Since I started this channel,
I've run into a few comments asking, "what are you going to do when you run
out of things to talk about in Animal Crossing?" I mean, surely there aren't that many
more interesting things to talk about. Well, it turns out, the more I get involved with this game,
the more interesting things that I find! So, I wouldn't worry about running out of content anytime soon. To prove my point, this video will not focus on a single topic. Rather, today's video is going to feature ten of the most interesting, technical, and slightly useless things that you didn't know about the original Animal Crossing. Now, these types of videos have been done before... ...but I can practically guarantee
you'll learn something new from this one! So, let's dive in! First, it's well known that Animal Crossing got its start
on the Nintendo 64 in Japan, released as Dōbutsu no Mori. Since then, this one N64 title has been
enhanced and re-released several times across multiple versions and consoles. For the GameCube releases, it's important to note that,
at heart, these are essentially ports of a Nintendo 64 game. The key word here is "port," since Animal Crossing
does not emulate the Nintendo 64. The game instead runs the code natively,
without the use of a built-in emulator. Couple this with the fact that the GameCube has about
five times the processing power as the Nintendo 64, with significantly more memory... and you have a console that is
pretty overqualified to run this game! In fact, nearly all of the contents on Animal Crossing's disc
fit inside the GameCube's random access memory, or RAM. This means that the disc is only
required for booting into your town, and you can actually take the disc out of
the console mid-play without consequence. From here, you're free to play the game normally,
and the only thing you'll need the disc for is to load the NES games if you want to play those. But, other than that, you can have fun ejecting your disc mid-game and watch the game still function 100% normally, which is pretty cool! The title theme of the original Animal Crossing
is iconic, and one of my favorites of the series. In game, this theme plays on the title screen
and only plays for about 60 seconds before fading out. However, the actual theme for the game is a bit longer. You'll normally never hear the full theme in game, but you actually can if you use the same
disc ejection trick we just talked about. By ejecting the disc at just the right moment
when the first little demo scene plays, the game brings up a warning message
which prevents the music from fading out. With this message active, you can now
listen to the entire extended title theme, which runs about 20 seconds longer than normal. Have a listen to the normal fade out vs. the extended version! In a previous video, I briefly showed off this
gyroid face texture that your player gets when you reset while traveling on the train to another town. This is actually one of the most replayed parts of that video,
and I got a lot of comments questioning why it occurs. Contrary to what some may tell you,
this is neither a glitch nor a programming bug. This is specifically coded to occur
when you reset while visiting another player. In fact, the actual cause for this has been decompiled, and a flag, called "player_decoy_flag," is set to 'true' whenever you load your save without having
returned home from your previous session. This flag is responsible for changing
your face texture to that of a gyroid, which is actually a normal face type in the game that you can
set for yourself if you play around with save editors. To put the final nail in the coffin that this is not a glitch, Nintendo themselves actually acknowledged this gyroid face
in the official Nintendo Power Player's Guide of the game. Here, they were refer to it as a "weird zombie-looking character"
if you reset while visiting another player. I'm not sure if anyone knows exactly
why Nintendo programed this to occur, but it's likely just a scary punishment to serve as a
reminder to talk to your gyroid and always save your game. Throughout the Animal Crossing series, the weather is randomized depending on your month and season... ...for the most part. While this weather is normally harmless, specific weather patterns can actually
prevent certain outdoor events from taking place. For example, the morning aerobics that are normally
held between July 25th and August 31st, are canceled entirely if it is raining. The 'aerobics radio' is an exclusive item from this event, and it is gifted to you by Tortimer once
you attend aerobics fourteen times total. But, due to the randomized weather, there is actually
a 10% chance of rain on each day of this event... ...except for August 12th,
which is cleared for the meteor shower. Thus, there is actually an extremely small chance
that there is too much rain in a certain year for you to actually attend fourteen
times and get that exclusive radio. But when I say small chance,
I really mean a minuscule chance... Animal Crossing fan "Icy" actually did the math and
determined that there was a 1 in 38 billion chance for it to rain enough to prevent you
from obtaining the aerobics radio. Of course, this is practically an impossibility, but you technically could get unlucky enough
with the weather to prevent your participation reward. Though perhaps if you're that unlucky, you might
have bigger problems than obtaining a virtual radio. If you're familiar with the Animal Crossing series, you'll likely know that all of the painting items
in-game reference real world paintings. Of course, Animal Crossing is able to get away with this because all of these paintings are works of art
that have entered the public domain. However, in the original Dōbutsu no Mori, there are actually two paintings that were not yet public domain in certain jurisdictions when the game was released. The "Novel Painting" was based on Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, painted in 1930. And the "Dreadful Painting" was based on The Scream
