Animal Crossing New Leaf Old Dialog for Deleting Town

Hi Reddit, last week I made a post about the Mario + Rabbids development process and New Coke. That post was received well and had some great discussion, and so I wanted to write down some more of my thoughts on the thing I keep seeing on this subreddit: a difficulty by longtime Animal Crossing fans in describing for those who haven't played understand what makes the series special. I would love your comments on why you think the series matters and is fun, and whether you think I've hit it here or missed the mark. Again, about a 1600 word read, so I understand that it won't be for everyone. Thanks!

Look around, and you'll start seeing this recurrent and meaningless conversation everywhere. It starts with the questioner, who asks: as someone who has never played Animal Crossing, why should I get the new one? Clearly, this questioner is intrigued but lost: presumably after a few minutes researching the game, they have been struck by the conviction that there's nothing to do in it. I must be missing something, the questioner thinks. The eager answerers are quick to jump in, but they offer little. You fish, many say. You can decorate your house, adds another. Countless eager answerers point out that the core gameplay is about paying off your loan. The questioner's inner monologue is raised to a frenzy: no, I asked why I SHOULD get this game!

The answers are unhelpful because they describe elements of Animal Crossing's gameplay, and gameplay is not where the franchise shines brightest. In fact, I will argue that almost no one was ever won over by Animal Crossing's gameplay.

So instead of examining Animal Crossing's gameplay, let's tackle this question from another angle: the number of words in the game.

In an "Iwata Asks" interview regarding Animal Crossing: City Folk, the series' installment on the Wii, director Aya Kyogoku suggested that the script was 1.6 million Japanese characters. Satoru Iwata notes that this is 4000 pages of solid text. If we use the ratio of 2.5 Japanese characters for every English word, that gives us 640,000 words in the script.

In an interview with Kotaku, the Nintendo Treehouse staff said that for Animal Crossing: New Leaf (the most recent 3DS, non-spinoff title), the script came in at 2.4 million Japanese characters. If we use that same ratio, that's 960,000 words in the script.

But we can get even more specific than the Japanese, and we should, as Animal Crossing games can't just be translated. The localization process involves writers that American-ize, and yes, redo the script. Jokes in particular need a lot of tinkering. New, relevant holidays need to be worked in; foreign and unfamiliar ones are scrapped. Entire characters don't make sense in the new language, and need to be completely reworked.

So go see that final product for yourself: download the full script for New Leaf.

You'll see that player initiated conversations and letters from animals (located in the "Talk," "MailR," and "MailN" folders) take up about 60 megabytes of data, spread out in 3,034 files. That gives us an average file size of just under 20 kilobytes. Each file has the text translated into three languages alongside plenty of code, so it's difficult to estimate exactly how many words are in each file "per kilobyte." I looked at average-sized (20 kilobyte) files and used a word count tool on a bunch of them. That gave me a pretty consistent average of 360 words in every 20 kilobyte file.

If there are 3,034 files of text, and they have an average of 360 words, we can multiply 3,034 files times 360 words per file to get an estimated word count:

It's approximately 1,092,240 words.

Some context: that would mean that the Bible doesn't come close to New Leaf's English text: the King James Version is 783,000 words. Animal Crossing also edges out the entirety of the Harry Potter series, which combines for 1,084,000 words. Maybe other large video games have it beat? Well, classic computer RPG's like Baldur's Gate II and visual novels are in the same neighborhood, but your standard open world, 21st century RPGs are not: the Witcher 3 clocks in at only 450,000 words. Not even close, baby.

Back to Animal Crossing, though: if you could squeeze about 275 words per page at 12 point font, the English text of Animal Crossing: New Leaf makes for a book of just under 4,000 pages. 3,971 to be exact.

Given that the average person can expect to read 250 words per minute if they really try, it would take them 4369 minutes to get through the Animal Crossing New Leaf English script. That's 72.8 hours, or just more than 3 days, of straight reading.

But there's another way to think about that number: I booted up Animal Crossing: New Leaf today, and got into a conversation with one of my favorite residents, Frobert. Our conversation was 63 words. We talked again: 65 words. Again: 70. Based on this short test, if I talked two times to 10 residents / other NPC's a day, and then sent one letter every day, and did this in perfectly optimal fashion (somehow managing to never repeat a conversation), it would still take me 821 days to have a chance to see every message. Alternatively, since Animal Crossing: New Leaf first released 2,419 days ago, I would have had to talk to seven animals a day once a day for the past seven years, sending some letters here and there, to see every message. All of this, of course, doesn't even account for unique events and holidays.

The point is, no one has seen every message, and no one ever will.

