Are Animal Crossing Villagers’ In-Game Traits Tied to their Popularity?

Introduction

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a life simulation game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch, and the fifth main entry in the Animal Crossing series. The game went viral from its release during the global stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the game, players create and control their character who lives on an initially remote island with anthropomorphic animal neighbors. The player has near total control over the development of the island into a small community, and with enough dedication and luck (really, lots of both), can invite their favorite or “dream villagers” to live on their island to complete one part their ideal community.

Fan Community run websites help enthusiastic fans keep a pulse on which collectible items, villagers, etc. are in demand for determining trading prices with other players. One such website, Animal Crossing Portal has been running a monthly poll where fans can vote for up to 5 villagers (formerly 3 in the early days).

Raymond the Cat in particular was one villager that attained newsworthy status (see, e.g. Why Raymond is the Most Popular Animal Crossing: New Horizons Villager). He is a new villager to the series and has been in close battles for the top popularity spot with Marshal the Squirrel, a newcomer from the previous game and was the most popular villager from that era.

Raymond and Marshal notably share three traits provided in the game data: they both have the ‘Smug’ Personality, which determines how they speak for example, both are Male gendered, and both prefer to wear ‘Elegant’-styled clothing. This brings up the question whether a villager’s popularity is possibly correlated with their in-game provided traits. This is possible to explore with the publicly available poll results from Animal Crossing Portal.

Another factor I will explore is the whether villager rarity in game (explained further later) is also a contributing factor to villager popularity.

Clarifying points about the data: Data taken from the polls and used for this analysis is taken from June 2020 to October 2021. From June 2020 to January 2021, fans were allowed to pick up to 3 villagers. After, they were allowed to pick up to 5 villagers.
Villager analysis is limited to the original 391 villagers included at the time of the game’s release. I cut off the poll period for the analysis at October 2021 due to the November 2021 update adding new villagers that some in particular became very popular shaking up the usual list of most popular villagers. There were new villagers introduced in March 2021 as part of a collaboration with Sanrio, but those villagers were not popular enough to break into the topmost spots.

Data about villager traits were taken from this Kaggle dataset.

Most and Least Popular Villagers from June 2020 to October 2021

The measure I will use for overall villager popularity is the sum of the poll results for each villager from June 2020 to October 2021 (In a possible future analysis, mean and median ranking would also be worth looking at). Below are the top 10 villagers that got the most amount of votes in this time period, along with a image of the villager.

Villager images are from Animal Crossing Fandom Wiki

Below is a table of listed in-game traits of these villagers.

##            Species Personality  Gender   Style 1     Color 1    Hobby  PollSum
## Name                                                                          
## Marshal   Squirrel        Smug    Male   Elegant  Light blue    Music    25481
## Raymond        Cat        Smug    Male   Elegant       Black   Nature    23901
## Sherb         Goat        Lazy    Male    Simple        Gray   Nature    16983
## Zucker     Octopus        Lazy    Male    Simple        Blue   Nature    15247
## Judy           Cub      Snooty  Female      Cute        Pink    Music    12687
## Marina     Octopus      Normal  Female      Cute        Pink    Music    11537
## Stitches       Cub        Lazy    Male    Simple    Colorful     Play    10674
## Ankha          Cat      Snooty  Female  Gorgeous    Colorful   Nature    10584
## Audie         Wolf       Peppy  Female      Cute       Green  Fitness    10485
## Fauna         Deer      Normal  Female    Simple       Beige   Nature    10042

And below are the bottom 10 villagers that got the least amount of votes. I have omitted the bar graph but the range of total votes is from 134 to 154.

##            Species Personality  Gender   Style 1 Color 1      Hobby  PollSum
## Name                                                                        
## Greta        Mouse      Snooty  Female   Elegant    Pink  Education      154
## Moose        Mouse        Jock    Male      Cool  Purple    Fitness      150
## Boyd       Gorilla      Cranky    Male    Simple     Red    Fitness      149
## Pancetti       Pig      Snooty  Female      Cute     Red      Music      147
## Rizzo        Mouse      Cranky    Male    Simple   Black  Education      147
## Harry        Hippo      Cranky    Male      Cool   Green  Education      145
## Limberg      Mouse      Cranky    Male    Simple   Green  Education      141
## Bitty        Hippo      Snooty  Female      Cute    Pink  Education      139
## Snooty    Anteater      Snooty  Female    Simple   Green  Education      137
## Violet     Gorilla      Snooty  Female  Gorgeous  Purple    Fitness      134

Determining if there is a possible relation between Villager In-Game Traits and Popularity

Personality

I began with an examination of the mean poll results of villagers categorized by their in-game personality. Sorting by the mean does show a trend of Smug villagers being the most popular, but further examination of all villagers in a category shows there is a wide spread in popularity with many Smug villagers for example having a low amount of total votes, and the median of each personality category does not vary in the same way as the mean. After exploring different types of plots, I determined (so far) the most fair way to show the data is with a strip plot with means and medians of each category, with a log scale on the total votes axis. This plot is shown below:

Each small blue point represents an individual villager’s total poll count over the June 2020 to October 2021 time period.

