Animal Crossing Deluxe might be the best way I've ever played Animal Crossing, barring maybe
Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I've been playing this mod for over a month now. It has all the best quality of life features from past
Animal Crossing entries, backported into the original Gamecube release, with a sprinkle of new content as well, incorporating cut content and beta items left over in the original game's code.
Here are just some of the highlights:
- Native widescreen support you can toggle on or off when loading your save file. Also introduces a "free camera" mode, where the camera follows your villager freely, without the transitions between acres. The game displays your current acre just above the clock in the bottom-right corner, and you can freely toggle this on or off when loading your save file.
- Villagers, fish, insects, and items from the Japanese-only Dobutsu no Mori e+ have been added to the game, including that one event where you can bang on the front door of Nook's shop to make him open up during after hours.

- Town Ordinances from New Leaf are in the game. You can enact them from the post office for 50k Bells and they take effect the next day. Public works projects are also available, after a fashion. A previously unused special NPC character (a red squirrel named Renna) can show up in your town from time to time with a random selection of public works projects you can build or demolish for 25k Bells.
- Custom designs can be dropped and cleared away as tiles just like in previous games.
- Kapp'n is available 24/7 at the dock, no GBA connection from Dolphin required.
Best of all, they removed that bug where the game clock wouldn't continue past the year 2030; it can now go up to the year 2099! So you never have to worry about playing this game asynchronously. Additionally this game looks fantastic with the fan-made HD texture pack. It doesn't work on the items from
Dobutsu no Mori e+, but it's worth it to see this game in HD with widescreen support. The mod is still under development, but if you don't want to have to join a Discord server,
here's a link to the current version. You'll need an uncompressed .iso of the North American release of
Animal Crossing to play it; it should be 1.35 GB in size.