I still don't understand the community's consensus on dialogue in the series

[TheKryptoKnight]

So sorry this got away from me. If you read it all, you're a saint and I'm so sorry.

I don't expect to be in the majority here since I'm pushing back against one of the most common ideas in the community, buuuut....

Dialogue in NH is not the worst in the series, and I think people remember past games with rose colored glasses. Like if you look at datamines, there is a LOT more than people would have you believe. It objectively has the most in the series. The dialogue is funny and made me laugh more than it has since Wild World. It took about 150 hours before I stopped seeing new lines. And you can actually tell the personalities apart.

New Leaf, everyone except jocks acted like normals. They were all nice, interchangeable and hero worshipped you. When NL was the current game, the most common complaint was that the villagers were like cardboard and barged into your house every 5 seconds. I'm playing NL and NH right now (they're both great games!) and I just talked to Nan 5 times in a row and got the same dialogue all 5 times.

City folk was okay outside, but indoors villagers had only one line on repeat. I've played CF least because motion controls, so I can't say much more and could be wrong about outside dialogue being okay.

Even Population Growing... I feel like people would be surprised going back. Yes, the snark and rudeness is great.. it has character for days. But they give you basic tutorial dialogue forever. It never stops. 500 hours in and they'll tell you how you can shake trees for fruit and use wallpaper to change your house. And connect a Gameboy. And use a second memory card to visit a town.

I think Wild World has the best dialogue in the series. The hobby and relationship systems also helped to give a lot of character. But I'd potentially put NH 2nd. Maybe 3rd because nostalgia is so high for PG and the sass was really fun.

I think the biggest contributor to this is how the dialogue in NH was buried until a late patch. The way dialogue worked for a long time after launch is that the first 3-4 times you talked to a given villager each day, it'd be a generic greeting, comment about events, comment about nearby furniture. And when you went to another villager, same thing. You needed to keep talking to them 5+ times in a row for the fun dialogue to start, and I think most people didn't when they encountered all of the villagers saying generic things every day to begin with. Compound that with only being able to talk to villagers a few times before they ask you to go away when they're not friends with you yet... I just feel like most people haven't seen over half of the dialogue. This has all been changed in a patch since 2.0 but too late, damage done?

I know this is so unpopular... But I can't understand the revisionist history that NL villagers were better when that was a huge pain point "back in the day".

Thoughts? Rebuttals?

 

[MiniPocketWorld]

For me it was, nl feels like more varied dialog rather than, it has more varied dialog. I didn't even play nl until playing NH first. I saw the data mine and yeah, on paper, there is more varied dialog in nh than any other AC game.
I think you could be right about the patch. Replaying now from the very beginning it seems more interesting than before. But I still get the oh, you're back and is this island not big enough for the two of us dialog just for talking to a villager for the second time. So I do think it is still buried some even after 2.0.
I don't mind it being buried except when the villagers are complaining that you're back again even though it was a milasec after they finished talking and you didn't really "leave". I did notice they don't if you wait for an extended period of time. Like if you spoke to them in the afternoon(like done with request dialog, gift dialog, greeting dialog first then click), wait until evening.
All around I think the drip feed and bazillion patches for an actual Nintendo game, developed and published, really hurt nh and effected the fandom's sight and opinion on it.

 

[TN4U]

Considering that I've played New Horizons far, far more often than the older games (I played it for 367 days straight right after the game came out, not even joking. The streak only broke because day 368 was so busy for me IRL, and I had absolutely no time to log on before midnight), I've seen my fair share of repeated dialogue. Don't get me wrong; I think the dialogue is much more varied in New Horizons than past titles, but since I've been playing the game for so long, I just know what to expect now. It kind of sucks, but eventually the game is going to run out of new things to tell you. I've kept it varied somewhat; I have one of each personality living on my island, and two extra villagers that I simply really wanted (Kyle and Dotty). That way, the dialogue is mixed pretty well.

I totally forgot that New Leaf would sometimes throw the same dialogue at you multiple times in a row. That very rarely happens in New Horizons, and thank goodness for that. One of these days, I'll have to revisit New Leaf and take note of how the villagers speak. I've sort of forgotten how most of them were like.

