As I commented on Hello, Nintendo, Animal Crossing: Wild World is putting in a good, late running for best game of 2005. The experience grows slowly like the Gamecube version, though, so even if it is better, enough of the fun will fall in 2006 not to count, so Ouendan's position is still pretty solid. So here I want to talk about wardrobes.
Wardrobes are the items of furniture you get in Animal Crossing that let you store more objects. If you played the Gamecube AC, doubtless you were delighted to get your first wardrobe, and immediately ordered as many as you could afford, so you could turn your basement into a maze of twisty little wardrobes, all alike. My game felt crippled by the tiny house--I was selling furniture and items I might otherwise keep, and after all I could order new copies later--but Sally finally gave me a pear wardrobe, and shortly after that I got a refrigerator from Tank (also a wardrobe), so I was finally able to start storing other things.
Thus I am privy to information about wardrobes that players just starting or having yet to get the game might not have, and herein I share it. If you are interested in learning the terrible secret of wardrobes in Animal Crossing: Wild World for yourself, please avert your eyes.
As part of AC:WW's focus more on communication, there are several changes from the Gamecube version. For instance, you're no longer required to use the mail system to redeem fossils, so you can save your stationery for writing to your townsfolk. Wardrobes are another case of that. Rather than spending money and your even more valuable house space to buy "full" inventory management, wardrobes are totally epic.
In Gamecube AC, each wardrobe held three items. In AC:WW, as soon as you get a wardrobe of any kind, you get full access to six pages of draggable item storage, each the size of your full inventory, for a total of ninety items of storage. Suddenly your entire resource management strategy changes: you have a place to hold those twenty pears you harvested while the store was upgrading to a Nook 'n' Go.
I was sad to find that wardrobes are somewhat nerfed in that, as I discovered with the refrigerator, all your wardrobes share the same storage space. I imagine that's partly to keep you from dealing with the pain of moving ninety items fifteen at a time from one wardrobe to another when you change your furniture scheme. On the other hand, you can no longer buy more wardrobes to get more storage capacity. If they let you expand your storage with additional wardrobes, perhaps they would have given each one a single sheet.
Wardrobes could be further depowered depending how they work with other players in your town. My friend Broken tells me you share one house with the other players in your town, which is kinda lame. I thought perhaps the single attic was some kind of magic where each player would walk downstairs into their own houses. This does fit with the communication focus, though: perhaps they were planning to only support one person per game card, to encourage players to have whole other towns for other players to visit, but thought that would surprise parents who bought one copy for multiple siblings to play. So the single house is a compromise. (Hmm, if you can only get a single house, why does it look like there are spaces for other houses on the sides of the stone path in front of your house?)
Therefore, in conclusion: omg AC:WW wardrobes are totally totally epixxx!!
If you need more Animal Crossing hax, try the _animalcrossing LJ group's guides. (I haven't read them yet.) There's also the N-Sider Goes Wild blog if you need more AC action.
