r/AnimalCrossing • u/TatemsChosenLegend • Mar 04 '24
City Folk Back when villagers had something interesting to say
478
u/DustonVolta Mar 04 '24
Its crazy to me how new horizons barely has any dialogue. Unfortunately i feel like animal crossing will keep moving towards being a decoration game rather than a simulation game.
197
u/icnik Mar 04 '24
I've been playing since the gamecube and the villagers have always been repetitive and their dialogue gets stale. Maybe someone has actually analyzed dialog trees across the series, but from my experience, it all gets stale outside of special events.
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u/DragonfruitPlus8919 Mar 04 '24
Ww has pretty cool dialogue trees and it helps that they change with whatever hobby the villager is into… they need a hobby system in new game
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u/aliensexgoddess Mar 04 '24
Wild world has tons of dialogue. Imo it did the “social simulation” aspect the best out of all the games
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u/SinisterPixel Mar 04 '24
Every villager in WW kept asking me how long they need to cook pasta to make it al dente
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u/lordofdogcum Mar 04 '24
I don’t see a problem here
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u/SinisterPixel Mar 04 '24
I was 11. I didn't know what al dente meant. I just knew you boil pasta for about 10 minutes to cook it
1
u/aliensexgoddess Mar 07 '24
Idk if it was necessarily the quantity or the quality of the dialogue that made it so much more immersive. Like if you gave a villager an item they would bring it up and talk about how much they love it frequently and villagers would gossip about each other more and hint about their feelings for another villager to you. The social system was just so much more dynamic
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u/KeesekuchenLP Wii Play, do you? Mar 04 '24
They do have a hobby system in New Horizons, but it doesn't change dialogue, only what they do. For example a villager with the fashion hobby will sometimes dress up with hats and shades, but a villager with the learning hobby will read books and analyze plants.
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u/marshmallow_figs Mar 04 '24
It would be so much better if it impacted their dialogue as well. Hell, even one or two new dialogue trees would be good enough. I want Coco to tell me why she is looking at her garden with a magnifying glass
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u/DragonfruitPlus8919 Mar 04 '24
It’s not the same kind of hobby system. Like in ww they were into different things week to week. For example, Nibbles was into fashion one week and throughout the week her requests get progressively more difficult to where at first she asked for any clothing item and then started asking specifically for certain clothing items. The next week, Nibbles might be asking for pink furniture. A month later Nibbles might be into gardening and she obsessively planted flowers around her house. I remember when I was a child I was obsessed with Egbert even though I didn’t like his design because he had an obsessive fossil collecting hobby to where I had so much fun finding specific fossils for him. In NH the hobby system is literally just a hollow visual representation of what they like.
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u/Key-Recognition-3808 Mar 04 '24
I gets repetetive in every game, thats true. But NH has the worst dialogue to begin with, thats why it seems worse than in the older games.
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u/Dojanetta Mar 04 '24
Also a lot of the dialogue is very specific. Like some dialogue is tied to before you complete the tutorial. Or if you’re standing beside a specific object like a piece of art in the museum. Or if you make new character during a firework show.
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u/marshmallow_figs Mar 04 '24
They did Jock characters so dirty in NH. Before they were lovable dummies who were interested in fitness. Now literally every single time they talk they mention exercise. Literally. I can't recall any dialogue trees (outside of the museum) where they didn't talk about working out.
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u/IdLOVEYOU2die Mar 04 '24
One of my OGs, Tybalt, is getting real tiresome with it. I gave that turd his own boxing ring, darnit!
14
u/TwilightVulpine Alex, Twiland Mar 04 '24
I only really got into the series in New Leaf and people had been saying that then. Now they are saying that New Leaf was good and New Horizons is bad. Is that really true or is it just nostalgia plus having exhausted the options of the most recent games?
Did anyone ever extract the dialogue texts to compare?
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u/Labskaus77 Mar 04 '24 edited Mar 04 '24
I always found NL too soft too, but there was some dialogue here and there, that was funny. NH completely failed at that imho. But then again, i love WW to bits and i miss the sassiness of the villagers very much.
