplay, but atmosphere, writing and music. and all of that is so i can lead into telling you that there's not just one version of this game. not just two either. no, there's a whopping FIVE DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF ACGC. and they all have their own little weird version specific quirks and differences.

now as much as i'd absolutely love nothing more than to talk your ear off about all five versions of this game, i really don't wanna lose your attention. you've read this far, and you probably want me to get to the damn point already. fine, fine, but just listen to me ramble for a moment longer. the five different versions of ACGC are as follows:

Doubutsu no Mori (N64, 2000)
Doubutsu no Mori+ (GC, 2001)
Animal Crossing (GC, 2002)
Doubutsu no Mori e+ (GC, 2003)
Dongwu Senlin (iQue Player, 2006)

i know that's a lot, so i'll just give the basic rundown of each. Doubutsu no Mori was the original release for Nintendo 64, Doubutsu no Mori+ was an updated port of DnM to Gamecube that added a ton of new features, that version was then localized and released in America as Animal Crossing with a few MORE new features, and then THAT version was retranslated back into Japanese and updated to add a LOT more new features and released in Japan as Doubutsu no Mori e+. and then there's Dongwu Senlin, which is a Chinese translation of the Nintendo 64 game that was released in the year of our lord 2006 on a China-only device called the iQue Player, and... y'know what? fuck it, i've got time to talk about the iQue Player.

the iQue Player was a weird little controller developed by the Chinese branch of Nintendo, aptly named iQue. because of China's strict laws on censorship, videogames, and Japanese themes in said videogames, Nintendo had to be crafty about how they brought their stuff over to China. because China's laws banned videogame consoles, Nintendo made a weird little controller that had the specs of an N64 built into it, which you would plug directly into your TV and play games off of. i think it was battery powered, but i'm not sure. it only played N64 games that were specially ported to it, and it had a library of a whopping 14 whole games. of all the games ported to it, the last one was Animal Crossing, which was called Dongwu Senlin. hey by the way, this thing was released in 2003, and wasn't discontinued until 2016. that's longer than the damn Wii's lifespan!!

sorry. got sidetracked. thinking about the iQue Player makes this little ticking noise start happening in my head, and the only way i can get it to go away is talking about the iQue player. back on topic, i got the first and last versions of ACGC, DnM and DnMe+. i wanted DnM because you're only allowed to do speedruns of any version of ACGC if its running on actual hardware, no emulation allowed, and i needed a real cartridge of the game to be able to beat my old (terrible) PB. and i got DnMe+ because it's a really fascinating version of ACGC, having a ton of new and completely unique features that we never got in the west. stuff like being able to make structures in your town, new bugs and fish to catch, a ton of villagers that would later become HUGE fan favorites (Bella, Francine, Moe, Felicity, Lolly, Tasha, Roscoe, and loads more) and even fucking... DLC?? yeah, using the eReader, an accessory you'd plug into your Gameboy Advance that would let you scan these little cards to get new stuff in other games or see little programs run on your GBA, you could actually get brand new villagers that were not on the disc already and have them move into your town. that's just... insane to me. they were able to store all the data for a villager, including their species, catchphrase, house layout, personality type, and TEXTURES into one itty bitty dot code on a paper card. no NFC stuff like amiibo or anything like that. e+ is a really cool version of ACGC, and i'm pretty sad we didn't get it over here in the west. that being said, i'm using e+ to help train myself, because as of recent i've been learning bits and pieces of Japanese! it's a good game to teach yourself a language with, or at least use supplementarily to practice with, since there's so much of a focus on text and dialog. e+ also holds a special place in my heart, since it was one of the first games i ever REALLY worked hard to get good at the speedrun with. sure, there was Parappa the Rapper 2 and Space Funeral before it, and while i don't want to devalue my time and experiences with those games and communities since they taught me a lot of valuable lessons as a speedrunner, e+ (and AC as a whole) was the first game where i felt like i was competing against more than just a handful of people. back in May of 2020 when i got my sub 40 time in All Debts, it was a 4th place time and i was really proud of it. it was the first time in my speedrunning career where i had gotten a time that was both near the top of the leaderboard AND above a lot of other people, and it felt good. so i guess i just wanted a real copy of the game as a memento of that. (and who knows maybe i'll come back to the game after all these years someday and crush that time)