Probably. I don't look at both games as "which game was better", but "which mainline
AC is the worst one". Ultimately, my attachment to either game has just about all but diminished.
Animal Crossing is quite a flawed series, but I think I can contribute a lot its issues to these two, and I've realized that whevever I play
Wild World, it usually just takes talking to some villagers to see the cracks. With
City Folk, all I need to do is just look at some patches of dirt from grass wear to realize what's wrong with the game, and it circles back to it trying to be an amalgamation of both the GC game, and
Wild World (I still can't accept when people call
WW and
CF the same game when the differences between the two are obvious once you've actually played both of them), while pleasing no one in the end.
So, why do I think
CF is worse? Here's a list:
- Animal Tracks. Yes. Animal Tracks. One of the worst mechanics to ever taint the franchise.
- Easily has the worst dialogue in the series, and while a good portion of it has to do with its writing/localization (Peppies and Jocks are flanderized beyond belief, here) most of it comes from how it's handled. It's not like the other AC games where they gave you the option to have a villager tell you something, or exit the interaction. This doesn't exist in CF, unless it involves a favor or an event of some sorts; even then, you aren't even given the option to just simply say "Nevermind." When you talk to a villager in CF, they automatically tell you something, then it ends. You don't get the choice to ask them to tell you anything, and speaking to them again will just have them recall what they just told you, so you can't gain anything else from them. This is especially bad because AC's dialogue works on RNG. Talk to a villager in any other AC game, then do that with this, and you'll fully understand the problem.
- The decision to exchange made-up events with the real-world ones from GC was fine on paper, but some of them didn't translate well, and lost some of the energy they once had. Thanksgiving is boring now because we don't see villagers outside the Town Hall eating and laughing as they did in the first game near the Wishing Well. Halloween is gimped; it's nice that we can Trick-or-Treat, but why couldn't they make villagers move faster? They practically ran almost as fast as you did in the original game. Were they just too lazy to adjust their speed? And yeah, the events in WW were often bleh, but I think it's charming that this fictional world of anthropomorphic animals had its own events; I think a lot of these had the potential to be great if they were expanded upon in later games, instead of being replaced.
- Is there any explanation why Villager Photos, B-Days, and additional Episodes with various Special NPCS were absent in CF? It's confusing because WW, NL, and NH allowed villagers to give you their photos, and had their own B-Day parties. No, having a bulletin posted saying, "Hey, Today's is this villager's birthday!" doesn't count. It's the most low-effort way of celebrating a birthday. CF only had one Episode that could only be played out once per character, and it existed solely to give some background on a then-new character, and not establishing the backstories of the characters who already lived in your town. What were they thinking? Why couldn't they just bring all the Episodes from the previous game?
- WW's music pails in comparison to the original game, and even NL had a better, more varied OST, so the fact that they used it in this game just shows how lazy they were with this title.
- The City, which is the game's selling point, is probably the most disappointing aspect of all, 'cause it's not even a freakin' city, dammit. It's way too small to be a city, and the only real thing worthwhile is how many Bells you plan on spending. It's a shopping district, which is exactly what Main Street is called in the JP version of New Leaf.
- Oh, and remember in WW, villagers in boxes could be persuaded to stay in your town? Yeah, that doesn't happen in CF. They have to ping you, and even then, it's not even GUARANTEED they'll stay if you tell them so. Goodbye, Pearl... and Static... and Freya...
Wild World is also a game that I used to hold in high regard for its dialogue. I still agree to some extent that's it handled well for an
Animal Crossing game, but it's still far below other games of the genre, and this was probably true back when it was new. Dialogue was never good in any of these games. Instead of Crankies just being standoffish and rude, they're re-categorized to be bullies with a whacky gimmick, and they wondered why they're hated (in-universe). Jocks were turned into meatheads that have 99% of their dialogue being about sports and such. Peppies were as obnoxious and entitled as ever, while being more ditzy than they were previously. The Nintendo Treehouse team obviously had no idea what to do with Snooties. Normals and Lazies are still the only villagers that actually want to be your friend, but their writing is also a bit iffy and nonsensical. Despite these issues, I think
WW's writing wins based off the backstories that Special Characters like Tom Nook passed on to the player character. There's no reason to not have these in every other
AC game. These Episodes represented the best character writing the series ever had, and it didn't even come from villagers, but the characters stationed by their jobs/roles.
Yes, it was better, but only because
City Folk is like a worse version of both it and the GameCube version.
and pitfalls and pushed him