 

[Cowplant]

I disagree. I think New Horizons has the weakest dialogue in the series. (Although I don't remember City Folk's dialogue and I've heard it was pretty bad, so take my opinion with a grain of salt!)

I think the dialogue is strongest in Animal Crossing Gamecube. And this isn't nostalgia talking, I still play it! I really like how often they talk about their lives, their hobbies, and their relationships. I also like how they can react negatively to your responses by spreading rumors or ask you to write them more often. (Instead of it being a daily task or something you do to get miles, they specifically ask you to do it when you ask them for work and you get a letter back with a reward for your trouble.) There also feels like there's a lot more little details in their relationships. For example, the harvest moon festival was a couple of days ago and I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was dialogue about one of my villagers accompanying another to the festival because they were too shy to go alone. I appreciated that! I haven't played Wild World in a long time so I can't say too much about it, but I remember it being almost on par with or equal to the Gamecube dialogue.

I agree with you that New Leaf's dialogue wasn't great. I felt like it was a major step down from previous entries and there was a lot of people upset with the direction Nintendo had taken with it. It's funny to see so much praise for it now that New Horizons has released! I feel really attached to my Gamecube and Wild World villagers, but I only remember a few from New Leaf because they just weren't as exciting to talk to. I didn't feel motivated to talk to them like I do in the previous games and I don't think I wrote to them often either.

That being said, New Horizons is worse in my opinion. I really wish I could see where people are coming from when they praise it so heavily. I've heard people say you need to talk to your villagers extensively to get better dialogue, so maybe that's my problem, but I just can't get past the blandness of it all. I'm tired of being told it's sunny out (I know, I can see that, thank you) or about the same episode of their drama they watch every night or that they're sitting down. I've probably put the least amount of hours into New Horizons and I feel like I've seen more repeated dialogue than any of the other games. But, hey, I'm glad that people like it! (Also, if anybody has any tips or know if I'm doing something wrong, let me know! I wanna unlock more dialogue!)

 

[JKDOS]

It's not the worst as I think that is probably City Folk, but the dialogue in NH is under utilized for a 2020 game and lacking when you compare it to past games like Wild World and the original.

 

[pawpatrolbab]

Having gone back and played a couple of the older games recently ( because I was worried I was viewing them with rose colored glasses ) I can safely say that I personally do find New Horizons to have the worst dialogue in the franchise ( compared to Gamecube and New Leaf as those were the ones that I had been playing to test )

I think it's very funny how different peoples experiences of these games are! When playing New Horizons all of my villagers repeat dialogue, some even saying the same thing as the other right after each other. Where as when I was playing New Leaf I never discovered repeat dialogue ever, maybe I just got lucky or something haha

It's also very interesting you say that a patch has fixed this dialogue issue with New Horizons. I still have not encountered anything different from my villagers and have been playing since day one. I will speak to each one maybe a couple times but afterwards I don't bother as I get tired out of hearing the same things between them. Maybe I'm not talking to them enough?

 

[Khaoticnoize187]

i personally liked how savage the first game's dialogue was back in the day on the gamecube i wish we had that kind of savagery back in todays animal crossing.

 

[liliyoa]

In hindsight, New Horizon's diaglogue I believe is about on par with New Leaf's, I think the absence of other series staples being absent in New Horizons made it's dialogue look worse because it's as good as the previous game, not better.

 

[VanitasFan26]

The original Animal Crossing on gamecube had more dialogue to the villagers than the more recent AC games. I know that villagers don't always talk the same way as each other, but they can still be their personality and still have more to say that makes them feel like an actual person talking to you in a way that feels real. Thats what made the original so likable, they can still talk about other stuff while at the same time still keeping up with their personality.