The categories are ordered by the highest to lowest mean. Looking at the Smug category again, we can see the mean is influenced by the two most popular villagers overall, Raymond and Marshal. On the other end of popularity sorted by these categories is the Cranky Personality, which clearly has no outlying popular villager (the most popular Cranky villager is Apollo at Rank 27) a noticeable clustering of points at the low end of poll totals. This makes a compelling argument for a villager having a Cranky Personality being more likely to be less popular.

Gender

Although the top 4 most popular villagers are all male, the mean and median total votes split between genders are higher for female villagers.

It is worth noting that villager personalities are tied to gender, thus likely influencing the results here. Normal, Peppy, Snooty, and Big Sister villagers are all female, while Lazy, Jock, Cranky, and Smug villagers are all male. As shown above, Cranky villagers in particular seem to be more likely to be unpopular.

Hobby

I suspect that a villager’s appearance besides their personality has a more clear relation with how popular they are, but for now we look at villager’s in-game hobby preference. The categories are again sorted by highest to lowest mean.

Again ignoring Raymond and Marshal (who have the Nature and Music hobbies respectively), it seems like the most popular villagers’ more often have Nature has a hobby, but it is not dominant.

Clothing Style

Villagers actually have 2 preferred clothing styles in the game, but for simplicity I looked only at the first listed Style, which I assumed is their favorite style overall.

I suspected that Cute would have a high ranking among these categories, and it even beat out Elegant despite Marshal and Raymond both being in that category. Ironically, I was not expecting Cool would be the lowest ranking in terms of average.

Color

Villagers also have 2 favorite colors, and again for simplicity I chose to only to look at the first listed color.

It seems the most popular villagers tend to have pastel colors, consistent with the cute aesthetic (not to be confused with the in-game style) that fans seem to favor. This pushes the mean for their respective categories higher. In addition, some categories are sparsely populated, and sorting by the median would produce a different ordering of categories.

Species

Finally, we have the Villager’s listed Species.

To clarify, the Cub category means Bear Cub.

The exceptional category is the Octopus category, which only has 3 villagers, 2 of which are in the top 10 (Zucker and Judy) and the third, Octavian, is ranked 34th. Deer is another category that appears to lack unpopular villagers. Going down the list, the categories spread from very popular to least popular, but reaching the least popular end, there becomes a clear absence of exceptionally popular villagers.

So are in-game villager traits correlated to the villager’s popularity?

It’s easy to look at Raymond and Marshal see that they’re both Elegantly-dressed and Smug, so that what must be most appealing to the fans. Even I went into this analysis with the preconceived notion that most Normal villagers tend to be cute, in both their in-game style and their visual design. But I was overall surprised by the spread of the data from very popular to not popular at all in the categorical breakdowns.

More rigourous statistical tests could be done to determine if there is a correlation, but from this first analysis, I would say there are a few traits that a villager could have that could somewhat accurately predict that they would be more or less popular, and these predictions might be more accurate on the least popular end. For example, Cranky or Gorilla villagers clearly tend to be less popular.

In my opinion, villager popularity is probably more likely tied to individual visual designs of the villagers, which unfortunately cannot be quantified for an analysis like this. Another unofficial trait I believe is tied to villager is popularity is perceived rarity, which I also went into a small examination in the next section.

Villager “Rarity”

While there is an equal chance of finding all villagers in the wild or them visiting the player’s island, players can also obtain villagers through physical collectible cards called “Amiibo Cards,” which are themselves randomized in a pack. However, when New Horizons was released, there were 8 villagers new to the series and thus could not be obtained via Amiibo Cards. The following are the poll results for those villagers:

(These villagers now have their own Amiibo Cards that released in November 2021)

So 5 of these 8 villagers are very popular, 4 of them appearing in the top 10 villagers. Dom is also notably ranked very close to the top 10 at 12th place. It is likely these villagers popularity is due to combined factors of difficulty to obtain, in addition to appealing individual visual design, and some favorable in-game traits as was discussed earlier.

Also related to rarity is again the Octopus Species category, as there are only 3 villagers out of the original 391, and all three of these villagers are very popular.

Data Credits and Tools Used

Poll Data was compiled from Animal Crossing Portal and the Villager Traits table was downloaded from Kaggle. Villager Images are from Animal Crossing Fandom Wiki. Animal Crossing and its villagers are copyright of Nintendo.

Data tools used in this analysis were pandas, matplotlib, and seaborn. The GIMP image editor was used to put the images of the villagers onto the plots. This webpage was compiled with RMarkdown in Rstudio.