Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, Everything You Need to Know!

It’s certainly familiar in a lot of ways – a relentlessly cheerful, folksy package, filled with the kind of warm-hearted flourishes that define Animal Crossing – but it reduces the core series’ expansive roster of activities down to just one. You amass villagers, but there’s no relationships being built.

The biggest thing missing for me is my own house. Meanwhile, the turnip prices just kept on changing.

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer begins with you joining Tom Nook’s designer outfit as a new citizen in town.

In Happy Home Designer, you play one of Tom Nook’s employees.

And then there’s the wonderful Isabelle, in charge of providing you with facility jobs as part of the town improvements.

I’m apparently the only one doing any real work in an office staffed by lovable slackers. Before you know it, you’ll be pondering the aesthetic implications of a chaise lounge, obsessively heightening the dilapidated ambience of your haunted house, or toppling into existential despair as you debate adding another sofa to your project – just in case the entirely fictional Kabuki might want more than two friends around for tea. If you impress them with your design savvy, they’ll even ask you to help redesign the school, hospital or Department Store to help build up the town. Satisfying even these meager requirements is generally enough to please a client, but chances are if you’re playing HHD you’re not about to skimp on the interior design elements! Engage your preferred new neighbor by pressing the A button, and you’ll both head inside for a more formal consultation. After seeing to your various administrative duties, you end each day by writing a report. So if Isabelle says she will see you tomorrow, it can be in five minutes if you want it to be. It’s also the first game to make use of the new amiibo cards, unlocking new characters to come visit and design for. The dismal news? Well, it provides a large amount to do using that “pace” I noted.

The reason for this is obvious: you can’t exactly tell a child how terribly they’ve done. Select an item and click and drag it to wherever you want.

Worse of all, the entire open field is absent-all you can do is explore the plaza-so the idea that you’re creating a full town is an illusion that’s easily broken. Far from being the stripped-back, amiibo-card-pushing cash-in that many feared, Happy Home Designer is generous with its tools, slowly expanding its initial focus on furniture-shifting to include nearly everything a budding interior designer might need.

The item catalog is impressive and widens as you complete each client’s request.

A new 3DS-exclusive entry in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series heads up this week’s eShop update, accompanying newly released digital titles like Extreme Exorcism and Beatbuddy. But there are more items to tinker with in Happy Home Designer, and more places to put them. You are essentially guided to tailor your design, including appliances and furniture, to their wishes. For instance, you’ll be able to design clothes as an unlockable sewing machine becomes available. For those who simply wandered with no organised agenda and prefered to just while away the hours experiencing the world, you might find the tight reins too much to bear. While the investment has its moments (thanks especially to the fact that you can create custom designs) and it’s always cool to check out your finished product, there are several huge problems with the gameplay mechanics, making the game something much more childish than you’d expect. To some, that is going to be a large slice of handheld heaven. Some characters will only be available through Animal Crossing Amiibo Cards which are speculated to be 6 dollars per pack. This allows you to import them into your game, fulfilling their home design request, and then being able to visit with them in their home, or someone else’s. These packs will contain a collection of random cards and retail for $5.99. Completionists might have an issue with this, as one of the joys of the series is that all the content was there for you to work towards. There are folding screens and solid, opaque panels for dividing rooms, but I didn’t find them as alluring as the glass.

There are a grand total of over 300 individual villagers that you can design homes for in Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, but each one feels the same, from the first to the last. There are even regular, themed challenges, enabling players to battle it out for design supremacy – all of which goes some way to mitigating the rather blasé demands of offline mode. After you finish a project, you’ll get the chance to upload it on to the network immediately or save it for another time.

Thankfully there is more to the game, and while it isn’t particularly challenging, it does offer up some new pieces of gameplay to enjoy.