Creativity - or, more specifically, the art of making stuff - has been a common thread running through Nintendo's gaming output in 2015. Kirby and Yoshi celebrated the aesthetic joys of craftsmanship on Wii U, with their worlds of lumpen clay and wool, while the advent of Splatoon's chaotic ink fights saw Nintendo subtly shifting focus, moving the tools of (in this case, riotously messy) creation directly into players' hands.
It's there they've mostly stayed, with Art Academy: Atelier, Super Mario Maker and now Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer all foregrounding the act of making stuff until it becomes the whole game. At first glance, this treatment might seem like a dramatic shift for Animal Crossing - with Happy Home Designer trading twee life-sim trappings for interior design - but, really, it's a logical progression for a series that's ultimately always been about self-expression.
Nintendo's Animal Crossing games task you with taking ownership of the world around you. They invite you to spend days planting flowers and plopping down pavements, to manipulate the emotions of your neighbours in shameful displays of bullying until you've created a carefully cleansed utopia, to amass cupboards of pricey bric-a-brac and waste countless hours arranging them just so.
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