GBAtemp Recommends: Animal Crossing Deluxe
Sometimes dreams do come true. Perhaps that’s a little hyperbolic, but Animal Crossing is a game that has a lot of meaning to me, so when it was announced that the game had been fully decompiled after years of efforts from fans, my 10-year-old self’s dreams had been realized. Years of reading the Animal Crossing wiki, and pouring over details like new villagers, additional fish to catch, and outdoor decorations were going to be fulfilled. Soon, a high fidelity, modernized, open-source version of the original Animal Crossing, Japanese-exclusive features and all, would exist, on PC--what more could a fan want?
While the team behind the decompilation have yet to port their efforts to PC, you can still experience Dōbutsu no Mori e+ in English, in widescreen, and in HD. Quietly released in November of 2024 was the first iteration of Animal Crossing Deluxe, a romhack that utilized the lessons learned from the decompilation in order to create the “perfected” form of Animal Crossing for the Nintendo GameCube.
If you’ve ever wanted to revisit the nostalgia of the original entry into what is now one of Nintendo’s most successful IPs, this is, without a doubt, the best way to do so. Quality of life additions from 2008’s Animal Crossing: City Folk, or even aspects of 2020’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons have been amazingly backported into a 2003 GameCube port of a 2001 Nintendo 64 game. The level of detail and love that has gone into this romhack is equal parts amusing and amazing. If you really want to know how deep it all goes, there’s content from the 2006 Chinese iQue port of Animal Crossing, of all things.
At the time of writing, Animal Crossing Deluxe has just gotten patch #26, and is still seeing active development. With so many improvements, ranging from tool switching on the dpad, to removing the acre transitions, it genuinely feels like the perfect remaster. All the dated, sluggish elements have been removed, while still keeping the slow-paced charm that makes Animal Crossing so beloved. So many elements feel familiar, but there’s so much new content that it all feels fresh.
I’ve seen quite a lot of romhacks in my time, but this manages to be the most impressive one that I’ve ever experienced; not only did this require years of hard work in order to decompile the game and recreate it from scratch, the magnitude of effort that it must have taken to add every--and I mean every--little possible detail into the game is nothing short of staggering. Playing Animal Crossing in native 16:9, with higher quality text resolution is cool, but seeing something as deep of a cut as a few lines of unused data from a beta build of the game being reimplemented in perfect working order is insane, in the best possible way. That’s right: you can now throw paper airplanes, a feature that was cut from the game and has no practical use. But the fact that the developers made it work for no reason other than the novelty of it all is a testament to how much they love this game.
If you were too young to play Animal Crossing when it first released, but are hesitant to go back to an older game, or if you’ve wanted a reason to return to a game from your childhood, or especially if you’re someone who has always wanted to revel in the most complete experience of Dōbutsu no Mori e+ in English, then I can’t recommend this enough. This is a true love letter, by fans, for fans, just as the very best fanmade projects tend to be.
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