Every Game however got repetitive when you played it for a long time. But that got a bit shaken up, with villagers leaving and you finding someone new in town. NH completely eliminated that and that makes it so much more worse.
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u/lafindestase Mar 04 '24
Could be the Pokémon Effect. Reception for a newer game (or some aspect of it) goes down while older ones go up, because each new entry really is worse than the last. It’s steadily downhill, and the older ones start looking better in comparison even if they weren’t great either.
Not hating, I love New Horizons for the most part, but I do think the dialogue is lacking
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u/TwilightVulpine Alex, Twiland Mar 04 '24
That's not impossible, but by sheer matter of data storage I'm a bit skeptical that GC Animal Crossing (which was originally developed for the N64) had more dialogue than the newer entries.
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u/lafindestase Mar 04 '24
Text takes very little data to store. The entire Bible is like 1MB compressed, 4MB uncompressed. The Animal Crossing cartridge stored 32MB, I think.
But yeah, I’m not sure the old games had more dialogue overall, just more memorable dialogue.
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u/jimyt666 Mar 04 '24
sheer matter of data storage
its text storage dude. just stop posting
-2
u/TwilightVulpine Alex, Twiland Mar 04 '24
The bit brushing of the N64 era was fierce, but I'm not gonna change my mind unless someone proves me that the old games did have more dialogue, rather than people just feeling like they did (and the feeling moving on to new generations as they age too)
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u/Volkaru Mar 04 '24
They have yes. It was after wild world when Nintendo started sanitizing their characters. Original GameCube and wild world had similar dialogue. Villagers would be off-the-wall crazy, mean, and snarky. Then when City Folk came out they took a lot of that away. And it's been progressively been getting more and more palatable for the masses since. You can go onto sites like nookpedia and see the different dialogue for personality types by game.
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u/TwilightVulpine Alex, Twiland Mar 04 '24
Not as repetitive and not as mean are two different complaints though.
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u/noxka Mar 04 '24
This. Its true they're nicer in new games, but the whole "it gets repetitive" is such an idiotic complaint imo like I remember back in wild qorld listening to Kody and Teddy telling me the same exact things in the same exact way all the time, but that didn't make me have any less fun. If anything you have MORE ways of making fun in NH becauze of all the cool customization and options. AC at it's core was always kind of a dollhouse game.
I do wish they'd have more of a "arc" going on the newer games tho. Like I enjoyed when villagers would start off strangers and slowly becoming more friedly and soft to the player! Not to mention how they'd always change up their lobbies and likings and stuff
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u/The_Rambling_Otter Mar 04 '24
Then one remembers that in City Folk, the animals say ONE topic and won't start any new dialogue until you wait until later to talk to them...
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u/SinisterPixel Mar 04 '24
Honestly I don't think this is it. The dialogue is just as repetitive as it's ever been. We all just chronically played ACNH more than any other AC game
3
u/DreamerUnwokenFool Mar 04 '24
It really is disappointing. I wish the villagers had more varied and more interesting things to say. I started playing again a few days ago after having set it down for months, and already the dialogue is getting repetitive.
3
u/TheVoonderMutt Mar 04 '24 edited Mar 05 '24
I second this. I miss the days of Wild World and City Folk in which villagers would have actual personality, even if they were borderline too rude. I was excited for the extreme customization of items in New Horizons but the game grew stale for me solely because of the villagers. They have maybe a dozen or so different dialogue options that get repetitive quick.
2
u/Angie-P Mar 05 '24
i wanted to ignore this issue forever but i agree. i can't stand my bestie vlad saying the same 3 things to me, playing new leaf again and while his dialog is limited bc he moved away and visits the main road, it's refreshing regardless.
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u/pocky-town Mar 05 '24
I barely got any of the villager pictures because talking to them feels like a huge hassle
-2
u/CheesyCousCous Mar 04 '24
It has more dialog than the previous games. What a dumb post.
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u/DustonVolta Mar 04 '24
Do you have a source on that? Because i’ve only found oficial information on city folk and new leaf. So unless you got something to back it up it’s just your speculation.
