The Animal Crossing games have always been a source of cute, wholesome fun. Sure, the villagers in the older games (especially Animal Crossing on the GameCube) are totally unafraid to tell you if they don’t like you, and you can be verbally attacked by an angry mole, but the series is still considered to be home to some of the best cozy games ever made. For that reason, I never expected that buying a copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World would be so emotionally devastating.
Let’s backtrack. Up until November 2023, I’d never played the 2005 Nintendo DS iteration of Animal Crossing, but as a committed fan of both New Leaf and New Horizons, I figured I was long overdue a trip into the series’ history to explore one of the games that I’d missed. However, now being almost 20 years old, trying to buy a brand-new copy of Wild World without breaking the bank is nigh-on impossible, so I settled on picking up a preowned copy. What could possibly go wrong?
