Gaming Animal Crossing : NL has more text than Bible or if you prefer, All the Harry Potter books Combined!

[DayVeeBoi]

In a Reddit post entitled How Much Text is in Animal Crossing, and Why You Should Care, a Redditor (u/Balloon_Monsoon) has data-mined ACNL for dialogue and broken down exactly how much content is in the game. They figure that it would take 7 years of talking to 7 different characters everyday (seemingly impossible in my experience of the game) to see all the dialogue, and there is speculation that nobody has likely seen every bit of dialogue in the game, and maybe never will!

u/Balloon_Monsoon found that the script for AC:NL is about 1,092,240 words. That's 3,871 pages or 72.8 hours long if it were an audiobook! This is longer than all 7 Harry Potter books combined and totals 1,084,000 words. The King James version of The Bible is only 783,000 words!

From the Original Reddit Post:

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.

*If u/Balloon_Monsoon happens to be a Temper, Great Work! Thanks! I don't want to flood your thread with another appreciation post, I upvoted!

 

[Sliter]

Well, any game people don't generally pay attention on how much writing it have, and when you want to translate it to your language you be impressed like that xD

 

[DayVeeBoi]

Well, any game people don't generally pay attention on how much writing it have, and when you want to translate it to your language you be impressed like that xD

I agree, most people don't pay a lot of attention to it. On the other hand, with fan translations and interest in UnDub's being more and more common I think that there's a lot more awareness about localization in general than even just a few years ago.

 

[DayVeeBoi]

Wow, can't believe nobody at the Temp seems to have noticed or care about this. It had like 15,000 upvotes on the Switch subreddit when I saw it.