Complaints about City Folk?

[Kapriznyy]

Every so often I've seen people say very vague things (not necessarily on this board!) about disliking City Folk, but I never see anyone outright discussing what they didn't like about it. I don't remember playing it for more than a day or two before ultimately losing interest, but I can't say that was because of any one factor in particular, I just wasn't in the mood for an Animal Crossing type of game at the time, and by the time I was yearning for one, New Leaf had come out - so I never went back and really gave it a shot.

Was there something wrong with City Folk, as compared to the other entries in the series? Is there something I'm perhaps missing? It looked fine enough to me but again, I didn't spend much time with it so there could have been glaring flaws I'm unaware of.

I just remember thinking the city square area was a cute addition, after coming from GC/WW.

 

[radioloves]

Ohh, hmm. City folk was fun I played it very often along time ago and can't remember much of it now except the fun in the city plaza. The game itself was nice, but I didn't really do much since I was young and didn't really know what I was doing. But yeah most of my animal crossing game experiences with the previous games and such, I all had a good good time with it

 

[Belle of Pripyat]

I never played it, but I hate the Wii. I love Wild World and I'm sure I would have loved City Folk if it hadn't been a Wii game.

 

[MayorJudyOfZootopia]

only thing that i remember that stank was the bus ride with Kapp'n UGH what a chatterbox!

 

[cornimer]

I thought that the villager dialogue was boring and repetitive. I've also heard a lot of people complain about bad grass deterioration but I hardly played so I didn't really experience that. And frankly, I just don't like AC on the wii, I never felt connected to my town. It feels much more personal when you're holding it in your hand and you can take it anywhere you go.

 

[PrincessAurora]

City Folk was okay I guess, but it's probably my least favorite of the AC games. Since they called the game CITY Folk you'd think it'd have more to do with an actual city. All you did was take a bus to a small little square with some stuff to do in it. I think if they'd focused more on the city area it would have been a better game.

 

[Silversea]

City Folk did not feel particularly inspired. It was basically a HD Wild World with a small panel of new features, not like the progression of Gamecube to Wild World.

 

[mayortash]

The grass deterioration was a big turn off to most people.

I personally didn't like it on the wii - I think AC works best as a handheld game.

 

[Nayab]

The "city" was kind of annoying, since you had to go through the bus cutscene every time. Replacing it with Main Street in ACNL was a great choice. Other than that, though, it was an enjoyable game.

Things I wish they kept in New Leaf are the gyroid storage once you befriend Brewster, and Celeste's observatory. I enjoyed making constellations...

 

[shuba]

Yeah, the handheld thing is a big factor. I could write a long parahraph about why handheld works better for Animal Crossing, but I guess we all know.

I think there was nothing wrong with the game itself, but it's a lot of this:

City Folk did not feel particularly inspired. It was basically a HD Wild World with a small panel of new features, not like the progression of Gamecube to Wild World.

So, not being on handheld and not even releasing any extremely interesting features, I haven't played it much.

 

[Kapriznyy]

I never played it, but I hate the Wii. I love Wild World and I'm sure I would have loved City Folk if it hadn't been a Wii game.

I'm not a big fan of the Wii, either, so I feel your pain on this.

 

[scotch]

I had it, it broke after 3 days. I don't remember A SINGLE thing.

 

[thecheese103]

Personally, it's the only installment I haven't played, and from an outsider's perspective I don't see myself playing it for quite some time. A lot of the features, such as Wii Speak and WiFi, are no longer applicable (outside of the homebrew for WiFi, provided that still works?). That and from what I hear from many, even some of the opinions in this thread, it may be the weakest installment in the series. Again that's not my opinion, just what I hear. Doesn't seem like there's too much in particular that let it branch out and have its own identity, at least not when compared to other installments in the series.

Are there any more specific, technical complaints that anyone has about it though? As someone who might be picking it up whenever I get the next chance (i.e. whenever I see it at a local game shop), I'd like to know anything important before I buy it. Conversely I'd like to hear some of the good about it as well, no matter what complaints it brings to the table I'm sure that everyone has great memories of it too, ones that they could only get from a particular installment Let me know!

