VS
Fighter Profiles:
Name: Animal Crossing Wild World Enchanted Folk and the School of Wizardry
Genre: Life Sim Fantasy Life Sim
Developer: Nintendo Konami
Release Date: March 2006 March 2009
Price: £15 - 25 Approx £ 15 - £25 Approx
Animal Crossing Wild World and Enchanted Folk and the School of Wizardry (otherwise known as Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times) are two Life Simulation games on the Nintendo DS, both very similar. Animal Crossing has been running since the days of the N64 and Wild World is the 3rd game in the series, Enchanted Folk is the product of Konami's sight of the AC sales figures and a sheet of binary tracing paper. Both AC and EF are based around life in a town, with animals for your neighbours, it's a bit of a strange concept and one that to any really hardcore gamer that just likes to blow shit up in Call of Duty would just seem really, really dull, but as a matter of fact, it's not. The only real difference between these two is the addition of fantasy into EF, but is it actually any better than it's rival which came 3 years earlier? Let the battle commence!
Round 1: Plot/Concept
As I said before the plot and concept for both of these games are similar, it's life, you live, you do what you would do in a town, there's not much else to it, and this would make them pretty much the same, but thankfully both titles have just a little something that makes them unique, different 'goals and objectives' so to say. Animal Crossing sees you move in to a small coastal town, get a house, and then pay of the debt you have accumulated by buying your house. It sounds like something most people would want to stay away from, ''DEBT' wow that sounds really fun, but sarcasm aside, it's not as bad as it sounds, there's no tax man, heck you don't even have to pay it off if you don't want to, the only benefit you get from paying off the debt is a slightly bigger house, which to be honest is great, oh and did i mention you get an even bigger debt to go with it? On the other side of the... uh... Trees, Enchanted Folk sees you enrolling into and attending a magic school with your fellow villagers, learning a number of spells while you try and become an ultimate wizard, and occasionally solving the odd mystery that arises as well, it's all a nice touch and with a few more actual things to do in terms of Primary Objectives, Enchanted Folk wins this round!
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| AC: You have many more options for how to design your home, take this lovely cold storage style for example: "Hey! Turn down the AC!" |
Round 2: Graphics/Visuals
With both games being on the DS, it's very easy to compare how the two games look fairly, but Animal Crossing does have a handicap being 3 years older than its rival. Both games llok awfully similar, but AC does seem to be quite... I'm no sure how to say it really, the shapes are less defined I suppose, the pixels seem to stickout the the point that you'd think you were seeing an animated story of Minecraft, It looked great for the time, but it has to be said that Enchanted Folk's visuals are better, what you can see is more defined and precise and you wouldn't notice that everything was made up of pixels unless your eyes were close enough to the screen that a man would come out of nowhere to tell you 'You should have gone to Specsavers', so somehow Enchanted Folk goes 2-0 up after winning round 2.
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| EF: "You're a wizard Harry" "I'm a what?" |
Round 3: Collectibles/Museum
Both games have a series of things for you to collect in order to keep you entertained throughout your town life. At the beginning of Animal Crossing, there's an empty museum in town and it wants you to donate to it by finding fossils and paintings, and catching insects and fish, there's no real reward for handing these things in and theoretically you could forget the museum and just sell all that stuff straight out to the store, the Museum only needs one of each item though, so it's really worthwhile donating to the museum, no-one else in town will (unless there's someone else playing your game) and viewing your donations in the galleries, whether it's dinosaur bones towering above you or the tuna you just caught swimming right in front of your eyes, there's really something quite magical about it. Enchanted Folk on the other hand has a tower with two talking books, a kind one that records data of the fish it's eaten, and a spiteful one that records data on bugs it's eaten, no fossils and no paintings. If you want to make any money off the fish or bugs you catch you have to take it to these guys, otherwise you can't sell it and cycling through the book's dialogue over and over again just ends up feeling like such a chore that soon enough you won't even bother catching their food in the first place, you don't even get a magical aquarium to see the fish, you just look in the books mouth and it tells you stuff, it's really very dull. It's no contest, Animal Crossing definitely wins here making the score 1-2
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| AC: Bones... They're watching you |
Round 4: Dialogue
