Animal Crossing New Horizons just released
not too long ago and it’s honestly got me thinking. Animal Crossing has come quite a long ways. I mean, we came from being a drifter with
only a few bells to their name, to becoming the mayor, to now basically becoming a god. We start off on ground zero again though as
we basically buy into a timeshare scam from Tom Nook, and the next thing we know we’re
whisked off to a deserted island where we will spend the rest of our days. But while I’m obviously pumped to play this
one for a long time, I can’t help but think back to the humble beginning of the series. And that’s why in this video, we’re going
to be giving the original Animal Crossing the old SwankyBox treatment. So join me for some out of bounds fun, some
strange documentation, and a whole lot of other weird things we’ll be covering. We’re going to the bizarre depths of Animal
Crossing, and I’ve brought along MissFushi along for the ride. She creates a lot of content focused on Animal
Crossing, so I thought she’d be a perfect fit for this video. And without further ado, let’s get started. I’m sure I’m not the only one who did
this as a kid, but I’m certainly guilty of altering time within the game. The clock in Animal Crossing is initially
influenced by the GameCube’s internal clock. Many of us figured this out early on, and
after playing the game for a while we realized that certain instances during the year means
people in our town send us free stuff. And who doesn’t like free stuff? So I did what all my friends did. I changed my GameCube’s clock to the max
year and booted up my town… And was greeted by a tsunami of gifts. Honestly, it was overwhelming. Now this in itself is cool, but what I really
want to touch on is how Animal Crossing as a game only has a timeline that lasts 30 years. While the game came out in late 2001 in Japan
on the GameCube at least, most of us didn’t get to pick it up until September of 2002
in the United States. However, by that point Animal Crossing’s
inner clock was already ticking. Because despite us changing our GameCube clocks
to the year 2099, Animal Crossing caps out at 2030. Going the opposite way, even if we mess with
our GameCube to load an unobtainable year like 1980, Animal Crossing will still stop
at January 1st, 2001. It’s kind of neat for a lot of reasons because
that means probably the least played time period for anyone within Animal Crossing is
the year 2001. The Japanese version of the game for the Nintendo
64 came out in April of 2001, but those first four months of the year are still no man’s
land unless you messed with your system. Because the game came out after that point,
and there was no real benefit to going back in time. We simply started our towns in our current
year. Now, I’m a pretty sentimental guy, so thinking
that Animal Crossing’s end is coming in less than 10 years is kinda bizarre. After new years in 2030, the year 2030 simply
repeats over and over again. For some reason that makes me pretty sad. Obviously there’s no way anyone could probably
play the game for that entire timespan, but it kind of dampens any sort of New Years celebration
that could occur. 2030 becomes a year long Groundhog’s Day… All aboard! Kapp’n is a fellow that will take you over
to an island just south of town in Animal Crossing, assuming you have a Game Boy Advance
hooked up to your system. I never could do this as a kid when I was
super into the first Animal Crossing, so I missed out on this place for a while. You get to name the island when you first
make your way over to it. Regardless of what season it is, you’ll
arrive on a warm, summer-time island. And this is one of the greatest appeals of
it. It's always warm here and can contrast the
winter woes of the colder months. But the thing is, this actually isn’t 100%
true. Animal Island actually does reflect whatever
season it currently is. It’s just that during the boat ride with
Kapp’n, the game loads in the summer theme for the island. Because the player always has to take the
boat between the island and the mainland, the seasons are always swapped out during
the voyage. However, if we break out of bounds and walk
across the water, we’ll notice that the island isn’t always summer. It’s covered in snow just like every other
place during winter - and the contrast is really, really strange. You have all these tropical things sprouting
out of the ground like the coconuts in the palm trees, yet it’s a winter wonderland. It's kind of neat to know that this area’s
weather is defined by the boat ride over to here. So, most players know that Animal Crossing’s
map is laid out on a grid. When your player crosses over from one square
to the next, the camera pans and the next area loads. Honestly, it’s pretty similar to how Luigi’s
Mansion’s grid system works in my opinion. The only difference is that Animal Crossing’s
can be glitched sometimes if you mess with it enough. This will cause objects to load in as transparent
and you won’t be able to see them until you initiate a reload of that same specific
square. For the entire game we’re confined to this
small grid. But I always wanted to see more. I wanted to see what the greater world was
like beyond the confines of our small area. With some exploits, we can actually break
out of the boundaries of our world and explore a little deeper. For starters, we’re capable of exploring
the train tracks. Both lead into tunnels that carry on past
the entrance for quite a ways. Our player begins to walk out into a black
void, but the collision and walls for the tunnel are still there. Heading up north, I was always fascinated
with the stream that was beyond the railroad system. You definitely become fixated on strange things
when you’ve spent months confined to the same area. If we enter the water, we’re actually free
to move around it and follow it up north. It actually comes around a small bend and
then disappears into a cliffside. What’s neat is that I’ve actually had
a fish spawn way up here before. Wasn’t able to catch it to see what it was,
but I was caught off guard when I saw its shadow swirling around. Alongside the edges of the map are actually
super high walls that we can’t get over. Trying to load the character onto them actually
