Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer Review

Build-a-bungalow:

“Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer” is a curio that speaks volumes about Nintendo’s vision for 2015. Many of their holiday releases this year are side-games or spin-offs to their main franchises, and Happy Home Designer might be the most niche of them all. Catering almost exclusively to Feng Shui enthusiasts, HHD tasks you with designing homes and little else.

Story:

In mainline Animal Crossing games, customizing and designing your own house has always been a huge draw. Building up your collection of furniture, wallpaper and expanding your floor space (to fill it with even more mismatched miscellanea) is a great distraction between cultivating a fully working and prosperous village, digging up fossils, fishing, attending events and keeping your townsfolk happy. HHD casts a spotlight on this aspect, however, and does away with any familiar AC distractions.

Working for Nook Homes, the player becomes the designated home designer of the three-hundred or so colourful animal villagers the series has become known for. Aside from being an interesting way to run into all the kooky characters Nintendo have created (you may only see twenty or thirty of these guys pass through your standard AC village in your entire playtime) there’s little in the way of narrative here.

Gameplay:

Indeed, Happy Home Designer is laser focused. If you have no interest in designing ridiculously cute abodes for ridiculously cute animals, read no further, HHD is not for you. If, however, you’ve yearned to customize not just your own house in Animal Crossing but all the houses of every animal in your village, you might just be onto your game of the year.

Over the last few days I’ve been doing very little other than dragging furniture and arranging posters. Mainline Animal Crossing games have – smartly – been a fairly hands-off experience when it comes to your animal neighbours. They exist independently of your player and decorate their own houses (sometimes adding pieces you gift them if they like it enough). This makes Animal Crossing less of an omnipotent, control-everything kind of sim and more of a second life, where you’re free to focus on your own little guy or gal, rather than get swamped trying to control everything.

Of course, certain players – myself included – have been desperate to go a bit more hands-on with our adorable inhabitants, and Happy Home Designer finally lets you do just that. Working exclusively for Nook Homes, the player is approached by various animals every day and asked to design a home that cater to their particular needs or desires. Very often these demands are simply a specific theme or to use particular bits of furniture, but this structure helps your style constantly evolve and change, rather than stagnate as you craft the same types of houses over and over.

Despite initially being turned off by being asked to make, say, a robot-themed house, these quirky little briefs really helped me become a better designer. Whilst I wouldn’t ordinarily utilize some of the wackier pieces of furniture, when presented as a must-have I managed to work them smartly into a unique and interesting design, and I swiftly found myself designing the kind of cute and personalized houses you might actually see in an Animal Crossing game.

I was disappointed to find there was no way to link Happy Home Designer to New Leaf and carry your snazzy creations over to your main game. This lack of integration seems like a real missed trick, and I really hope future titles are a bit more cohesive, as being able to design my neighbours houses would be fantastic fun – as well as giving me more reason to care about how good my designs look.