Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer | Review

For those unaware, Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer is a spin-off of the Animal Crossing series, but it takes most of its inspiration from the latest entry in the series, Animal Crossing New Leaf. In Happy Home Designer, you design houses for animals from the Animal Crossing series. But let’s discuss Happy Home Designer further.

Pros:

-This game is bright and cheerful. It’s what you’d expect from any Animal Crossing game, even a spin-off. You can choose a season each house will appear in, though it’s purely cosmetic. Trees during the springtime are pink, it snows during the winter, it’s the kind of detail you’d expect from an Animal Crossing game.

-House building in this game is much easier than it is in New Leaf. The touch screen has a map of the house, including the objects that you’ve already placed. Dragging an item with the touch screen will change the items location in the house.

-You can have an insane amount of custom patterns, and custom patterns play a much bigger part of Happy Home than they do in New Leaf. You can do the normal stuff like paths and wallpaper. But you can also customize curtains and rugs for houses.

-You can decorate houses for almost every character in the series. This includes special characters like Isabelle, though you need a special amiibo card for the special characters.

-Speaking of Isabelle, she will let you design the interior of different major buildings, like restaurants, schools, and stores. And the amount of freedom they give you in the creation process is amazing.

-You only get to help one animal during an in-game day, but don’t worry, because this is the first Animal Crossing game that doesn’t follow a real clock. There are only two times of day in Happy Home Designer, day and night. You can work on a single building during the day, and at night you can walk around the plaza, assuming the place you want to go isn’t closed.

Cons:

-Furniture and music is unlocked when you design a house for certain villagers, so let’s say you want to put a specific TV in someone’s house. You better have helped a character that unlocked that TV, because that’s the only way to get it.

-I’m a guy who likes a sense of progression in his games. New Leaf provided that sense of progression with badges, house expansions, and the museum. In Happy Home Designer, you get almost infinite houses to build, which limits the sense of progression significantly. You can also build a very small number of public buildings, which almost feels like the ending of the game.

Overall Opinion:

I don’t mind the idea of a game where you build houses, but I expected a little bit more to this game. This is the same price as any other first party 3DS game, at $40. If you like Animal Crossing, wait for this game to be half that price.