This is the only sane position to have about this, and something I’ve been arguing for a while, now. Since there are eight personalities, it shouldn’t be too hard to have the four more passive ones be kinder in varying degrees, while the remaining four are a bit more rough around the edges. This isn’t even asking much, here — just designed archetypes in a way that doesn't lean too much on either side.
I have no reason not to suspect that people going off about villagers being “too nice” in
New Horizons would’ve flip-flopped and went, “They’re too mean!”. Seriously. People don’t know
what they want from a game when they ask for characters to mindlessly berate them for trivial reasons, or no reason at all. That was obnoxious in the first two games. If Peppies just stole from you and were basically a ditzier version of the Snooties (like they were in
PG!), if Snooties just regarded you as a troglodyte despite you being in charge of your own island and establishing a home for them, if Crankies just considered you a nuisance to be ignored, if Jocks shifted from being nice to insensitive on a dime, if Lazies made jokes about your weight whilst talking about nothing BUT food, if Normals sometimes brushed you off despite instances of them latching themselves onto you, and if villagers PAINTED your roof without your permission and you COULDN’T ask Tom Nook to paint it back, and had to hope the Nooklings were selling a paint color your roof had before it was painted into something you NEVER asked for… all of this was obnoxious and never charming — rarely was it ever humorous, either. It’d just be your neighbors being absolute ******** and you couldn’t even retaliate, other than decking them with a net or pushing them. There is no way in hell that people wouldn’t have complained about this sort of behavior, especially when the game came out nearly a week after a lockdown (speaking just the U.S.A, here, and this is an American site, after all), and was marketed to be a break from the harsh realities of this life.
Going back to
Wild World would’ve also been a terrible idea. Peppies are still easily the worst villagers in that game because they act even more rudely (if it could even be believed) in there than they did in the first game. Snooties and Crankies might not be in-you-face about how arrogant and crude they are respectively, but that doesn’t mean they were any better, either. Jocks are relatively the same; they still meditate between being your buds, and being insulting. Normals are a strange case. They’re still the nicest, next to Lazies, but there's a certain tone the English localization gave them that I can’t say I hate, but don’t particularly like, either. All-in-all,
WW was pretty bad at handling this whole “Nice/Mean” dichotomy. When they gave you their picture, it didn’t make a damn difference in the slightest, either. All that work to befriend them, all to be treated like garbage, anyway. It’s good that they’ll wave (or bow) back if you initial the gesture, but there needed to be waaay more of this in the game to show that your work meant more than, “I got a pic! Maybe the quote won’t be a recycled one from the other three pics that I already have!”
The inverse of the particular issue above is that villagers in the newer games won’t even behave in a way that appropriately reflects how poorly you treated them. There might be subtle visual cues, but villagers not acting in a way that accurately reflects their relationship with the player is a series-wide problem. It’s baffling how much this is ignored whenever the topic of this dichotomy is brought up.
Honestly, there doesn’t even need to be a dichotomy, anyway. If you make villagers angry, write dialogue to reflect that, and make it justified. Don’t have them insult you because you refused an insane offer, or didn’t want to spend money on non-native fruit when there’s already a tree of the stuff right next to them. If you’ve been continuously nice to them, they shouldn’t turn on you because of the games' dumb RNG that randomizes what a villager says at any given time — that’s what makes this dichotomy muddled in the first place.
I find the idea that people can look at NL and NH, games where you're explicitly named as the boss of the small patch of rural land that you live in, and where you're encouraged to do basically what you like with the place, even going as so far in Welcome amiibo and NH to having easy control of the specific villagers that live in your town, then proceed to go "villagers aren't mean anymore because people complained
(despite the fact the devs specifically named Resetti as the thing people complained about), so if we complain loudly enough they'll put it back! This has
nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that you're
the most important figure in the town now!" kind of... stupid, I'm not going to lie, and it's a harrowing reminder that most Animal Crossing discourse is ultimately based on complaining and treating things as a bunch of content rather than, y'know, thinking about why things are the way they are and how everything meshes together.
I only really feel as if villagers would become people that you've got to work to befriend again if the NL/NH model truly wears out its welcome and Animal Crossing goes back to being a world you've got basically no control over again... and I think a good portion of the AC playerbase would then complain that you can't easily swap out Ugletto for Cutesie, or that you can't force your animals to wake up at 7am so that you can see them before you go to work because that's the only time you can play the game, or that you can't turn this rural slice of nothing into a purely aesthetic theme park.
Don't get me wrong, as someone who started out with Wild World, part of me would welcome that! I just don't think it's possible in the current model of Animal Crossing, and I'm fed up of hearing about it as something you can just easily reimplement (or worse, add as an option, as if Animal Crossing dialogue hasn't been stretched enough by villagers talking about the things you've placed, two extra personalities, and the expectation that AC games have to be released worldwide at roughly the same time, instead of releasing potentially more than 2 years afterwards like the European version of the GC game)
Once again, McRibbie is the voice of reason when it comes to this topic. Though I disagree with the point that the current standard has to be removed in order to make villagers be people you can be friends with, you're certainly right about how the
AC fandom takes these problems and makes complaints about them without understanding why these decisions were made in the first place.