Kotaku picked up on this, and asked the folks at Nintendo Treehouse (the brains behind Nintendo's localization process) if this makes their work seems pointless: is it really worth it "…to spend that much time working on dialogue that most people will never even get to read"? But the production team couldn't disagree more. Aya Kyogoku, who will be the Director for New Horizons, put it like this:

"The reason we prepared all of these messages is so when you're playing with someone else, they'll come across a message you've never seen before and maybe they'll show it to you—'Oh my gosh, look how funny this thing is.'"

Nintendo Treehouse lead Nate Bihlldorf agrees:

"Those messages I always thought were the most fun in the game, because they were so private… putting a little something extra into that message so you knew that no matter what they were gonna be smiling when they saw it, cause you knew the writer was winking at you when they wrote it."

In fact, one of the biggest points of consensus of the team behind Animal Crossing is that the text of Animal Crossing has a responsibility to go beyond being "fun," actually teaching the player about the depth of human communication. Ann Lin, one of the writers at Nintendo Treehouse, discusses writing the letters you get when you find out a villager is moving away:

"When I was working on letters like that… I was always trying to make it as tear-jerky as possible, acknowledging that this was a real relationship that is ending, and… trying to elicit that emotion out of the reader."

And the creator of the series, Katsuya Eguchi takes it one step further:

"For instance, the seagull Johnny [named Gulliver in the US versions] makes all these dark jokes. I'm sure a kid won't understand them. I imagined he would have to go to his Mom and ask her what the seagull was talking about, and the Mom would then have a hard time answering."

C'mon, a wry, suggestive seagull? Is this whole script just a gimmick? No, Hisashi Nogami, series producer says, also commenting on Gulliver's humor:

"We mixed in difficult sections like that… [because] communication is what we ultimately want people to take away from Animal Crossing *—and there's no better example of it than that."*

Now, we're starting to get at the idea that's unique, the thing that separates Animal Crossing from everything else: communication - a chiefly human skill - taught through animals.

Actually, does anyone get this joke?

The challenge, particularly when it comes to explaining the draw of Animal Crossing, is that communication is not a gameplay element. It doesn't actually happen within the cartridge, as you can't truly communicate with the animals. Your animals are pre-programmed with messages and they are imbued with no intelligence, real or artificial. Their habits may grow more familiar to you, but they cannot truly learn. Even their ability to "read" the letters you send them is little more than a script that checks for grammar and capitalization.

If you agree with me so far, then you'll agree that the core of what makes Animal Crossing is not its gameplay, but the illusion of an experience. The developers have crammed so much text into these critters that the illusion becomes compelling. Some say that the cycle of paying off your loans gives the game a sense of realism. I think the part of the series truest to real life is that your experience is unique and limited, and you will never see everything in one lifetime.

This endlessly big world (even if it is physically much smaller than, say, Hyrule) creates an experience, and if that experience clicks for you, the gameplay will come naturally: you will create it even where there is none. You will find yourself meticulously crafting letters to animals that can't read. You will insist upon doing so. Strung on by the seemingly endless permutations of conversations and "comic mischief," as the ESRB calls it, you will continue to be drawn in well past the point that the game has actual incentives to bring you back. It isn't surprising that Animal Crossing has been the origins of that some of the most wholesome video game experiences, such as the 87-year-old Grandma who played 3500 hours, or Chuggaaconroy's most meaningful Let's Play conclusion.

I haven't played enough games to say for certain whether Animal Crossing is "unique" in that regard. But I do know that is unique in what it offers: the illusion of experience - quite separate from any gameplay elements - that reels people in like a Sea Bass on the fifth nibble.

This is why Animal Crossing fans are obnoxiously excited that a new installment is on the way. It's not a whole new world, it's a whole new impossible set of lifetimes waiting just around the corner.

It's literal books of text we will never be able to read… and that's the magic.

Sources and Further Reading

• IGN: "Nintendo Voice Chat: The Charming People Behind Animal Crossing." [Podcast]

• Kotaku: "Nintendo's Secret Weapon." Nintendo Online Monthly, Interview with Katsuya Eguchi and Hisashi Nogami. Translation by shmuplations.com.

• Nintendo: "Iwata Asks: Animal Crossing New Leaf."

• Nintendo: "Iwata Asks: Animal Crossing City Folk."

• Title Image: Animal Crossing Wiki, "Catchphrase"

• Gulliver Joke: YouTube user vb543, "Animal Crossing Gamecube: Saving Gulliver"

• Character Ratio estimate from Japanese to English information from Charles G. Wilt Japanese-English translation services and from bel.proz.com forums.

• Baldur's Gate II Word Count: YouTube user Video Game Sophistry: "Bioware Interview with David Gaider, Part 1" (thanks to u/OckhamsFolly)

Animal Crossing New Leaf Old Dialog for Deleting Town

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/c4twqb/how_much_text_is_in_animal_crossing_and_why_you/

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