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Animal Crossing ACNH Villager Interactions

Threads relating to the Animal Crossing series.

Uwu_Oocoo2

Joy is in video games and colored pencils
ZD Legend
Forum Volunteer
Right now I'm sitting on my couch watching my dad play Animal Crossing Wild World. This is an older Animal Crossing title so it lacks a lot of the niceties of later games (increased pocket space, storage space, etc). But watching the game the past couple weeks is making me notice just how badly they screwed up the villagers in New Horizons.
In ACNH, characters are broken into personality types such as grumpy, pop star, etc. Same goes for Wild World. But in the older game, each character also has their own interests. This means you can have a grumpy character who loves fossils, and they'll give you fossil specific challenges. They can also share their interests with other villagers, so sometimes you'll get a week where everybody is just going fossil crazy. Another aspect of their individual personalities is they each have their own preferences in furniture so you can learn which villagers are most likely to give you which items. This encourages players to strategically cultivate friendships. This also opens up more options for dialouge compared to ACNH because instead of just having the base personality each character has different things they specifically like to talk about, creating multi-layered characters.
Another thing that makes these interactions in the older title so complex is that making good friends is hard. Certain responses can make villagers mad at you. They can send you angry letters in response to ones with poor grammar. Villagers fight, they argue, and you have to pick up the pieces. But this makes the game so much more interesting and challenging. Villagers in ACNH don't have any backbone. The game basically requires you to be friends with them. They will forgive you for every transgression and apologize if they even inconvenience you. If you tell them you don't want them to leave, they will always obey. Sure this makes things more simple, but it takes out the layers of character and advancement. Just like how Ressetti was removed because he was too "scary", villagers aren't allowed to hurt players feelings and players can no longer have to work to be loved.
The basic summary is that by the time you get to ACNH, villagers are mostly island decoration with limited dialouge and impact on how you play the game. Older titles forced you to work with them, but ever since amiibo got introduced to the series they've become collectibles at best. Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, but I've never been able to connect with any of my villagers in ACNH, and I got to the point where I was going to different islands searching for new people whilst Googleing what their houses look like. Sorry if this feels more like a blog post than a thread opening, but has anyone else noticed/been bothered by this?
 

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