Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2015, is an odd game to go back to in 2022. In its original release, this family-friendly interior decorating-focused spin-off of the Animal Crossing franchise seemed strangely incomplete, like there should have been something more to the game. Of course, in 2022, it’s easier to see why – the expansion to Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch, titled Happy Home Paradise, is clearly the successor to Happy Home Designer, and it makes it plainly clear that Happy Home Designer was naturally better suited to being an Animal Crossing expansion rather than its own fully-fledged game.

Right from the start, this game feels like a recycling of assets from Animal Crossing: New Leaf, reusing the same simple 3D characters, detailed 3D objects, and using the same laid back themes and cutesy gobbledygook sounds of the characters’ speech. It’s all still delightfully appealing, but it’s really unimpressive in the wake of Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

The focus of Happy Home Designer has players placing and arranging furniture and decorations within a small home, and as is the norm with Animal Crossing, this is a process that’s generally easygoing and judgment-free – the various anthropomorphic animal characters you’re creating these interiors for tend to have a theme in mind, as well as a few specific furniture pieces they’d like you to include, but beyond that how you arrange them and what other decorations you want to add are entirely up to you – this is a game where you are free to express your creativity, it’s not about assessing your decorating skill.

Only, without much greater structure tying everything together, everything seems somewhat aimless. Arranging houses for the game’s characters is nice, but it doesn’t seem to have an overarching purpose, doesn’t seem to be building to anything. It’s almost like this was never really meant to be a game unto itself, but additional content… added onto another game.

Look, Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is fine for what it is, but what it is simply doesn’t feel like a complete game. And as we see in its successor, Happy Home Paradise, that’s because it kinda’ isn’t. While I don’t doubt there are some who will find Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer charming and enjoyable, I think just about everyone is far better off playing Happy Home Paradise on Nintendo Switch. And since the added content and features of that game far outpace and outclass Happy Home Designer, this game feels obsolete in multiple ways.

tl;dr – Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is a family-friendly Management Simulation that has players doing interior design for the series’ animal characters. It’s enjoyable, but it feels incomplete. This should have been an expansion to New Leaf, not a separate game, and players wanting this sort of experience will be much better off playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch with the Happy Home Paradise expansion, which not only incorporates this content in the way that Happy Home Designer should have but didn’t, it also offers far more features and options, making this game feel completely obsolete.

Grade: C-

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