it's honestly amazing how cf managed to flip the entire franchise on its head. backpedalling on what made wild world so great while shoehorning in gamecube features that were missing from wild world doesn't make for an interesting game unfortunately. while it does do some good things, like a consistent 60fps and giving us the holy grail that is the city music (all are genuinely wonderful tracks) however that doesn't excuse the terrible grass deterioration, complete dumbing down of the villager system (which had a surprising amount of depth in wild world) removing all the special character episodes and their memoirs, and making them a LOT nicer (which, in turn, hurts their original personalities a lot) thankfully i don't need to go into detail since everyone knows about them by now, but man did that hurt the sales of the game by a long shot back then.
the city deserves its own section. i absolutely love the vibes, but when you get down to it, it's really just the special shops crammed into one place, and it hurts the game’s replayability a lot. special characters in wild world would pop up in town and do something fun each week, and for me, that was a big motivator to come back to the game every day - there’d always be something new to find, or unlock - and if not, they would at least be interesting to talk to. but now that people like Redd, Katrina and Harriet are always in the city, there was no real reason to come back, since they’d always be there, doing the exact same stuff. gracie’s shop made returning furniture sets from gamecube way too expensive, the auction house is pretty much useless now that wifi’s gone, and kicks would be better if he had his own building. it would have been so much better if they had made new characters to replace these old ones, but that’s what new leaf is for.
i would go into more things like the terrible golden axe fountain rng, the fact that multiplayer is virtually unchanged from ww (and you can't go to the city), the weird exclusion of classic controller/gamecube support and ultimately harder to play for longer periods of time due to the lack of portability, but i don't want to be too harsh considering i have had some fun memories of this game with good friends. the goofy wii speak, pro patterns, and the whole hacked villagers and dlc item fiasco years ago are always a fascinating part of animal crossing history in my eyes. still, for every improvement it introduced, it adds 3 more problems, while also being way too similar to wild world and trying too hard to fill in the gaps it left behind.
the city deserves its own section. i absolutely love the vibes, but when you get down to it, it's really just the special shops crammed into one place, and it hurts the game’s replayability a lot. special characters in wild world would pop up in town and do something fun each week, and for me, that was a big motivator to come back to the game every day - there’d always be something new to find, or unlock - and if not, they would at least be interesting to talk to. but now that people like Redd, Katrina and Harriet are always in the city, there was no real reason to come back, since they’d always be there, doing the exact same stuff. gracie’s shop made returning furniture sets from gamecube way too expensive, the auction house is pretty much useless now that wifi’s gone, and kicks would be better if he had his own building. it would have been so much better if they had made new characters to replace these old ones, but that’s what new leaf is for.
i would go into more things like the terrible golden axe fountain rng, the fact that multiplayer is virtually unchanged from ww (and you can't go to the city), the weird exclusion of classic controller/gamecube support and ultimately harder to play for longer periods of time due to the lack of portability, but i don't want to be too harsh considering i have had some fun memories of this game with good friends. the goofy wii speak, pro patterns, and the whole hacked villagers and dlc item fiasco years ago are always a fascinating part of animal crossing history in my eyes. still, for every improvement it introduced, it adds 3 more problems, while also being way too similar to wild world and trying too hard to fill in the gaps it left behind.