24 Hours in the Animal Forest
06 May 2025Over the past week I’ve been listening to all 4* Animal Crossing (AC) games’ hourly themes to devise a playlist of my favorite for each hour. I exclusively listen to each theme during or within 10min of the hour (as in, 1pm from 12:50-2:10) trying to stay within the hour. The goal is to capture the “vibe” of the hour best.
My husband once said, “Music should be somewhere between where you are and where you want to be.” So the hourlies shouldn’t be solely the most pleasing objectively at all hours - 3pm should be the most pleasing with the mental state I am generally in at 3pm.
Exceptions were made for 1-6am because I’m pretty much never awake then nowadays. 1-4am were listened to in the hours before bedtime, and 4-6am right after waking up (preferably at 7 if I remember to get my headphones on by then). 4am is a weird hour. It should capture both being awake very late AND waking up very early.
The games are: GC for original GameCube AC, WW for Wild World / City Folk since City Folk is just a higher-quality WW soundtrack, NL for New Leaf, and NH for New Horizons.
We’ll start at 8am because that’s generally when I wake up.
8 am - GC
9 am - GC
10 am - WW
11 am - NL
12 pm - WW
1 pm - NL
2 pm - GC
3 pm - WW
4 pm - GC
5 pm - NH
6 pm - GC
7 pm - NL
8 pm - WW
9 pm - GC
10 pm - WW
11 pm - NL
12 am - GC
1 am - NL
2 am - NH
3 am - NL
4 am - NL
5 am - NH
6 am - WW
7 am - GC
Totals:
GC - 8
WW - 5
NL - 7
NH - 3
I’ve played hundreds of hours in all of these and don’t have any favoritism. I have plenty of cozy memories even with New Horizons (especially NH! I had the most socialization with that one, bonded me with IRL friends). Maybe Wild World would be the weakest entry? But the music seems pretty represented here.
It’s been interesting to listen to each soundtrack objectively, out of context of my feelings of playing the game. I started to think about what “vibez” each soundtrack expressed and tied that into my feelings on the game.
GameCube: Goofy, harsh, diamond-in-the-rough, surprising and fun. The soundtrack is cohesive but all over the place, incorporating wacky noises like a cat meowing, and some of the samples are low quality to the point where they hurt wearing headphones. Even if someone upscaled the samples and had an AC newbie listen to this soundtrack, I think they could tell that this was the first entry in the series. I noticed when I played the GC soundtrack through my phone speakers it was far more enjoyable. Meaning, the soundtrack is optimized for terrible speakers.
Wild World / City Folk: Iterates on the previous soundtrack ideas and refines them, but plays it too safe and occasionally becomes boring. Generally the WW songs aren’t exceptional and shine in an hour when the other options are so weird they’re bad.
New Leaf: A bit off-kilter, soothing, still in style with the previous soundtracks but adding its own offbeat flair. I think this soundtrack was the weakest of the first three games. There’s a lot of hits, but a lot of misses.
New Horizons: Trying too hard. Overworked, oversaturated, weird for weird’s sake, so attention-grabbing it distracts from the game and ruins the whole point the music exists. It also barely feels like Animal Crossing. So the soundtrack reflects the game’s mechanical differences well. It’s a decent soundtrack, but a terrible Animal Crossing soundtrack. New Horizons is a decent game, but a terrible Animal Crossing game. The design differences effuse the whole of the experience.
New Horizons (Snow/Rain): Somehow a completely different vibe than the main soundtrack. The replacement of the bassline string wanking with simple marimba strikes or bells simplifies the overwhelming soundtrack to something good. It’s still substantially different from its predecessors, but it’s enjoyably different instead of obnoxious.