The Animal Crossing: New Horizons players among us love cats, laziness, and Marshal. That is according to research into the fanbase’s online activity, which looks at our search history, and how much we’re willing to fork over for Amiibo cards for sought after villagers.
The research, gathered by Blue Planet Aquarium in the UK, shows that smug squirrel Marshal may reign supreme in the fanbase, as he brings in an average of 246,000 searches on Google a month. He’s miles ahead of Bob the cat in second place, who sits at 165,000 monthly searches, and is then closely followed by Coco the rabbit in third. According to the data gathered, Marshal’s Amiibo card also has an average resale value of $55-110 on eBay.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the infamous Raymond the cat only made it 18th in terms of Google search popularity, despite his boom on social media around release. He sits in between Molly and Roald on the leaderboard. Some fans have remained loyal, however, with him remaining number one in Hong Kong, Austria and Denmark.
As for the most hated, this is less consistent. Sure enough, villagers typically considered ugly made the list, such as T-Bone and Wart Jr. However, some odd inclusions such as Fauna, Lolly, and Candi mean that this method of assessing popularity may not be as accurate the other way around. Taking the spot for least popular of all 391 villagers is Clyde, an unassuming lazy green horse.
The research also looked into how players spend their time on the game, and what our favorite items are. The info suggests that we spend 20% of our time filling the museum, 13% terraforming, and 11% bug catching. Apparently, we only spend 3% of our time visiting other islands, but this could be because this is a fairly straight forward activity, which doesn’t require many guides online.
Lastly, Animal Crossing players seem to be feeling regal, as the items with the most internet searches are the crown, royal crown, and gold armor.
To read more about the research, you can visit the Blue Planet Aquarium here.
Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s was released in March of this year, and is about to receive a Halloween update. Alongside this, Nintendo claim it will attempt to fix the notorious stock issues associated with the villager Amiibo cards, which has led to the high prices online.
Food for Thought
While probably not the most definitive way to end the years-long debate into who’s the best villager, this makes for a fun read. Looks like poor Raymond couldn’t keep up the momentum after his crash into fame back in March, but having said that, his lesser amount of search engine mentions could be down to the fact that he (for some bizarre reason) doesn’t yet have an Amiibo card release, so that’s one less reason to put his name into Google.
