Sorry, I've gotta go with Angela on this one. I suppose they targeted women because it's billed as a "social simulator/communication game", but the original Animal Crossing was focused on shopping, visiting friends and making your house pretty.

Sounds pretty stereotypical to me...I'd rather play games with decent graphics (not that childish cartoony stuff) and female characters that actually have substance.

That ad is nothing compared to the other ad that I've seen on tv. Sadly I couldnt find it on youtube but in short there are two "moms" playing and they go shopping for clothes!! BARF

I've played the game and think its great. Nintendo is pissing me off though because guess what? Boys play too! My boyfriend visits his town almost every day. They are portraying this as a Girl Game because you decorate and make friends. Its more like a kids game because you dont do anything else BUT that.

I love the game, but frankly, I think those ads are giving them the wrong impression about the game. Those women in the ads are going to get tired of it really quickly.

I've played online with a female friend and we ended up talking about the antics of our animal neighbors and about our real-life cats all while we did our own things in town.

I guess it's core to their goal of targeting the casual gamer, but I've been quite turned off by this style of ads Nintendo's been doing, where they show people calmly playing the game instead of showing the game itself. I'd rather get a glimpse of what the game's about and deem it interesting or not, than be told it's fun because a generic person in a commercial enjoys it.

In terms of the graphics, they weren't making it cute entirely for the sake of potential female sales. It was originally developed as an N64 title, so the blocky character models and art was the limit of what the system could push, and I guess they wanted to keep it the same style for the sequels.

Also, the game is kinda a childish fantasy, wherein your character, by him/herself, moves in to a town full of talking animals, and does nothing but make friends and explore the town, collecting cool things. It seems rather appropriate to render the characters in a childish manner than as correctly ratiod and sized humans. The opposite of this can be seen in the early models of the teenagers in Jet Force Gemini, with cute cartoony kids blasting alien bugs to bits with explosives and machine guns

Shopping, visiting your friends, and making your house "pretty" is not stereotypical, it's LIFE. FYI, boys also like to shop, visit friends, and yes, some even have a flair for interior decorating. Besides, what's so wrong about a game being geared towards girls? Nobody complains about all those gory shoot-em-up games geared at boys. I for one, appreciate that Nintendo realizes that there are girl gamers, unlike other companies.

Also, you can't judge a game solely on its graphics. So the graphics on this game aren't what you would find on a first-person shooter. So what? Does that ultimately make a game any less fun or make the FPS any better? Not really.

I, for one, own this game and I love it! And no, I don't mind that my female character doesn't have more "substance". I get the choice to play as a female, and that's all that matters to me. I also keep in mind that, this is after all, a VIDEO GAME.