YMMV / Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer

• Awesome Music: The "House Preview" track for when you get shown your hard work, containing a jazzy saxophone, and steel drums.
• Americans Hate Tingle: The game sold very well in Japan, and while it did sell decently elsewhere in the world, many fans were turned off by the lack of life simulation elements, or lack of goals outside of designing home and public work project spaces.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: A common complaint for Happy Home Designer is that decorating has no challenge as you're given a very generous minimal standard for each job (just include furniture and objects given to you). The removal of the real-time system from past Animal Crossing games means there are no deadlines to anything in-game. You play the game at your pace, not at the behest of the real world clock.
• Moe: Isabelle, of course. Lottie can be this as well.
• Older Than They Think: A lot of mechanics from New Horizons actually comes from this game, such as the ability to decorate the outside (which New Horizons expanded upon with landscape editing), the ability to actually interact with objects like music players (you do a little dance and shake a tambourine to the beat of the song), as well as clothes and face customisation being easily accessible (via the machine and booth on the first floor of Happy Home Academy).
• Periphery Demographic:
  • Much more so than usual, but it is very popular with female teenagers and young adults.
  • With furries as you are able to dress up villagers to your liking.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The game has an Excuse Plot of you being a new employee at Nook's Homes, and raising through the ranks. However, it's just a framing device to let you create building such as schools, and villager homes in any way you see fit.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The bizarre decision to lock functionality behind the Guide Book wouldn't be so bad if you could have more than one lesson per day... but since you can't, you're forced to unlock otherwise-helpful functions like removing windows or the Happy Home Camera by visiting the guide book each day. Once you've built enough public work buildings, you do get the option to remodel (and therefore edit) buildings, which means you can go back to everything you've created to add in newer features you never knew about.
  • Locking certain pieces of furniture to villager requests. To some degree, it's understandable, as this is one of the only forms of progression in the game, and the furniture you get at the start is far from sparse. But you are missing specific sets and other items that you cannot get until a specific request from a villager is carried out, which gives you them. This is most notable with the music tracks, as they are unlocked considerably more rarely.
• So Okay, It's Average: In the west, it's generally considered to be a very average game, and the main complaint being that it has no real challenge as the only requirements are to include specific items in the finished product; the theme of which is up to you, despite what the game encourages.
• Vindicated by History: Happy Home Designer was met with mixed to positive reviews, and the consensus in the western hemisphere was that nobody outright hated the game as it wasn't bad, but it wasn't exactly well liked either as it was technically a seperate game to New Leaf. It was pretty Big in Japan, but not elsewhere due to it's limited replayability and lack of player motivation after five hours. That said, its influence lives on throughout the series; Lottie and the furniture moving functionality was also debuted in the Welcome amiibo update for New Leaf there, and New Horizons would re-introduce this games' mechanics, such as decorating outside, interacting with objects netting you animations, character creation being simplified, and more. This game would also receive a sequel on November 4th, 2021 as a Paid DLC for New Horizons as Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise. This version in comparison was met with a lot of praise by fans who saw it as a worthy sidequest, notably the fact that designing holiday houses actually serves a purpose for your island in the main game this time (acquiring decoration techniques and new furniture for you to use on your main island).

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