The Oddities of Animal Crossing

I previously covered various interesting obscurities about the original Animal Crossing and that video is one of my personal favorites from this channel so today let's run it back with another compilation of even more interesting facts tidbits and obscure information about Animal Crossing up first if you watch my first video you'll know that the original dutu noori on the N64 included these two painting items that reference artwork that was still technically under copyright these two Works would not enter the public domain in certain jurisdictions until 2015 so Nintendo promptly replaced these paintings with other paintings in subsequent releases of the original Animal Crossing however with the release of dutu noori plus Nintendo actually offered a special transfer feature to transfer items and progress from the N64 version over to the GameCube this was a bit of a process and actually required players to physically mail their N64 controller pack and a GameCube memory card to Nintendo's offices so that they could manually transfer the data from the N64 pack to the GameCube memory card this service lasted from 2002 to around 2005 and cost 630 Yen or about $5 at the time with this system if you actually had the two copyrighted paintings in your inventory in the original N64 version they could actually be transferred over to dutu noori plus through Nintendo's transfer service which is the only way to obtain these paintings in that version of course I mentioned that these paintings were replaced entirely by different paintings in this version so what happens if you then try to donate these to the museum well Nintendo actually thought of this and included special BLS dialogue if you attempt to donate these paintings to the museum this dialogue even has an official English translation in the North American release of Animal Crossing and reveals that BLS recognizes the paintings as valuable pieces of art but cannot accept them due to a decision from his superiors he then encourages you to place the artwork in your home instead this dialogue is found in both dutu noori plus and Animal Crossing and is supposed to be triggered when you attempt to donate the Dreadful painting or the novel painting however due to a coding oversight this dialogue is actually never triggered typically when you attempt to donate a piece of art to the museum this function gets called which includes a switch case at the very beginning to handle the special case of a player donating the two copyrighted paintings however I mentioned Nintendo replaced these copyrighted paintings with others which is true but they never updated the painting counter to include the two copyrighted paintings in the case that you transferred them over from the N64 thus the game only considers the first 15 paintings as valid works of art and the two copyrighted works that were moved to the end of the list are not even considered as valid items to be donated to the museum so even though there is code and special translated dialogue checking if the donated items are the copyrighted paintings this is actually never triggered in reality because there's first a global check to see if the items are valid pieces of Art and since Nintendo didn't extend the list of valid paintings to incorporate the Dreadful painting or the novel painting BLS just defaults to his invalid it item dialogue this is the case in both dutu noori plus and Animal Crossing and manually fixing the valid painting list to extend by two more will indeed fix this oversight and Trigger the [Music] dialogue next let's talk about this unused mural testing object that's found in some of the beta maps of the game similar to the debug gyroid this object has glitchy texturing in the North American version of Animal Crossing in both of these cases the textures are glitched because the draw function in the code is programmed with N64 formatting in mind modifying the code to use the GameCube format will indeed fix the textures in both cases however somewhat interestingly while the mural object uses draw code formatted for the N64 this object itself was never included in the N64 version this object does appear in duut noori plus but of course that game was released on the GameCube meaning that this object was likely used for testing textures while porting the game over to the GameCube fixing the object's display in Animal Crossing reveals a 4x4 grid showing player designs and shirt textures interestingly you can actually modify the tiles of this Grid in real time with a special debug mode enabled this mural is modifiable through the TAC regge debug submenu short for Takaki register referencing gintaro Takaki a programmer who has worked on every animal crossing game to date quick shout out to Kyler for fixing the draw code and showcasing the mural's unused functionality for the first time earlier this year next let's talk about player reactions newer Animal Crossing titles include a lot of reactions that both the player and villagers can perform but the original game really only had one true player reaction to my knowledge the player becomes shocked when encountering bees from a tree or roaches in their house and to my knowledge no other reactions are used for the player and don't get me wrong the player has a lot of unique animations and facial expressions for specific scenarios but these are separate from the general reaction system that the villagers use even though the shock reaction is the only one used by the player there are actually at least two more programmed into the game but they're just never triggered these two are a scared reaction and a weird purple Mist reaction luckily we actually have a way to trigger these on a vanilla copy of the game by abusing Nook codes and the