Title: Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer
Release date: September 25 (North-America), October 2 (Europe)
Platform: (New) Nintendo 3DS / 2DS
Price: $39,99 / 39,99 / £34.99
Blocks: 4,038
amiibo support: Yes, through Animal Crossing amiibo cards
Preload: Yes
Save files: 1
Release date: September 25 (North-America), October 2 (Europe)
Platform: (New) Nintendo 3DS / 2DS
Price: $39,99 / 39,99 / £34.99
Blocks: 4,038
amiibo support: Yes, through Animal Crossing amiibo cards
Preload: Yes
Save files: 1
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is a spin-off title of the Animal Crossing series on the Nintendo 3DS in which you design homes happily.
Well yes. Sorta. Of course you create your own character first (btw you can choose your own skin color now!) as is standard in the Animal Crossing series, but there is no
fishing, bug catching, scalping turnips or inflicting RSI on yourself while trying to lay tiles in your town.
Yes! You are an employee of Nook's Homes - a real estate company that builds and decorates houses for their clients. Animals will come to visit and tell what kind of house
they want and then you make their wish come true!
Glad you asked! Of course, because of the emphasis on decorating, a lot of new features have been added to make designing and moving furniture around easier than ever.
For example, there are select, copy and paste functions now, you can skid between tightly placed furniture, and you can use the touch screen to drag and drop pieces of
furniture where ever you want.
Sure is, Mike. You can also hang things from the ceiling now, as well as decorate outside! How about putting a fence around the house? You can also drop furniture in the
garden, like a slide which children can play with!
Sssh.
Probably, yeah! Luckily, decorating houses is just a part of the game. Once you've succesfully completed some requests, you can start decorating facilities as well! There's
a big hub, similar to the city from Animal Crossing: City Folk/Let's Go to the City where you can help build new facilities such as a school, restaurant, a department store,
hairdressers-
You have to buy amiibo cards to unlock furniture. Cards are sold in blind packs of three, each sold for $4,98, only while supplies last.
Just kidding. Furniture is unlocked as you complete requests. The more 'missions' you take on, the more stuff you unlock! You can also go back and redo some requests if
you feel like a newly unlocked chair would better suit that house.
Yep, for the first time in the form of amiibo cards. The first set contains about 100 cards and they all feature one villager on them. The cards are sold in blind packs of three
in Japan and Europe, and packs of six in North America. Each pack, regardless of territory, will always contain one special amiibo card, which simply means they feature a
special villager that can't be unlocked through normal gameplay (think Tom Nook, Resetti, etc.) - this is the only amiibo exclusive content.
Isabelle will help you during the game but to build a house for her you're gonna need her card. So either buy shit tons of booster packs in hopes you get her, or start saving
up and refreshing eBay.
....Don't you want to at least know what the cards do or are you already determined to collect them all regardless?
There are two ways you can use the amiibo cards. One is by scanning in the card at the amiibo phone in your office. This way you can call up the villager on the card and
invite them over for an interview to have their house built. Using this, you can sidestep RNG as otherwise your clients are sort of randomized. The other use is for inviting
over villagers into other animals' houses. This way you can set up scenes and take cute photographs.
Yeah you can! As long as you're not on the job, you're free to visit the houses of the villagers you've helped, or even explore the hub town and check out what everyone's
doing in the various facilities you built. There will also be lots of animals walking around the city, minding their own business. If you talk to them, you can convince them to
get a house built. Also, the game doesn't use a real time clock and you can end the day whenever you feel like it.
There's a bunch of stuff you can do at the office, such as changing your appearance, messing around with the amiibo phone, creating your own designs and even studying!
Yep - using play coins you can study courses and unlock new features, like changing the appearance of windows, customizing furniture and unlocking more decorating items.
Actually, the game wants you to give you as much creative freedom as possible so the animals will accept any house you give them. So if you're looking for a challenge or a
high score kinda something, you're not going to find it in Animal Crossing: HHD. The animals will give you a theme to work with, such as "More construction site than house"
or "A house where kids can play in the garden" and they usually have some personal belonings that they definitely want you to place in their house. When designing facilities,
you also need to place some specific items (what's a school without a blackboard?!) but overall you're pretty much free to do whatever you want.
There is something called the Happy Home Network which enables players to share their rooms online and have them rated by other players who can come visit your creations.
Nintendo is also hosting online contests, which has players create rooms based on specific themes.
Sadly there are no Streetpass features in this game. But Nintendo has distributed DLC items in Japan for this game through Spotpass so maybe we can expect something
similar here as well in the future!
The Image Share function does make a return and this time you can share your snapshots to Miiverse, Twitter and Facebook in-game, without having to exit to the 3DS Menu.
As always, simply press both the L1 and R1 buttons simultaneously and you'll snap a picture.
Well that depends. Did you spend all your time completing your catalog, collecting bugs and seeing all the different events? You won't find that stuff in this game. But if you
loved decorating your house and you want to do more of that, with no restrictions, having complete creative freedom and a better UI and controls? Then you might just spend
another couple of hundred hours in this game. The important thing is that you know what to expect and deciding if that's going to be enough for you!
It's cool.
Enjoy the game everyone!
