When Nintendo first announced Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer, I thought the game would just be a simple house designing spinoff of Animal Crossing. And while you do design houses, it turns out that there is a little bit more to the game than just that.
In Happy Home Designer, you work for Tom Nook in his Nook's Homes store. Lyle, Digby, and a new character, Lottie, also work there. Tom Nook will quickly go away and Lottie will be the main person you report to. As for the job, you are tasked with designing animal's homes. You can do this by inviting them via the amiibo cards:
Or by inviting them from the town's plaza! Yes, you don't NEED the cards to play this game. But you will definitely WANT them. See that Isabelle card? With that or any other special character card, you can invite special characters to LIVE in your town. You'll create a house for Isabelle or Tom Nook or K.K. Slider or or....oh man. I need some of these cards!!
With the cards, you'll specifically invite animals. The animals in the plaza are RANDOM. So who knows who you'll get. I'll definitely be inviting some good randoms too (no clown sheep!!!).
Designing homes is a bit more complicated then we thought. You pick a place in the town to put a house and then...well...look at that picture above! You get to design the OUTSIDE of the animal's house too!
You pick the look of the animal's house, what goes around the house, including trees, flowers, and stuff that you could only put inside the animal's house in New Leaf. You can put furniture outside! Wow.
After you design the outside, then you design the inside of the house. You get suggestions from the animals and some initial furniture and then you can design the rest of the house however you like. You'll be MAD WITH POWER! 'insert evil laugh here'
If it was just designing houses, well, that would be cool but the Animal Crossing developers didn't stop there. As you can see from the picture above, you can design a school too! And a hospital. And stores!!! You pick the outside look of the building and then design the inside however you want. Looks like there is even more room to be creative in the designing of buildings.
Plus, you pick who the teacher of the school is and who the students are. You can also pick the doctor of the hospital!! And who runs the shops or restaurants or whatever. Oh and the animals can wear hats and glasses this time around! The level of animal interaction is going to be amazing in Happy Home Designer.
There are some questions that are still unanswered however. We don't know if you'll be able to walk around in the actual town. We've seen the character walking in the plaza, but when going to an animals house, we've only seen the character zooming there (looks like they take their car there). It seems unlikely that you can fish or bug hunt though. And we know that doing favors for animals is gone. We have no idea if this game has holidays. Actually we don't even know if it has a real time clock, although that seems likely because they showed day and night in some videos.
Another question is: how many animal's houses can you design per day? We know that Nook's Homes closes down later in the day.
All of these questions should be answered next month! The game is coming out in July in Japan. There will be some people who import the game and play it. So we should have these questions answered.
Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer comes out on September 25, 2015 in the U.S. No matter what the answers are to the above questions, I'm VERY excited for this game! Can't wait to play it!
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All of the above pictures come from Google and are copyright Nintendo.