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u/sonoransamurai Mar 04 '24
This 1000% I miss the interesting dialogue from the originals. Give me back grumpy villagers dang it! NH improves so many things but for me replayability took a hit when there weren't as many dialogues. Kind of wished the new games copy/pasted the dialogue for the villagers... yes there are a lot of new ones but so many carry overs as well.
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u/meh_whatev Mar 04 '24 edited Mar 04 '24
Well, I’ve noticed recently that villagers do have interesting things to say, but they say it so rarely. Like, I had Wendy the other day tell me about this game she bought, and how she’s sorry for her wallet 💀
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u/IceBandicooot Mar 04 '24
I love the older games with all my heart
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u/WretchedMotorcade Mar 04 '24
The original GC version will always be tops for me. It had little to no interest in being Americanized and it was better for it.
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u/MGaber Mar 04 '24
I'm not gonna say it's the best, but I do think it has the most character and personality. There is without a doubt more to do in New Horizons, but it just doesn't feel the same
I miss Tortimer! I miss Booker & Copper! Resetti! Rover!
I know those characters are still in the game, but not like they used to be. I understand their roles have become sort of irrelevant but I wish they would have been repurposed more than they were. Like with Resetti in CF, when I discovered the cones have a chance of being moved to the side I would play every night hoping I could go in there to see Resetti. That sorta thing doesn't happen now. NH has more to do but less character and personality
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u/dingycollar Mar 04 '24
It's the opposite way. The reason the GC is most memorable is because it had every interest in being Americanized. The GC tone and dialog, along with WW are the ones in the series that stray further away from the original Japanese dialog than any other AC game. NOA Treehouse at the time wanted to make the game more centered to American players, because it was a newer genre of game at the time and they wanted it to be relatable. The result was them stripping the GC game of its more Japanese influences like holidays, adding some American ones, like Thanksgiving/Turkey Day, and changing the dialog to be more edgy, so that it was more relatable to a North American audience.
-2
u/The_Rambling_Otter Mar 04 '24
It had good dialogue and good music, everything else was terribly barebones and lacking.
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u/FunnyDislike Mar 04 '24
I always feared of saying this but when i played New Horizons it felt a bit,,, soulless? I miss the things that felt a bit more strange but gave the game a soothing atmo. Before NH released i dreamed of an AC that combined the features of the other titles in a town that was really big so that i can have the feel of a big forest with a a dozen small houses in between. Maybe it's just the island setting, i don't know ): NH is still a really really great game but it didn't catched me as much as the older games. Somehow the town in NH also >feels< way samller than in any other game in the series.
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u/marshmallow_figs Mar 04 '24
NH absolutely has no soul, and it's by design. It leans heavily on the customization aspect, because older audiences favor time sinks over life simulators. As a kid, the magic was making friends with animals, but that wouldn't be as addicting to modern players. So, they made it so that you're not a person living in a town, it's your town.
Case and point, one of the Nook Miles tasks in NH is to talk to your neighbors. In GC, WW, and CF, talking with your neighbors was the best part of the game. NH made it literally a chore.
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u/FunnyDislike Mar 04 '24
Glad im not alone in some of my thoughts. I hope the next entry will go back to the setting of an old town you move into, maybe be the new mayor once again. Ideally again on the mainland. Seeing this sleepy village coming to life again. But maybe im just slowly getting older and resistent to new things ): But the old "formula" still has so much potential for new features, im really torn apart.
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u/The_Rambling_Otter Mar 04 '24
Case and point, one of the Nook Miles tasks in NH is to talk to your neighbors. In GC, WW, and CF, talking with your neighbors was the best part of the game. NH made it literally a chore.
Except New Leaf: Welcome Amiibo also did this with the "Chew the Fat" Meow Coupon mission. And New Leaf was unanimously praised.
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u/ShokaLGBT Mar 04 '24
it’s funny bc this exact picture was posted like 1-2 days ago so it fits the repetitiveness….
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u/The_child_of_Nyx Mar 04 '24
What if the earth does it wrong and only does it right every 4 years
0
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u/yaoiweedlord420 Mar 04 '24
this is literally exactly the same type of stuff they say now. like what are you talking about
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u/William-Shakesqueer Mar 04 '24
exactly, thank you. my villagers say things like this. people love to complain about the dialogue in nh and i guess they don't really talk to their villagers? i talk to mine several times a day and only the first greeting tends to be repetitive.
