Editorial: Animal Crossing on Wii U is something I don’t want to play

The Animal Crossing series might have started its life on the Nintendo 64, a home console and Nintendo is definitely working on the very next installment of the series for the Wii U as well as we speak. That to me just sounds boring and isn’t something I actually want to play anymore. I can’t get excited for simply just another home console Animal Crossing.

I believe the future of the series is portable and Nintendo don’t have to wait for the next handheld to bring it to us and they can even make the Wii U one too – we’ll need it.

Out there in this huge world of ours, everyone leads a different life, the majority of people however are working during the day. If they’re not working they’re at school, looking after kids, studying at university. Whatever it may be, it’s during the day. Some people might be lucky enough to work at home or have a different working situation but for the majority of people, this is the reality.

Animal Crossing is a game that can be played and should be played anytime, whenever you can and whenever you want to play it, coming home after work and playing it after a day of work between all the things you have to do after work just isn’t any fun. It’s the same time of day, the same events and you miss everything else that happens in the other waking hours.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf introduced Town Ordinances which did help with this a lot, you could be an Early Bird and have everything open earlier or have the Night Owl one enacted and stay up late with your villagers. All great but it did mean you couldn’t enact the other two and more useful ordinances.

That’s the Nintendo 3DS version of the game, you know the one you can play anywhere anyway. On the way to work or school, on your lunch break, in your cubicle away from the bosses’ eyes or in bed late at night. A console version offers no such flexibility, I just can’t get excited for a game anymore that will tether me to my TV overnight – it’s not how I want to play Animal Crossing anymore and you should expect more from it too.

Ask anyone with a Nintendo 3DS and that has a copy of Animal Crossing – chances are it’s their most played game with hundreds if not thousands of hours clocked up – Try doing that in front of your TV.

Let’s not kid ourselves here, just how much is a Wii U version of Animal Crossing actually going to sell?

If you look at the top selling games for the Wii worldwide on Nintendo’s website, there isn’t any sign of Animal Crossing: City Folk/Let’s go to the City at all. The last game Nintendo lists on that is Super Smash Bros. Brawl on 12 million. How much did City Folk actually sell? 3.38 million, that’s nothing compared to 101 million Wii units out there.

Now look at the sales of the DS iteration, Animal Crossing: Wild World. That game worldwide has sold 11.73 million units on a user base of 165 million consoles. Even though there is 25% more Nintendo DS consoles in the world, the game sold 236% better than the Wii version.

What about more recently? Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the Nintendo 3DS has sold 7.66 million copies on the much smaller user base of 45 million – just how much is a Wii U version going to sell on user base of 7.2 million sales? We already know that console Crossings’ don’t sell well, the Wii U version is poised to sell poorly.

Nintendo shouldn’t totally give up on the Wii U version of the game, they instead should just go about it another way.

What Nintendo should do with the game next is clear and that is to leverage the power of the Nintendo 3DS.

The next Animal Crossing game is going to be on the Wii U, no doubt about that. But what about if you could continue to play in and visit your village while you’re on the road? Nintendo could and should make a Nintendo 3DS ‘companion’ game, no one is going to simply buy New Leaf again but if Nintendo are going to make a brand new game on the Wii U with new features, characters and ideas why not be able to continue those adventures on the go.

The idea would be that the Nintendo 3DS ‘game’ would sync either online or locally to your Wii U machine and you could continue to play where you left the Wii U version. Both consoles feature the ability to download data in the background or while asleep, your Animal Crossing life could continue anytime you were connected to the internet.

You could have your ‘gates’ open on home console 24/7 and your 3DS could ‘ring’ and you let people in via the portable version.

It’s unlikely Nintendo would patch Animal Crossing: New Leaf to do this, the kind of crazy infrastructure to do that would likely mean a lot more work than simply making it all sync up.

We shouldn’t settle for just another console iteration of Animal Crossing, I’m over playing the game tethered to my TV and it appears consumers are too. Let Animal Crossing go free, use both consoles’ abilities to their full extent and let people play the game how they like.

What about you?