Animal Crossing is only one of five different versions of the same game, three of which were only released in Japan, and one of which was only released in China. The first version was for the Nintendo 64 in 2001, entitled "Dobutsu no Mori", which translates to "Animal Forest". The second version, "Dobutsu no Mori+", was an enhanced remake of the original game, released on the GameCube. This was the version that would be localized as Animal Crossing in North America and Europe. The fourth version, "Dobutsu no Mori e+", was a second enhanced remake released on the GameCube including e-Reader card content. The final version was a Chinese localization of the original Nintendo 64 version, Dòngwù Sēnlín, released five years later in 2006 exclusively for the iQue Player.

In the Japanese version, Dōbutsu no Mori +, two paintings that were present in the original Dōbutsu no Mori, the Dreadful Painting and the Novel Painting, are not obtainable in the normal course of play. However, they still exist in the game's code and can be legitimately brought over to a player's save file by importing one from Dōbutsu no Mori (via Nintendo of Japan's now-defunct Data Moving Service), though they can't be donated to the Museum. In the international release of Animal Crossing, however, these paintings are completely removed, and their index numbers instead point to duplicates of the DUMMY furniture item.

It's likely that the decreasing accessibility of these paintings was due to the fact that their real-world equivalents, Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and Piet Mondrian's "Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue", were still under copyright at the time. The Munch and Mondrian portfolios wouldn't enter the public domain until 2015, well after the Dreadful and Novel paintings were retired from the series.

Several clothing items were changed between the Japanese and international releases of the game:

• The Three Arc Shirt (a.k.a. the Familiar Shirt) is replaced with the Fortune Shirt, due to the former's resemblance to Charlie Brown's shirt in the American comic strip Peanuts (which had ended its print run in 2000, shortly before the game's release).
• The Tomato Juice Shirt is replaced with the Fishbone Shirt, due to the former's design resembling bloodstains.
• The W Shirt is replaced with the Houndstooth Tee, due to the former's resemblance to the logo of American fast food chain McDonald's.
• The Puzzling Shirt is redesigned to use more pastel colors, also changing the bottom-center square from orange to purple, to reduce the design's similarity to the Rubik's Cube brand of toy puzzles.
• The I Love GC Shirt (itself a redesign of the I Love 64 shirt from Dōbutsu no Mori) is replaced with the Cherry Shirt, due to the former being a parody of the I ❤ NY logo, which is trademarked by the New York Department of Economic Development.

These redesigns are also carried over to Doubutsu no Mori e+.

In the Japanese version, Dōbutsu no Mori +, two of the NES games that the player could obtain were Gomoku Narabe and Mahjong. The international release respectively replaces these titles with Soccer and Excitebike.