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 A forest of books |  Casa di Lopez |  Rococo interior |
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As a new hire with Nook's Homes, the player designs homes to cater to clients' tastes... or their own.
From a marketing standpoint, Happy Home Designer was probably designed to get people to run out and buy the 3DS NFC Reader and 10 or 12 Animal Crossing amiibo cards. Gameplay-wise, it's more like a watered-down version of The Sims. Even synchronising with New Leaf doesn't do anything helpful. A handy feature could have been placing homes you've worked on in Designer into the Happy Home Showcase, but even this rather obvious feature was not done. I don't get the same feeling of care from the development team from Designer as I do from New Leaf; it feels forced, as though it was made in a hurry to co-incide with the release of the NFC Reader (itself basically a new-age take on the GBA e-Reader concept).
4/10, would only recommend for jailbroken console owners. If it comes down to a purchase with actual money, Happy Home Designer isn't worth it. Jailbreaking, at least, you can install the ROM for nothing, plus it's fairly small in filesize so you won't need a whole new SD card just to play it. There are a few benefits to synching Designer with New Leaf (it has to be Welcome Amiibo v.1.5 though), so, until I can come up with a different game to recommend there, I'm going to continue recommending it in the Honourable Mentions section of the 3DS 15 page.
