By
Animal Crossing: New Leaf has a feature called the “Happy Home Showcase”. This is a feature by which the homes of other Animal Crossing players that you pass by in real life are collected in a section of your village, along with the data of those players.
You can then visit these homes in your village, use their layout for inspiration, or even buy pieces of furniture that you like.
In Japan, this feature works using Streetpass, which means you need to physically pass by another Nintendo 3DS owner who owns Animal Crossing: New Leaf. In North America and Europe, however, Nintendo added an extra feature that lets you collect homes through the Internet. These homes will be distributed by Nintendo, the game’s localization team reveals.
“The Spotpass feature was actually added for NOA [Nintendo of America] and for NOE [Nintendo of Europe]—for our territories,” says Reiko Ninomiya, localization manager at Nintendo of America.
She elaborates: “Because just the environment in which you’re playing is different; and by that I mean, you know, in Japan Streetpass happens really, really frequently. People take trains. It’s a different community culture. Here, you’ve got people living in remote parts where they don’t have an opportunity to pass by people who have the game.”
“So, in order to make sure that people receive the Happy Home showcase, this is where the Spotpass feature is used—as a Happy Home Showcase, which is the top part of your town. Through Spotpass, what we’re going to be doing is, sending out official home data from Nintendo. So who knows whose house you could receive through Spotpass?”
Animal Crossing: New Leaf also lets your other 3DS-owning friends visit and explore your village. You can learn more about these features in the video from Nintendo above.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf will be released on June 9th in North America and June 14th in Europe.
