Four pieces of artwork in the Japanese release of the game were replaced in the international versions:

•The Fine Painting ("Jeanne Hébuterne with Yellow Sweater" by Amedeo Modigliani) is replaced with the Basic Painting ("The Blue Boy" by Thomas Gainsborough).
•The Healing Painting ("Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son" by Claude Monet, a.k.a. "The Stroll") is replaced with the Classic Painting ("Washington Crossing the Delaware" by Emanuel Leutze).
•The Lovely Painting ("Portrait of Irène Cahen d'Anvers" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir) is replaced with the Quaint Painting ("The Milkmaid" by Johannes Vermeer).
•The Pleasant Feeling Painting ("Olympia" by Édouard Manet) is replaced with the Scary Painting ("Ōtani Oniji III in the Role of the Servant Edobei" by Tōshūsai Sharaku).

Of these four, the only painting whose reason for replacement can be concretely inferred is the Pleasant Feeling Painting. Its real-world equivalent depicts a prostitute lying nude in bed, which Nintendo of America likely deemed too mature for a child audience.

The Fine Painting that was replaced in the Japanese release is a different item from the one named the Fine Painting in the English release of Animal Crossing, which is based on Paul Gauguin's "Arearea" and is included in all versions of the game.

With the exception of the Classic Painting, the replacement artwork would become standard for later entries in the series; the only replaced painting to return in a subsequent game is the Lovely Painting, present in all versions of Animal Crossing: Wild World.

In the Japanese version of the game, all sixteen player character designs have black eyes, as was the case in Dōbutsu no Mori. In the international release, however, most of them are altered to give them blue, green, or brown eyes; only two variants for each gender remain unaltered.

In addition to the multitude of NES games obtainable as furniture items, the player can also acquire a blank NES. On the surface, it appears to be nonfunctional, and interacting with it simply brings up the text "I want to play my NES, but I don't have any software." However, in 2018, dataminers discovered that using the item actually causes the game to scan the GameCube's memory cards for externally installed NES ROM data. By downloading NES ROMs onto the memory card, it's possible to play them in Animal Crossing via the blank NES, including titles not obtainable in the base game. This indicates that at one point in development, Nintendo planned to distribute additional NES games via memory cards.

The ROM loading function additionally enables one to patch NES ROMs after they are loaded, which can be used to install mods for Animal Crossing itself via the memory card.

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.