>>724683118
>Give said animal friends progressively FEWER lines of dialog every sequel making it basically pointless to interact with them at all
This is partially caused by how it became increasingly easier to pick favorite villagers and make them stay in your town. In the first gen games, the games deliberately tried to give you villagers with personalities uncommon in your town as a way to spice up your interactions with them, make certain portions of personality pools exclusive to each villager so they all had unique things to say, and continuously rotate villagers without warning to keep interactions with them fresh and make you "experience" every villager in the game.
Wild World and City Folk kept these mechanics mostly the same but with fewer villagers, but also added the feature of letting you try to convince villagers to stay in your town (the success of this wasn't guaranteed tho), effectively reducing your chances of meeting new villagers with uncommon personalities.
New Leaf also had a similar system, but with the introduction of campsites it became possible to select which villagers can move in to the town. Additionally, it became possible to make a villager stay (and not just try to convince them to stay like in previous games), making it easy to filter villagers with undesirable personalities and traits (but also making interactions with villagers more boring because they all say the same things).
New Horizons took a step further and made picking your favorite villagers and keeping them forever easier than ever and a core part of the game. This allowed players to have their dream towns, but at the same time killed part of the charm of the game because now it wasn't necessary to adapt yourself to new villagers with unknown personalities, and also made interactions with the current villagers more boring because in NH a good bunch of dialogue is only available under specific circumstances that rarely happen because the player controls everything.
