Ever since Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out, there was an ongoing debate as to who would be considered the most popular villager to ever grace your island paradise.
There are a ton of metrics to follow for this. You could check out the trade exchange on Nookazon to buy the most expensive villagers for yourself, you can even check out these awesome lists that were made right here on TechRaptor, as we candidly check out the best and worst villagers of each personality type. But math and statistics rule the day, and the website Blue Planet Aquarium has compiled the data to showcase, once and for all, the most popular villagers in New Horizons.
And the winner, to no one's surprise, is Marshal.
According to the Blue Planet Aquarium's blog, The smug squirrel, in terms of online searches for the past few months, is the most popular character in the game, with an average of 246,000 searches online monthly since New Horizons was released. This blows the next two popular characters, the cat Bob and the creepy looking Coco, who net over 160,000 150,000 searches a month on their own. Rounding out the top five are two of the three octopuses, Marina and Zucker, respectively.
Ironically, some of the top choices for most popular are pretty surprising, such as the incredibly creepy Pietro, to me. But others, from Bob to Ankha to Stitches, are less of a shock. In fact, out of the top twenty, cats made up the most popular animal type with 25%, followed by deer at 15% and octopus, dogs and ducks at 10%.
The villager personalities were also tallied, with Normal and Lazy villagers being the most popular, while Cranky, Jock, and Snooty villagers turned out to be the least popular.
In fact, the least popular Animal Crossing villager in the game, is the poor lazy horse Clyde, clocking in at just about 530 searches a month, well below 2nd on the list, Sparro, who averages about 1600 searches a month. The bottom five are rounded out by Kevin, Cally, and Candi, with Frogs being the least popular villager species, making up about 25% of the bottom 20 villagers.
The Blue Planet Aquarium didn't just track villager statistics, a number of charts showcased a lot of information regarding the habits of players in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. One of the most interesting charts was how players actually spent their time on their Animal Crossing islands.
For the vast majority, it seems fossil hunting, painting searching, and collecting bugs for Blathers and his museum is the most popular activity on the island, with 20% of the player base apparently searching for ways to add to their museum collection. The next highest was landscaping your island, with 13% of the playerbase seemingly obsessed with that. The lowest activity searched is a classic one for Animal Crossing veterans, upgrading your house at less than 3%.
These are not the only statistics to check out either, as data was compiled on the genders of popular and least popular villagers, the most sought after clothing items, and the most popular furniture items.
The Blue Planet Aquarium is located in Cheshire Oaks, Cheshire, England. The Aquarium, which opened twenty years ago, is the home of one of Europe's largest collection of sharks, all viewable through a vast underwater tunnel and a shark-dive experience that is available for both children and adults. Though not an actual gaming website, the statistics gathered by the Aquarium for this unofficial study on Animal Crossing: New Horizons is certainly a fun little distraction that will no doubt get fans of the series debating once more who the top dog, or in this case, squirrel, is.