by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, painted in 1893. For the unfamiliar, in most countries
outside of the United States, copyright is typically valid for the entirety
of the artist's life plus an additional 70 years... ...with some exceptions on when this rule comes into effect. Coincidentally, since both Mondrian
and Munch passed away in 1944, their works would not enter the public
domain in some jurisdictions until 2015. So, likely to prevent potential legal issues, Nintendo replaced both of these paintings in subsequent versions of the first generation of Animal Crossing games. These paintings were replaced with the "Healing Painting,"
based off Claude Monet's "Woman with a Parasol," and the "Lovely Painting," based off
Pierre-Auguste Renoir's "Portrait of Irène Cahen d'Anvers" In the North American version of Animal Crossing, the original
two paintings still technically exist in the game's item IDs, but they have a dummy model
and cannot be donated to the museum. It turns out there's a special interaction with Resetti,
exclusive to the Japanese e+ version of the game Specifically, in this version, there is new Resetti dialogue
for whenever you reset without saving. During one of these new interactions, Resetti will prevent
you from quickly progressing the dialogue boxes... ...so you can't progress them faster by mashing buttons. Instead, he will give you his usual rant slowly,
with no way to speed up the dialogue. But, as an Easter egg, if you attempt to
speed through his rant by mashing buttons... Resetti will actually stop mid-sentence and scream
at you to cut it out with all the "click clack click"! Funnily enough, the game actually keeps track of
how many times you input a button during this interaction, and Resetti will actually tell you this number during this scene. Curious on how high this goes, I set up turbo-button controls, and was able to get Resetti to count
over one-thousand inputs during his speech! So if Resetti can truly hear every input... I apologize... Similar to the gyroid face, a similar Animal Crossing legend
and Easter egg involves the humongous fish shadow that appears when you ride Kapp'n's boat to the island. This huge fish has about a 1% chance of spawning, and can normally only spawn in the deep sea,
which is way out beyond our own beaches. This fish is actually not a fish at all,
and the game's code refers to it as a whale! And, since this whale is only coded to spawn in the deep sea, you can normally only see it
if you ride Kapp'n's boat out to the island. Naturally, many people early on dismissed the whale as a
rumor due to the extremely low odds of ever seeing one. But, rest assured, the whale is a very real thing
and specifically programmed into the game. And yes, I know what you're thinking -- if the whale is treated as a normal fish that
can be spawned, then how do we catch this thing? Regulars of this channel may recall a
glitch I've discussed before that allows you to get out-of-bounds by
abusing special collision interactions, such as those from snowballs or sign boards. So, all we need to do is glitch out-of-bounds and get lucky with
a whale spawn out in the deep sea and finally catch it, right? Well, everything seems to line up here... ...you are able to walk on water,
the fishing rod works perfectly while out-of-bounds, and the whale spawn is not tied to the Kapp'n boat ride... So, yes, you can actually go out-of-bounds
and see the whale for yourself. However, there's unfortunately one glaring issue... That is, fish spawned outside of rivers, lakes,
and the beach acres do not function properly. More specifically, fish spawned in these
deep sea acres simply stay in their default animation and do not get spooked or react to your fishing rod lure. This is why, in all videos of the whale, it is a stationary shadow
simply sitting there while Kapp'n's boat chugs along. So, unfortunately, the whale is not catchable in the base game,
even if you get out-of-bounds with glitches. But, for fun, we can modify the game's memory
to set any fish we encounter to be the whale. And since these whales are within valid water locations,
we can actually catch them! Since they're so large, the area where you need to cast
is actually towards the center of the shadow... ...but you actually can get a bite! And... Yeah... Once you catch it, you're greeted to an arapaima
and text welcoming you to the Able Sisters! The reason this occurs is likely because
the arapaima is the last fish ID in the game, and the game simply defaults to certain values. So, the whale is a pretty neat Easter egg, but
unfortunately there's no whale texture or item -- only the shadow size and spawn location. Fans of my channel may know about all the
secret beta maps left in Animal Crossings files, one of which you can actually visit yourself
by wrong warping there through an elaborate glitch. It is on this map that you can come across this gyroid,
with strange textures and no dialogue. While not too interesting by itself, you can actually go to the
same beta map in the original Japanese N64 game, and that gyroid is properly textured and you can talk to it! And when I say you can talk to it... this one does not shut up... True to its internal name, this is a debugging gyroid and all of
its text is related to testing game functionality and debugging. Of course, all of this text is in Japanese... ...and while some sites mention
a few bits and pieces of this dialogue, I wasn't able to find an actual translation of this entire text. So, with the help of my good friend Yuki, we transcribed and
translated all of this gyroid's entire text flow Reading through the translated text reveals
that this gyroid was used to test the "control code commands" that I've talked about before. For the unfamiliar, the game works by including
special text scripts encoded within dialogue. So the act of a character reading off a bit of dialogue
can actually trigger common codes within the game. You can even see this when talking to this debug gyroid, where it will tell you that it's setting your reaction variable