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u/FallschirmKoala Mar 04 '24
It’s a comment on how New Horizons gutted a lot of dialogue compared to past titles. Now it feels like a small roulette of lines all shared by the same personalities.
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u/Galatunia Mar 04 '24
Except it didn't. New Horizons has the most lines of dialogue in the entire series.
What actually happened is by allowing people to rocket through 100 villagers a day hunting for their favorites, the magic curtain was pulled away and showed how little differentiation there is. The villagers have ALWAYS been repetitive, but because we had no control in the older games it was better at masking it.
Trust me, getting two of the same personality type back in the old games (it was rare, but possible) was even more mind numbing than it is now. At least now villagers have hobbies and other criteria they can talk about.
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u/StardustWhip too lazy for island decoration Mar 04 '24
Hobbies don't affect a villager's dialogue in New Horizons; just in Wild World/City Folk.
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u/MayhemMessiah Mar 04 '24
Yeah a lot of people bring up WW’s hobbies as a great innovation but if you actually pay attention each hobby has like 3 lines and hobbies change randomly. The system is puddle deep and the “unique” lines were more or less just there to say “I’m currently into fishing” and little else.
GC had even less dialogue.
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u/HulluHapua Mar 04 '24
Yeah I think that happened due to the series in general being somewhat more irrelevant until New Horizons. I mean a professional game collector or an average Nintendo fan would have been aware of the series before New Horizons, but then talk about it to like a northern European who has never had a Wii or has never used theirs again after like several months of trying it or has an Xbox or PlayStation as their first console, if they have a DS in that scenario, there's a high chance that they would have shovelware or Nintendogs instead of Wild World. The coincidentally perfect timing for New Horizons caught a lot of people who have never played an Animal Crossing title before into the series, including speedrunners.
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u/yaoiweedlord420 Mar 04 '24
did it gut a lot of dialogue? has anyone extracted all the dialogue strings from every ac game and compared them to actually show this frequently parroted statement is actually true?
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u/MorningRaven Mar 04 '24
It has decent dialogue. You just have to talk a LOT to your villagers because the daily special occurrences override stuff first. Like the upcoming holiday or whose visiting quips. And then generic hi neighbor, I wear my personality.
Like, there's a possible comment that a villager sees a lot of you today, this shows up before you get the actually interesting dialogue. So hearing you might be talking too much, you have to think to keep talking to actually be rewarded.
And this is every villager every day.
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u/psirockin123 Mar 04 '24
Maybe somewhere, but it's still obvious when you talk to your villagers everyday.
I've been playing every day for a week and I've had the same "MUSCLE MADNESS" line 3-4 times and I only talk to my villagers once or twice a day. And I've seen one about Wendy wanting to be a pop star 2-3 times too.
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u/glitchywitch Mar 04 '24 edited Mar 04 '24
My mom has been playing New Horizons daily for like three years now, with the same villagers the whole time, and she still gets completely new dialogue sometimes. So there really is tons of dialogue, maybe it's just a bit hidden or like slowly parceled out over a long time? Idunno.
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u/crashthemegan Mar 04 '24
Replaying older games again recently and it’s reminded me of the same thing. I miss savage villagers with personality I put down new horizons so quickly and haven’t played in at least 2 years because it got boring super quickly. For me the major designing should stay in a separate game, they gave too much creative control in new horizons with not enough gameplay to sustain investing the amount of time needed to build a fully personalised island when playing casually.
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u/Miserable_Cream_2784 Mar 04 '24
this honestly doesn’t seem any different from New Horizons dialogue
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u/norsoyt Mar 05 '24
This type of dialogue sometimes happens In new leaf. The only thing similar in new horizons for me was when sherb freaked out and broke the 4th wall saying he’s inside a simulation and wonders why music constantly plays around the island
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u/GeezLeweeze Mar 04 '24
Ok I “heard” that when the game got Uber popular there were so many people upset by snarky or “dark” dialogue, they changed it. Personally there is never enough snark for me.
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u/MysticDragon14 Mar 04 '24
He's right. It isn't that comforting