Animal Crossing fans are generally the creative types. The game series has allowed players to create homes with as much personality as one can put into a structure, with thousands of items at the disposal of the creator. But the series also had so much more, including an extensive bug hunting and fishing component, as well as the camaraderie that comes from chatting with and doing errands for the myriad anthropomorphic residents of the player’s randomly generated town.
In Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer for the Nintendo 3DS, most of that is stripped away, leaving only the home design elements, and some village/town planning. While this is both a good and bad thing for long-time fans, the good so outweighs the bad that it really becomes a moot point.
The player begins the game by taking on a job and Nook’s Happy Homes. The simple set-up gets you right into designing, as the animal townsfolk will come to you (at first) with their dream home idea, and it’s up to the player to make it a reality using an ever-growing catalog of items. Most animals have two or three must-use component items and the rest is up to the designer. Starting off, there is no way to screw this up as long as you use the items listed on your handy clipboard.
As Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer goes on, the player will have more responsibilities thrust on them, including picking out home locations and then building from scratch — all before doing the interior designs. But it doesn’t stop there. The town also needs a few structures designed, and guess who gets the gig. Not Lyle, who’s been with the company forever. The new guy. You. Me. Us. Bang!
These structures include a school and a hospital, which are pretty big jobs and allows for extra creativity flexing from the designers. The new structures also bring more animals into town, giving the designer more clients to work with. Each new client has demands that work to fill up the Happy Home catalog, which I guess is meant to replace collecting fish, bugs, fossils and the like. While this would be somewhat adequate, Nintendo has included a “handbook” that the player can use. By spending 3DS Play Coins to read each chapter, those items are unlocked completely, which speeds up the process, but also takes away some of the fun.
And just because you designed Bill, the pumped-up duck’s house once doesn’t mean you are done with him. You can visit the animals and get a gauge on what works and what doesn’t, and even do a redesign, which gives Happy Home Designer some legs after the initial 20 or so hours of playing.
The new Nintendo amiibo cards are also introduced here with Happy Home Designer. These cards (sold in packs of six, with a 100 series one cards in total to collect) allows the player to use the handy
“amiibo phone” in the office to import the character and then immediately build their house. Once they are in your game, they stay, so the cards are kind of one-use in that regards, though you can put the designed home file back on the card and then take the card to a friends house to share your designs. The New Nintendo 3DS systems have a built-in NFC reader, but older systems will need the NFC reader, sold separately.
The amiibo cards also work to create scenes in designed homes for pictures, and then those photos — as well as the home designs — can be uploaded to the internet and shared between designers.
While all the home designing is fun and all, one huge component is missing, and that’s the player’s home. We never get to see our own homes — or design one — which seems rather silly. Seeing as the upstairs of Nook’s Happy Homes has an outfit-changing area and beauty salon (used to change the look of the player’s character), I just assume that at the end of the day, my character heads upstairs and sleeps on a pallet of used phone books, with blankets made of town maps. The life of a designer is a hard one, apparently.
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer somewhat scratches the itch that fans have been feeling in regards to a new core Animal Crossing game, but it lacks in very many places and the itch is still there. The designing is fun and the rules are pretty much wide open, but it does tend to get repetitive after 10-plus hours of designing houses. There is absolutely no skill involved, and moderate knowledge of the stylus and the touch screen is all you need to start your career working for a lazy raccoon. Happy Home Designer may not be the Animal Crossing experience that fans have come to love, but the elements that are here will have to suffice until the next core AC game hits, most likely for the future Nintendo NX system.
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is available now for the Nintendo 3DS and New 3DS. This review is based off a copy of the game purchased at retail.
