YMMV / Animal Crossing: City Folk

• Contested Sequel: City Folk to Wild World. A common complaint for City Folk was it acting as something of a Mission-Pack Sequel to the latter, with some of its issues carried over, and some exclusive to its own. People that prefer it, however, say that it improved upon it in many respects, and that actual holidays being added back in and the controls being more user-friendly (largely owing to the presence of an actual analog stick and the ability to use button and pointer controls simultaneously, unlike the DS game's use of different "modes" for button and touch controls) made the game much more appealing.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A widespread criticism of City Folk, both then and now, is that compared to other games in the series, it's much more similar to its predecessors, to the point where many fans and critics in 2008 described it as a de-facto console port of Wild World with a few elements of the first game tossed in.
• The Scrappy: Serena, the fountain goddess. City Folk offered the most convoluted method of obtaining an axe better than the regular one you'll likely start with (Silver/Gold Axe). Pay 400,000 bells to wait three days for the fountain to be built, then throw an axe in the fountain, and one of starting conversations has Serena asking if you dislike her. You'll most likely will abhor her because of the RNG working against you more often than not.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Animal Tracks. The game will keep track of where you walk and wear down the grass accordingly. Aside from looking unsightly, it can affect other things, like the availability of certain bugs, and rolling snowballs. Additionally, there is no way to mitigate the effect apart from avoiding those paths and waiting a long time for the grass to re-grow. Neither the manual, nor game itself, hints that simply moving on grass is enough to deteriorate it, that damage varies depending on fast you move, or that running affects the range of the deterioration. It's hated so much that people were willing to hack their save files to reverse the effect. Thankfully, grass wears down more slowly and re-grows more quickly in New Leaf, and the system was axed entirely in New Horizons. The Cutting Room Floor explains it perfectly:
  It also introduced the infamous mechanic of grass deterioration, causing your well-loved town to slowly devolve into a barren wasteland.
  • The Flea Market, which thankfully only happens on a few select weekends each month, but is still quite a thorn in one's side. If you're meaning to spend a little time decorating your house on one of these days, you will find yourself hard-pressed trying to do it without a villager barging into your home unannounced to buy things in your room. While you have a guest over, all decoration is disabled until they leave, or you step outside to force them out.
  • Villager dialogue feels stilted because City Folk removed the dialogue options altogether when talking to villagers entirely. A villager will talk about a topic, provide more feedback on said topic, then said villager will loop around the same topic. If they haven't done that, they'll do the same with the next topic. This is infuriating, as the previous games were able to craft a more flexible dialogue system because there was always an option to have villagers go from one topic to another without staying on the same one. The GCN game had favor requests, and Wild World often gave you favors upon your first interaction with villager, but favors are completely randomized. And when you do get dialogue choices, it's because you're speaking to the villager who already gave you a task to complete (or a villager related to said task). The options themselves range from discussing about the favor, or to chat, so you can't just simply end the conversation, like you can in every other Animal Crossing game.

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