and you will do the "surprise" reaction after it's done! This gyroid cycles through a bunch of
these common control codes, and another thing this gyroid can do
is set your luck state to "unlucky," which will cause you to trip while running. From this, I actually learned that tripping in the snow leaves a
little impression of your entire character in the snow, which is super funny! Further, while noted before, this gyroid
also mentions Sega's Dreamcast and Sony's PlayStation 2 consoles as testing string variables, which is pretty interesting to see in a Nintendo game. If you're curious on the entire text-flow of this debug gyroid,
I've linked the translated document in the description! One of the coolest parts about the original Animal Crossing
is getting to play full NES games within your town. This of course means that Animal Crossing has
a fully functional NES emulator inside of it, which can actually handle most games outside
of the included Animal Crossing ones, too! This emulator is internally called "ksNes," and I theorize that this "ks-" prefix
stands for Kawase and Shimizu, which are the names of the two programmers
credited for the NES emulation in the Animal Crossing credits. A lot of people tie this emulator specifically to Animal Crossing, but it is also used in Metroid Prime to play the original Metroid, and in games like Zelda Collector's Edition,
where you can play the original NES games, This means that this is, indeed, a standalone emulator
that can be taken out of the context of Animal Crossing. Unfortunately, after understanding
more about how the emulator works, not every released NES game is supported here. See, as the NES matured,
the games naturally got more complex. You can clearly see this with the original
Super Mario Bros. compared against Super Mario Bros. 3. Despite releasing on the same console, Super Mario Bros. 3 runs laps around the original
in terms of gameplay, graphics, and complexity. The reason why such a leap was possible was due to special
"mapper" chips that were included inside game cartridges. Since the basic NES hardware only supports 40KB of ROM data, these chips essentially extended the amount of ROM data each game can hold by splitting the ROM into separate chunks. These chunks, officially called banks, would then be swapped in and out of the NES CPU
address map whenever they are needed by the game. This way, you can hold more data on the actual cartridge,
but not go over the limitations of the actual console. This process is called "bank switching" and was an incredibly
ingenious way of bypassing the limitations of the NES. The only issue is that these mapper chips that allow this
to happen are on the cartridges themselves... ...so emulating the NES and supporting a variety of games
also requires supporting all of the mapper chips... ...and there are quite a lot of these chips! But, what does this have to do with Animal Crossing? Well, Animal Crossing's emulator seemingly only
supports official Nintendo-developed mapper chips, most of which are the Memory Management Controller chips, or the MMC chips for short. This means that most, if not all, of
Nintendo-developed NES games should function fine, but there will be hiccups with some third-party games. Despite this, according to some strings found
throughout the various versions of Animal Crossing, third-party games were tested, alongside other games like Dr. Mario and Zelda II. There is even some supporting evidence that
Nintendo tested some unofficial bootleg games, since "tekken2.nes" is listed here as well, which is an unofficial -- and frankly awful -- NES port of Tekken. Finally, last video I detailed how you can abuse e-Reader cards
to get any valid Animal Crossing ID in your inventory. I was a little vague on the possibilities here, but
these IDs are not limited to just items, furniture, or clothes. You can actually gift yourself entire buildings, trees,
and special objects, which all fit in your pockets! Most of these IDs default to other textures in the inventory, but if you drop them and reload the acre,
the object should appear in your town! This means you can actually put things like
the Museum or Nookington's in your inventory, and simply plop them in your town. And, yes, these buildings are fully functional and they will remain there so long as you do not
place them in an area that overlaps with another building, or is too close to one. One of the most interesting things
you can have in your inventory is item ID 0x4080, which corresponds to an invisible warp object. Dropping this warp on the ground and walking into it will take you to your previous position
whenever you last reloaded your town map. So, naturally, if you haven't reloaded your town
by entering and exiting a building yet... then the default warp is -- you guessed it --
the first beta map in the game! So I guess we technically have another way to get there, albeit
with some external help to get the warp item in your inventory. Perhaps more interesting, we can actually use this item
to return where no man has returned from before! As long as you have the warp object in your inventory, you can abuse the "debt payment" glitch
to wrong warp to the beta map... ...and then, once there, you can place down the warp object
from your inventory to actually get back to your hometown! Perhaps there's a way to manipulate where this warp
takes you further, but if there is, I couldn't figure it out... Maybe one day, though! Hopefully you learned something interesting in this video! There are more interesting topics like this
that I've rarely seen anyone ever cover, so let me know if you would like to see a
continuation of this video in the future! I'd also like to take this time to give special thanks to
Phil, Cuyler, Icy, Yuki, AlexBot2004, HoleInOneLuigi, the Nookipedia Team, and The Cutting Room Floor for assisting in the discovery of some of the trivia in this video! Further thank you goes to my Patreon and YouTube Members
for their financial support of this channel. And, as always, thank you all for watching! Until next time...