 

[Mothership]

The grass wear in City Folk is absolutely terrible and was the main reason I stopped playing it. Having the grass be damaged every single time you loaded up a character meant that those of us who loved to play off and on all day every day very quickly wound up with towns that looked like deserts. ( Still don't know why Nintendo thought that it was a good idea to "punish" people for playing their game by turning their towns into mudpits. Makes no sense to me )

Restoring the grass was time-consuming and boring because you had to TT day by day for months without ever walking anywhere until the grass regrew.

The villagers were very boring in City Folk because they never really did anything other than wander aimlessly around, or stand in one spot for long periods at a time staring at nothing.

Somehow, I still managed to enjoy playing this game, tho.

 

[rass]

I don't really like City folk only because it's on the wii. One: I don't like consoles because they're not portable. Two: I don't have a gamecube controller and the wii remote sucks. Three: The grass wear is annoying like Mothership said and yeah you gotta time travel a lot to get your grass wear, plus running ruins the grass very quickly, it's like fragile. lol That's just my 2 cents.

 

[JCnator]

I've got two significant complaints that made the game much more difficult to recommend than any of the other mainline Animal Crossing game.

The Wii console is a poor fit for any mainline Animal Crossing title, not just for not being an handheld console to begin with. As the system is only marginally better than GameCube, there's nothing much new the staff could do with the console. The dated visuals of the original Animal Crossing are resulted by porting the original Japanese N64 game, which of course the Wii version easily improved the graphics by essentially adding more polygons and having higher texture resolutions.
There are a few areas where the Wii Remoter's IR pointer becomes useful. However, there's a lot of instances we prefer using another method (or even another controller) rather than the pointer. For some reason, making a pattern will always involve IR pointer for precision drawing, and it tends to be finicky.
Also, if you don't like using WiiSpeak and a USB keyboard, you're pretty much left with awkwardly typing with the Wii Remote with the in-game keyboard. It's fine when you're playing with 4:3 resolution, but going with 16:9 reveals a design flaw: the keys are stretched to fill the TV screen and made typing even slower and more cumbersome. That doesn't matter anymore, since online has been axed since May 2014.
You would be right to assume that the game could still expand a lot upon what Animal Crossing: Wild World did to the original GameCube installment, considering the technical limitations of the Wii system. Too bad City Folk still didn't do much for that matter.

The game didn't necessarily had to reinvent the wheels in order to be a good game. However, it didn't added and improved much to what Wild World did. Sure, there was a number of things that were actually added and improved, but those are pretty much insignificant to the game's overall appeal. For example, the city was lackluster, considering how long it takes to get in and then out and how little there is new content. Some of the stores were already available in form of special visitors or features from the past Animal Crossing titles, only more accessible this time around. Disappointing to see that this only much-touted feature is ultimately insignificant to what Wild World brought to the tables.


So yeah, Animal Crossing: City Folk is the least liked mainline installment for good reasons. While there's still enjoyment to be found there, one can't help but feel it being a lackluster effort that did nothing much to expand the franchise as a whole. You'd have to be hard-pressed to recommend this one over the GameCube installment and New Leaf!

 

[MapleLeafKangaroos]

Oh jeez. I am not a fan. Definitely not a fan. Like many people have said, grass in this game does not like to stick around for long, the villagers are boring, and Kapp'n talks too much. Seriously. I just want to go to the city without wasting 5 minutes of waiting for the bus, then chatting with Kapp'n. Other than that, I love the shops and everything else. I like how you just have the shops there, without having to spend millions of bells in stores to unlock better shops. So personally, I don't think it's necessarily a bad game, I just feel like there's not really much to do.

 

[Hoontr]

The control scheme drove me absolutely bonkers. I hated not being able to just move without pointing my Wiimote somewhere.

 

[windwake-me-up-inside]

I only started playing with New Leaf, so I never got to experience any of the other animal crossings. Sadly, City Folk and the Original Animal Crossing do not run well as emulators on my computer, and I can't seem to find copies of either that aren't priced outrageously.

Kind of feel bad for missing out, but all I had as a kid was an n64 and by the time I got a wii copies of City Folk weren't readily available at local outlets.

 

[Spongebob]

I dont think CF is that bad, it's basically an improved WW. The only big complaints I have about CF is that the villager dialogue kinda sucks and the grass goes away if you run a lot.