game's text control commands I've explained the game's text control codes in the past but I'll try to go a bit more in depth here to help some people understand essentially things like text color size speed dialogue sound effects the current background music and a whole host of other things are controlled directly by including special tags inside the dialogue itself if I were to oversimplify it the game's text would look something like this where the game reads strings in these brackets as a trigger to handle special commands the characters in these brackets are of course not rendered to the player but they are essentially present in each piece of dialogue for the game every conversation from resetti to Tom Nook to every villager utilizes this system in one way or or or another in fact more modern versions of this text control command system is used all the way up to New Horizons and several other Nintendo games also use a similar system to handle text and animation as well with the Thousand-Year Door remake being the most recent anyways by understanding how text commands can be embedded into dialogue like this we can abuse Nook codes to generate a code where Tom Nook recites a trigger for some player reactions by externally generating a Nook code with control commands as our player name or town name Tom Nook will recite these commands when entering the code which the game will then recognize as real commands and Trigger our unused player reactions in this sense you can actually see the two reactions that go unused on a vanilla copy of the [Music] game I'm unsure what the purple Mist reaction would have been used for maybe a curse or a sickness from Katrina regardless if you'd like to see these in game for yourself I've generated these two nut codes that you can use on any North American copy of the game [Music] fans of Animal Crossing are likely familiar with animales the language that the villagers speak in each game while the language the villagers speak may sound like pure gibberish true fans and Keen listeners will know that the villagers are actually speaking real English just in a weird character phonetic way that is if you slow down any villager speech you can almost always somewhat make out what they're saying if you pay close attention [Music] these language sound effects were sped up to give the animal villagers a unique way of talking but the development team was initially skeptical on including it the original Animal Crossing even gives you the option to disable this animal's language entirely of course Animal Crossing was originally developed with a Japanese language in mind and yes animales does indeed sound a bit different depending on your game language if you're familiar with the Japanese language you'll know that unlike English every syllable in Japanese is pronounced in a consistent manner that is you'll rarely encounter scenarios where a Japanese Kana character is pronounced differently depending on the context uh for the most part with this simplified phonetic system animales was first implemented for the Japanese language and indeed villagers in the Japanese versions do sound like they're speaking pretty decent Japanese at [Music] times but of course English and other languages have more difficult pronunciations depending on context so how did the localizers handle this when porting the game to other languages the solution was to basically just handle each language the same as Japanese and just choose a basic pronunciation for each character while the the synthesizing process is actually reprogrammed slightly between versions to match the various intricacies of different languages the concept of pronouncing individual characters is still the same this is true for most localizations of Animal Crossing and a special shout out to the European release for including French Italian German Spanish and English all on one disc resulting in slightly different animal speech for each version as a final note here animal actually turned out to be a hit with play testers and higher-ups so much so that Nintendo actually patented the tech process behind synthesizing letters [Music] phonetically next let's discuss some more beta and unused content from the original game one of the most interesting facets of Animal Crossing's beta content involves this unused squirrel villager found in the files of the original games for a while this squirrel character was thought to just be a standard squirrel villager that was cut from the game and fans of the series originally called her blazel as a reference to her looking like a mix between Bliss and Hazel funnily enough both Bliss and Hazel have since been renamed entirely in English and another different squirrel also named Hazel has been introduced into the series making this naming quite confusing luckily the official name of this character along with some other information was found in some official leaks examining code from dut namori plus reveals that this squirrel's name is shaki which could be a reference to various Concepts it was also discovered that this character was not meant to be a villager at all but was was instead intended to be a special character along the likes of the holiday and weekly visitors shaki is referenced in the game's code AS AC dutu possibly connecting to the word dutu translating as hole in the ground this coupled with the fact that her data is found among cut functions for wilting and growing flowers suggests that she might have been a special character related to gardening similar to Leaf in future Games shaki's model and textures still exist in Animal Crossing and she can be spawned in the game using hacks of course she defaults to our favorite glitched out name Johnny B and has nonsensical dialogue intended for Capp this may