Obviously in a game where half of what you do is talk to people, dialogue can get a bit repetitive, thankfully the people (Animals?) of Animal Crossing seems to have enough different topics on their minds to last a few months, which means you won't really be hearing the same mindless babble over and over again every time you speak to them. The dialogue in Enchanted Folk is slightly more humorous and quirky, which would be a great thing IF they had more to say, if you talked to one character enough you could hear probably everything they have to say in about an hour or two, and you can only hear a joke so many times before just going "Uggghhhh....." But probably the biggest joke in all of Enchanted Folk is the ridiculous rumors these children seem to hear, the other day I was told "Hey, did you hear that ... and Nina, going steady ..." it's like the game likes to build it's rumors out of people and things that don't exist, to the point where they just don't make any sense at all. The way the dialogue works in Enchanted Folk is pants, so it's another clear win for Animal Crossing, 2 -2
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| EF: No shit Sherlock, now shouldn't you be teaching that first!? |
Round 5: Controls
It's safe to say that Animal Crossing's controls are very user-friendly, they're nice and precise, with fitting controls for each task you'd have to perform they're simple to understand and use, meaning you can't blame the controls when a rare and particularly touchy fish gets away. Enchanted folk falls a bit short really though, I found in many places the controls were very fiddly and in places, badly laid out or used or even just overly complicated. Fishing in EF for example requires you to hold the 'X' button to charge a cast, release it to set the cast, and repeatedly tap 'X' to very slowly reel the line in, whereas in AC all it takes is a quick push of the more conveniently positioned 'A' button to set the line and a quick push to pull it out, it doesn't need to be any more complicated. When bug catching in EF your character uses a little horizontal swing which will often miss the target, but in AC he uses a more precise vertical swing, it's a minor change but it makes a big difference to the ease of bug catching. The last thing to say really is how easy it is to screw up with the EF controls, I've often tried to turn or move furniture in my dorm room, for example, but I don't know if it's just me but I feel they've made a bad choice in what button does what, I often confidently pick up a piece of my furniture when I try to move it because the button layout is so poor and getting a particular piece in a particular place can take ages because the game just doesn't seem to be able to tell that putting a particular piece of furniture here stops me from leaving! EF definitely falls short here, 3-2 to Animal Crossing
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| AC: Nina finally discovers Whitney is a lesbian |
Round 6: Everything Else
There's only really three things to talk about here, punishment, holidays and clothing.
In the clothing front, the AC outfits are very well designed and actually look like something I'd want to wear out on the town, there's something particularly nice about Stary Sky Tee, the EF clothes? Don't even go there, they look pretty bad when they're not just one plain colour and that's not going into detail, sure clothes are not that important in a game like this, but with designer labels and all that crap being the focus of the modern younger generation, you'd have thought they'd have tried harder.
If you take a holiday or something, say you're just too busy to play for a few days, AC has a function which lets you change what time it is, so not only could you play multiple days in one real day, you could also go back in time two weeks when if you take a holiday, that way you won't have a hideous town full of weeds to wake up. On the EF side of things, there is no such system, so not playing for weeks or months like I had just before turning on today results in your favourite towns-person GONE (that happened to me today... Cherry...), you also get a whole load of angry friends and a house full of mushrooms which take forever to pick up because your inventory gets full and you have to start cycling through hundreds of menus. No, just... No.
The last thing is punishment, as in, what happens when you turn off without saving. Well, in AC you're subjected to an annoying long conversation from everyone's favorite mole 'Mr. Ressetti', he gives you a nice long lecture on why you shouldn't turn off without saving, then you can get on with your life all happy, and each time you do it the talk gets longer so don't get tempted to do it all the time to piss him off. In the EF world, for the same crime you get forced to clean the staff room, a particularly fiddly task that will take at least 3 laps around the room to complete because the person watching you won't let you clean the same place twice despite it having multiple blobs of dirt on it, his interruptions get really annoying and it becomes even more of a chore than it already is.
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| EF: Games about school, who ever thought that was a good idea? It's only been managed once and that's only because it was about bullying! |
This last thing applies only to EF, but in this one you can actually get a boyfriend/girlfriend, which is very strange in a world half populated by animals, I remember my first Enchanted Folk girlfriend was a pink hedgehog called Sparkles. Needless to say this makes me wonder whether Konami support beastiality and whether someone somewhere is drawing some rather disturbing porn involving everyone's favourite reviewer and many pink spines... *shudders*
So all in all, it's not a whitewash but the clear victor is Animal Crossing, stick to Yugioh games Konami, this just isn't good enough.
Look forward to the next Spicy Chicken Bites where we'll have a special guest writer!