Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer Review

With whatever is next on the horizon for Nintendo fast approaching, the company is taking to its well of franchises and doing something different with them this year. We’re still getting Animal Crossing, Zelda and Metroid but we’re getting them in new forms with new ideas. Happy Home Designer puts you the in shoes of the town’s newest designer at Nook’s Homes, it’s your job to tailor houses to their owners and help a bit around the town as well.

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is the first time we’re getting an Animal Crossing title that isn’t the ‘same old’ Animal Crossing, it’s made up of parts of it but for the most part this is the first time we’ve seen Nintendo do something different with the franchise since the Nintendo 64. Animal Crossing isn’t a game you play over the course of a couple of weeks and then ditch for the next big release, it’s a game you play for years, it rewards you for your attentiveness and the relationships you build not only with your villagers but your home and town. Happy Home Designer is missing most of this.

Your game begins at Nook’s Homes, a new venture for the nefarious Nook who is now your boss once again. Your job is to design the inside and outside of your friendly residents. The needs of the villagers are simple, they have only a few requirements such as colour or theme and you can go about that any way you wish. The game has, eventually nearly every single item and theme from the Animal Crossing series and you can pick and place them wherever you wish in order to meet the requirements. You can only do one task per day, but luckily thats an in-game day and you can simply tick over to the next one by writing in your daily report.

Happy Home Designer runs on the same engine as New Leaf, the interface and style are familiar but what’s changed is the actual method for placing items and objects within houses. There’s no slow inventory to plop items, you can now simply drop and drag them across the touch screen, tap to rotate and that’s it. You can even group items together with a marquee tool. In addition several design improvements to the engine have been made including the ability to hang items such as fans or lights from the ceiling and you’re now able to move objects with more minuet control with the item grid sliced into halves. Since you have free reign to choose what you like to place in people’s homes and gardens with no limits, you can also hold down L or R depending on your handedness to duplicate items as you place. You can still do things the old fashioned way if you like, but you’ll pick up these new controls in no time. It’s just a real shame you can’t use these new tools to build your own home in the game. Because then you could make something you want, with every item from the Animal Crossing world.

So that’s it, you just design houses? Well luckily for you there’s more to be done around the town. Isabelle will drop by and ask for you design some of the run-down town’s establishments and then you’re able to assign which residents will work in there. Having the larger space to build a restaurant or school, I found to be far more interesting than a house, plus the catalogue of items is absolutely chock full of things, you would be into businesses nearly more than you would be putting into a house. The little town the game offers is the only area of the game you can explore, there’s map that you can choose where residents live but because you can place residents in the same spot again and again it’s really of no consequence.

No consequence, that’s something seems to be a theme within the game. It’s insanely easy, there’s no difficulty at all in fact – the requirements from residents for their home aren’t cryptic and they seem almost happy with anything. You can make a house look like a hobo den and still get some nice praise from the owner. You certainly aren’t going to get docked for it because you don’t get reviewed at all, the self satisfaction that you gain from within is your reward. The Happy Home Academy which featured in previous titles, that whole well thought out scoring system doesn’t apply here. You don’t get more or less points for keeping the same theme, there’s no bonus for weird objects and even meta things like Feng Shui which contribute to the score in other games are sadly left out.

Really though no one plays Animal Crossing solely to win it or reach a rank, but these advanced features in New Leaf extend the life of the game. With New Leaf you have to hunt down and earn these items and for your persistence you’re given a reward, here you’re given every item known to man and when you spend the time to make something perfect with better tools, you get a wave. Damned cute wave.

Animal Crossing has always been about connectivity with the series using the technology of day to interact and connect. Happy Home Designer has an online rating system to compare and share rooms but also goes back to the future with amiibo cards. This isn’t the first time an Animal Crossing game has used cards to augment its gameplay, no the GameCube original included support for the e-Reader, thankfully the NFC amiibo cards are a little more easier to read (unless of course you have an old model 3DS and you’ll need the reader).

Each amiibo card (and you’re given one with the game) represents an animal resident which you can pull (or is it place) into the game. You can bring this character into someone’s home to spice up a photoshoot or if you want design their house instead. The cards aren’t mandatory and you’re not really missing out on anything if you don’t collect them and being blind packs you’re not likely to get your favourite character.

The other connectivity included is that of the Happy Home Network. It’s an online portal where you can upload your own rooms to be rated and view others (which are better than yours). Like the rest of the game it’s overly positive, it’s more of a praise system than anything constructive. Unless of course you’re 15 and being called unique is an insult. The sole redeeming feature of the Happy Home Network is the cute little Tom Nook animations while it’s loading.

It’s great that Nintendo took the cute and amazing characters from Animal Crossing and put them into something new. The world Nintendo have created with these characters is great and should be used. The content and items they have created for these games is amazing and using it for something else just makes sense.

Review continues below.

A copy of Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer was provided by Nintendo for review.