moves them insanely high into the air and the camera simply culls out everything into
a black void. However, there are some areas on the map that
we can explore past the edges. For starters, the bottom right corner of the
map actually has a complete textureless area that can be walked on. It’s above the edges of the cliff and the
edges of the ocean are down below it. Beyond that, the ocean actually extends out
quite a ways. There’s plenty of areas in it that we don’t
actually see since Kapp’n doesn’t takes us out that way on the boat. The grid system’s camera tracking doesn’t
break in any of these areas either, so it’s pretty neat to truly feel out the edges of
the world. Heading back over to Animal Island, there
is one thing I wanted to touch on again. During the boat ride over to the island and
back over from it, there are a few things that can happen. For starters, trying to catch a ride with
Kapp’n when there is no actual town to go back to is quite interesting. You start off on your journey as usual until
Kapp’n has an existential crisis and just decides he’s not going to paddle. The boat drifts away from the dock for a bit
as your character just stares with a “this is fine” type expression as the game just
crashes. Silly game breaks aside, when you’re on
a normal boat ride there’s always something I wanted to know. Are you able to catch the fish that you pass
by on your way down? There are fish that sit idly by in the ocean
that Kapp’n normally rows past. But these aren’t the only fish in the ocean. There’s actually a few different ones located
in areas that Kapp’n will never row out to. The map for the ocean is actually pretty big
and it spans several grid spaces. Out in the middle of the ocean, where the
player would never venture, are just fish chilling. Whether through a glitch or an exploit, if
our character gains access to the water on foot this also allows us to equip a fishing
rod too. So, I figured I’d try seeing if these fish
could actually be caught. But regardless of what I did, the fish would
not bite. Given that these fish are frozen in place
and never disappear, I imagine these are just textures of the fish and aren’t actually
tied to an actual fish object. So, they can’t interact with the fishing
rod. Kind of a bummer, but I guess it makes sense
since the player would never be out here anyways. Apparently there’s a rare chance for a whale
to spawn beneath Kapp’n’s boat too, but I’ve personally never had it occur for me. The ocean is a mysterious place… I think most of us in Animal Crossing are
accustomed to the idea of visiting another town. We hitch a train ride over and we can check
out someone else’s area. It was a lot of fun and a pretty neat concept,
even if it was localized and only doable by memory cards at the time. But what’s interesting is that there are
lots of parallel worlds alongside the instanced town we are able to explore. In the game files there are tons of test maps
and debug areas that the game developers used to test out characters and objects. The land in these areas is often really strange
and doesn’t make sense. Sometimes you’ll stumble upon maps full
to the brim with apples, and in others you’ll find entire areas filled with pitfalls to
test out how the falling animation played on different slope angles with the ground. And while hopping around to different test
maps is cool and all, there’s actually something really neat about the concept. Regardless of where you are in the test worlds
your save file will still be referenced. I find this super interesting because event
sequences like Tom Nook’s series of tasks for you still hold true in these test maps. The items you pick up and decisions you make
here can affect your main game. One of these maps has like three shops for
Tom Nook and some floating squares you can climb on. It’s pretty trippy. I remember going into one during my first
day on the job and getting scolded that I didn’t mail someone the letter I was supposed
to yet. To make things even more bizarre, this loading
function can be utilized on the title screen too as a way to body snatch the auto-generated
characters. You force them to load into a test map, and
then we can really have some fun. One of the test maps in particular have the
top left house loaded as a tile, and the nice thing about the title screen characters are
that they own this house by default. This means we have access to their mailbox
and their memory card save function. Checking their mailbox reveals a ton of very
strange letters that are kind of creepy. The game is also at the very start, despite
us fully owning our house. If you save and quit, our data is saved to
the memory card slot. But when we try to reload it, unfortunately
K.K. tells us that our town data is corrupted and we need to delete it. To fix this, instead of saving our data, we
start the saving process and then abandon it halfway through. For example, if you try to save over existing
data that isn’t the title screen character, the game won’t let you do it and it will
prompt you to continue playing. This action allows us to now exit the house
forcing the game to load the true town map for our title screen character. But there’s a major problem with this. Since we didn’t create our character or
town, the game never auto-generated us a town to enter. So the game loads us into a black void that
goes on forever. We even step out of a house that doesn’t
exist. We are free to go wherever we want and the
map never ends. The grid still exists, but if we check out
in-game map, we can see that the positioning system glitches out. Boundaries were never set. I ran about 20 areas west and still encountered
nothing. It’s truly purgatory and there is nothing
we can do. I hope you enjoyed all give of these Animal
Crossing oddities! Before signing off, I want to thank MissFushi
for helping out with this video. I highly recommend checking out her channel
as she’s covering a multitude of Animal Crossing things over there and diving straight
into everything about New Horizons. If you have a moment, swing on over to her
channel right now and say hello. You can find a link to her channel in the
description below and at the end of this video. And with that… Thanks for watching guys and gals, and until
my next video - cheers!