sound interesting but it's just the result of the way the game handles text shaki's original text was likely just overwritten in the script and so the code to fetch her text just references cpp's lines instead this concept is also seen when hacking in the whale where catching it will result in dialogue welcoming you to the Able Sisters [Music] on the topic of beta content the original dutu noori has a ton of unimplemented early textures that were discovered just a few years ago I've discussed some of these before including a bunch of shortt textures that reference things from Space Invaders to Evangelion to Japanese baseball teams to sega's Dreamcast console I'm assuming the developers just had fun testing custom designs and never expected these textures to see the light of day I've pointed out the references that myself and the community were able to find but if any of you recognize the rest of these textures as a reference to anything then let me know perhaps more interesting some crudely drawn inventory textures were also discovered this includes a texture for the scrapped sickle item which actually still has data left unused in Animal Crossing there are various textures like this that served as earlier versions before the game was finalized but there are also a few textures that reference items that don't exist in the final game among these include inventory textures for a nut a medicine bottle minidisk CDs a guitar glasses and a water bottle trash item named pet don't worry I too was originally confused by this water bottle being named pet but apparently pet here is just short for polyethylene which is the plastic that water bottles are made of and this makes sense if the item was intended to be a trash item that you would fish out of oceans and [Music] rivers finally let's touch on the very interesting character of blanca before New Leaf Blanca was a character that only appeared during multiplayer functionality in the original game she has a 50% chance of being encountered on the train when you visit another player's town of course the GameCube game didn't have online connectivity meaning you needed your friend to physically come over and plug their memory card into the GameCube second slot to visit their town so I never really visited any other towns as a kid since I was pretty much the only one I knew who played Animal Crossing due to this I never really encountered or knew about Blanca in the original game and I imagine a lot of of other players are in the same boat but maybe I just didn't have friends because despite this very Niche and specific appearance Blanca was actually ranked as the second most popular character on an official Japanese character poll in 2002 right behind KK Slider I imagine some of this popularity is due to her very unique design or perhaps lack thereof for the unfamiliar prior to New Leaf Blanca claims to have accidentally washed her face off and asked the player to draw a new face on her and yes you can draw anything you want here and it will show up on her face no matter how crude Blanca then appears in your friend's town with a face that you drew on her sporadically throughout the following week meaning you can give your friends a pretty good scare if you draw something heinous in Blanca's official art her face is made up of Japanese hiragana characters a concept known as heno heno heni heno heno Mo which is a popular way for children to draw faces in Japan speaking of Japan Blanca is actually one of a few Animal Crossing characters to have their gender swapped in the international versions in the Japanese versions of the game Blanca is considered a male whereas in the international versions Blanca is a female Blanca shares this gender swap change with other characters like Gracie and Sahara in animal crossing the gender of villagers are typically known by just looking at the background of their name plate when they speak villagers programmed as females are pink and males are blue however for special characters like Tom Nook and the weekly visitors this name plate is green which apparently led to some assumptions made when translating the game into English anyways Blanca was reassigned to the host of April Fool's Day in New Leaf where she Sports a new clown-like outfit she also appears this way when summoned in New Horizons though her Nook phone design does reference her original outfit from the earlier games as a final note about Blanca unfortunately in Animal Crossing city Folk Blanca only appears if you're connected online via the now defunct we connect4 since the service is no longer operational encountering Blanca is no longer possible in any official capacity on the Wii making her one of a few cases of lost content throughout the Animal Crossing series well I hope you enjoyed our dive once again into the obscurities of Animal Crossing as always special thanks to Kyler the spreadsheet team and the ncpedia staff for compiling and sharing a lot of information here and of course thank you to all of my patreon and YouTube members especially Lun Escape Lorenzo Cynthia mentis 998 silly Marina Viller Cass Hornet Tumi Vinnie Diddy pit 01 kid D comfy boy 404 Japan eat Tammy's head comfy exploding Bears Holly Molly and sits for the generous support and thank you all for sticking around and watching I hope you enjoyed and until next time [Music] down [Music]

Channel: Hunter R.

Views: 75,912

Keywords: animal crossing, acnh, animal crossing gamecube, gamecube, hunter-r, hunter r., hunter r ac, hunter r animal crossing, glitches, animal crossing glitches, broken code, codebase, buggy, things you didn't know, animal crossing trivia, ac facts, animal crossing facts, obscure, technical gamecube, oddities

Id: ksxt5SO_8Bc

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2024