Guide: Best Animal Crossing Games Of All Time

We begin with a spin-off experience built around using the adorable Animal Crossing amiibo in a board game. This was also the first series entry to benefit from high definition, but the disappointment of Animal Crossing fans was palpable when they realised that Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival was to be the series’ only entry on Wii U. We described it as ‘slow and plodding’ in our review, which for a series that isn’t exactly famous for its fast-paced gameplay is a pretty damning criticism.

Nearly all of the minigames quickly became repetitive and probably the best thing to merit Amiibo Festival’s existence is the accompanying series of amiibo. For that we are thankful and if you see the Amiibo Festival pack for under a tenner, it may be worth picking up for the Isabelle and Digby figures that came bundled. Otherwise, even die-hard fans should probably concentrate their time and effort elsewhere. A shame.

In terms of presentation, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp translates the AC experience to mobile phones very well, and even if you don’t spend any bells there’s still plenty to investigate and enjoy here.

The game had a paid membership service and the various monetisation mechanics might have rubbed series veterans the wrong way, but as f2p mobile experiences, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp wasn’t a bad one, even if the ‘pay-to-accelerate’ mechanics leave an unsavoury taste in the mouth compared to the mainline games.

There’s a reason we Animal Crossing fans were busting to get our hands on the ‘proper’ Switch game, but as a free experience on a non-console platform, Pocket Camp transplanted the look and feel of the series well enough.

The free version has been retired as of November 2024, but it’s now available in ‘Complete‘ form for a one-off payment, with the microtransactions stripped out.

A 2015 3DS spin-off that followed the incredibly popular New Leaf, Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer Designer drilled down on the collecting and organising aspects of the series and casts you as interior designer for your village. For series fans it’s a charming, if basic, little game that introduced some decent UI additions that found their way into New Leaf via the Welcome Amiibo update.

As we said in our review, Happy Home Designer is “likeable but largely forgettable”; a pleasant spin-off for anybody who really liked going to town with their furniture and interior decorating, but certainly no substitute for the proper full-fat experience. Thankfully, the New Horizons DLC expands on this formula to delightful effect.

Subtitled Let’s Go to the City! outside North America, 2008’s Animal Crossing: City Folk enabled up to four players to take their own house in a single village and introduced a city for players to visit. It might not have been the bustling MMO metropolis some fans wished it was but it was a fun addition in a game which arguably played things a bit too safe to be top-tier.

City Folks’ compatibility with the Wii’s ill-fated microphone peripheral Wii Speak demonstrated that Nintendo really wanted you to be playing City Folk as a family. There’s nothing wrong with that, but solo players obviously couldn’t enjoy the novel interactions of sharing a town and leaving each other messages, and the game ended up feeling like an upscaled version of Wild World except lacking any serious innovation, not to mention the convenience of portability.

Not bad — far from it — but it added little to the base formula and it was hard to be locked to your TV after the joys of a handheld village.

Taking the base foundation and adding sweet, sweet portability, Animal Crossing: Wild World was the perfect game on the perfect platform. Having your village with you on the go made all the difference to many players and enabled you to check turnip prices in bed, water your plants on your way to work, or make sure your favourite animal friend wasn’t packing their bags on your lunch break. Portability made the world accessible in a whole new way and opened up its joys to the masses who embraced the Nintendo DS.

With intuitive use of the touchscreen and the day-night cycle reflected in the sky permanently visible on the top screen, this is where many people began their love affair with the series. Subsequent entries might have polished its systems and sanded off Wild World’s rough edges, but the magic of the series shone brightly on DS and when someone mentions Animal Crossing, it’s the title theme of this game which pops into our mind. Shocking, then, that there’s another entry (two, in fact) we’d rather play.

The original game debuted on Nintendo 64 in Japan after beginning life as a 64DD title. When that console died on its derrière, Nintendo shifted the game to a standard N64 cartridge and launched it in Japan in April 2001 under the title Dōbutsu no Mori. Before the year was out a GameCube port hit shelves with extra features and following a mammoth localisation effort it hit US store shelves in September 2002. We Europeans had to wait another two years for the game to arrive – we don’t miss those days!

This first game set the template for the series so wonderfully that although the GameCube original is basic by the series’ modern standards, the fundamentals are still utterly charming nearly two decades on. Throw in GBA connectivity and unlockable NES games and you can understand when aficionados who have been there from the start claim it never got better than the original Animal Crossing.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons offers such a bounty of goodness, such a wealth of nostalgia and refinement and subtle advancement — and came at a time when many people in the world really needed a little good cheer and comfort — that it’s quite easy to see why it ranks so highly. Giving us a whole island, the power to terraform and decorate, and a handful of big free upgrades (and DLC) over the years, and you can see why it’s one of the best-selling Nintendo games ever.

Whether you’re a series veteran or a total newbie, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an absolute treat: the best Animal Crossing game in the series. Enjoy it.

As for the minor Nintendo Switch 2 Edition upgrades? They’re underwhelming. It does load a little faster and look a little better — the Switch 2 version is measurably the ‘best’ one — but if you’re happy with your Switch 1, it’s absolutely not worth buying the newer console to experience ACNH’s improvements alone.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf took everything from its handheld predecessor and polished it to the Nth degree. Rather than start you off under the yoke of Tom Nook, New Leaf made you mayor of the town and gave you municipal power to mould the place to your liking like never before.

These changes were facilitated by your delightful doggy assistant Isabelle, a tireless public servant on hand to take care of the day-to-day office tasks while you go about your important mayoral duties like beach-combing, fishing, shaking trees and bothering bees.

Taking advantage of 3DS’ SpotPass feature, you could nose around the houses of players you passed on the street and order their furniture if a piece took your fancy. It’s also easy to forget the system’s patented 3D effect which made the world more enticing than ever. It might not have been HD, but New Leaf was a fine-looking game and with the 3D slider set to max, it had never been easier to get lost in your little town.