sunsetsanddragonflies: First Impressions // Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer!

Hey guys!

On Friday, I got Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer, and I just wanted to write a quick blog post about it to let you know my first impressions.

I'd been looking forward to it pretty much since I first heard about it, aha. It's always been a pet peeve of mine that, on Animal Crossing games, you don't have very much control over your villager's houses - you can send them furniture, but there's no guarantee that they'll put it in their house, let alone where you want it, and in New Leaf they won't even change their wallpaper or flooring if you send it to them. So, a game where you can choose where to put a house, design their garden and have total control over what goes in their house was always going to appeal to me! Plus, I've always loved the idea of interior design, and used to spend hours on Pinterest looking at ways to decorate houses and refurbish furniture, so this is pretty much my perfect game!

At the beginning, unlike other Animal Crossing games, your face isn't decided by answering questions - you can choose your skin tone, the shape and colour of your eyes, your hair colour and hairstyle! I like this a lot, as sometimes it can be a bit frustrating trying to get a face you like on previous games, and this makes it a lot easier.
I also like that you can connect to the internet and upload a picture of the houses you've completed - it means I can go snooping and see how other people interpreted the brief that the animal gives you (for example, a house for cats to hang out, a fast food joint, or a tea party house) and see how they decorated!
There's also a rating system online, so people can say whether they think your designs are cute/good if you decide to upload them to the HHN (Happy Home Network). You can also enter the code it gives you for your design, so that people can look up the code to find your project, which is a nice touch. Also, there will occasionally be a special character available to design a house for - as far as I know, in the UK at the moment it's Louie the gorilla, and you can unlock the Mario furniture (which is what you can get in the fortune cookies in New Leaf) which is a pretty awesome touch! It's worth noting that, if you decide to accept the challenge, you will have to do it immediately.

After a while, you can remodel the buildings on the high street, starting with the school. You can also choose to remodel a shop, a cafe and a hospital, which I think will be really fun to try, as there hasn't been a hospital on an Animal Crossing game before! No matter what you're doing, unless there isn't a brief for a project, there will be at least one item you need to include in the project - for example, in the school you needed 4 chairs and 4 desks.

Also, after you've played it for a while, you get given a catalogue, where you can choose to spend Play Coins to unlock some new interior touches, such as fish, bugs, fossils and custom designs, so it's definitely worth spending your Play Coins on these - you can do one per in-game day, and they cost between 1 and 5 Play Coins.

I won't say too much more about it, in case any of you are planning on buying it or waiting for it, but I love this game a lot. Some people are apparently already bored of it, as you literally just spend your time working on houses and other projects, but personally I love it, as I like this kind of thing a lot. I'll leave you with some screenshots, and the codes for the houses I've uploaded in case any of you have the game and would like to see what I've done with my houses!