I know people get tired when I say this but I'm sorry the dialogue in New Horizions is just not as good. The personalities to me just feel like they are forced to only say things about themselves rather than talking about different topics. They need to be more varied. Here's the problem with the personalities right now. Jocks only talk about muscles, Lazies talk food and bugs, Snootys talk about their fashion/looks, Peppy only seems to talk about about being famous and a pop star (seriously every Peppy villager I've saw all said they want to be pop stars), Crankys they do sometimes talk different things, but only when they are in a grumpy mood and want to prattle on the good old days. Smugs care about how smart they are and too shy to admit when they are being silly, Sisterly tends to act the same way as Smugs but come off a bit cranky sometimes. and Normals (even though they are my favorite) they are always too shy and I see them talking about washing their clothes all the time.

With all due respect I know villagers do say different things sometimes but it just depends on the RNG in New Horizions whenever you want to get the dialogue that you want them to talk about otherwise everyday you get the same conversations about clothing, seeing the same questions you answered many times, and of course only talking the same thing about themselves based on the personality.

 

[azurill]

I don’t think that the dialogue is the worst. With past games it got a little annoying when they would still tell you how to do things you already knew how to. I know they want you to keep talking to them to get new dialogue. The thing is they sometimes get mad if you talk to them more then once in a day and that’s with having a high friendship. My issue with dialogue is it’s a little too random. There really is not much back and forth. They ask you questions but you very rarely can answer them. Ione will say she doesn’t know what to cook for dinner but you can’t give her a suggestion. Or they will notice you have been gone awhile but it doesn’t give you option to let them know why. There are so many other times they ask you a question but your not given the chance to respond. I agree with @VanitasFan26 they talk mostly about their hobbies. It’ s fine most of the time but it would be great if they talked about some different things.

 

[Introspective Onlooker]

To be frank, I’ve never understood the consensus people have towards the dialogue in the series, either. People mainly point to the GC version or Wild World to have the “best dialogue” in the series, but with how Animal Crossing handles its dialogue, that’s not saying much. People decry the newer games for having repetitive dialogue, as if this wasn’t an issue at all in the previous titles, but somehow, it is in New Leaf or New Horizons. I find this really absurd; villagers have always repeated what they just told you a minute ago. An hour ago. A day ago — sometimes multiple times throughout said day. If this wasn’t an issue then, people shouldn’t have an issue with it now. Also, it’s a life simulator, so it’s to be expected, really. It doesn’t matter which game has more or less repetitive dialogue; you’re eventually going to run into a wall in which hardly anything NPCs tell you is fresh.

The problem with this dialogue is that Nintendo doesn’t offer more options to be had with engaging villagers. There used to be three, but they took out the option to ask for favors to do in e+ — a re-translated GC port of the first game, and we’ve pretty much been regulated to just asking them to tell us anything, and the “Goodbye” option just ends the “conversation” (putting it mildly, here), anyway. Instead of there being an actual exchange of words, it’s really just villagers telling you something, and developers haven’t done much to make dialogue more interconnected between a player and their villagers. This is something I wish was brought up more often in these threads, because this is what hurts the dialogue of the series, and Nintendo needs to overhaul the system so people can enjoy actual, real genuine communication — a foundation the series was built on.

Instead of just having two options (really just one) when approaching villagers, why not give players the ability to ask how their day’s been going? Or what they’re favorite whatever is? Their best friends, their daily routine, their future aspirations? Give us five dialogue choices, Nintendo. That’s all that’s needed to improve the dialogue IMMENSELY. This stuff is what I wrote about in another thread a while ago, too, and I’m going to keep reiterating on these points until it rings into the minds of every AC fan here, and everywhere else. And yes, I know there’s an option to give villagers a gift, but that’s just giving them something. I mean actual verbal engagement, not spoiling them with materialistic things.

City Folk is the nadir when it comes to dialogue. It didn’t matter if you were outdoors, or in their house. This is how it worked in CF. You’ll walk up to a villager, ask them to say something, then they’ll talk about a particular thing, leading to the end of the discussion. Similar to how every game does this, right? Well, speak to them again, and they’ll still be on this subject. Do this again, and you’ll get ANOTHER variation of the subject they spoke to you about. This is where the dialogue chain repeats. It was awful. You CAN’T let them branch out into other topics like you can in every other game in the franchise, so it makes the repetition in this entry especially noticeable. Anyone who’s played CF has no right to criticize the later games because they aren’t as bad as this — not by a long shot.