Fashionable Life in Animal Crossing: New Leaf – DualShockers’ Japanese QR Code Guide (Episode 1)

Giuseppe Nelva July 10, 2013 10:30 AM EST

Animal Corssing: New Leaf is an extremely addictive game and comes with an enormous amount of clothes and collectives straight out of the box. Not everyone knows, though, that that already large number can be expanded to infinity thanks to the game’s QR code function.

Many that have just picked up the game, and even quite a few veterans, probably have no idea about the feature, as the game does really nothing to advertise it. In order to unlock it you need to go to the Able Sisters shop and talk with Sable (the one sitting at the sewing machine) at least once a day for ten consecutive days. After that she’ll unlock for you a special sewing machine that allows you to read QR codes and to save your own creations into a series of QR codes to share it with the world.

Once you’re able to scan QR codes, things get interesting, because the net hides literally tens of thousands of creations for you to play with. There are quite a few western sites that are found easily via google, but the true treasure grove lies with the Japanese community. Since the game was release in Japan last November, they had several months to create all kind of interesting and wacky creations.

The designs you’ll unlock by scanning the QR codes can be used in several ways. You can wear them (obviously), use the ground tiles to decorate the otherwise rather drab ground of your village, drawing streets, plazas and the like, and you can even use textile designs to customize a large number of pieces of furniture to give your home a truly personal feel. To do so you’ll need to unlock Cyrus at Re-tail. In order to do so you need to have played for seven days, spent 100,000 bells in the shop and added 100 pieces of furniture and 50 clothing items in your catalog (items are added to the catalog each time you put a new one in your inventory).

The first site you may want to visit is Animal Crossing New Leaf QR-Code Collection. It includes more than 7000 codes categorized between several video game and anime series.

A rather important thing to notice when dealing with Japanese QR codes is that many of them will be stored on the Japanese online community for artist Pixiv (think about it like the local version of DeviantArt). The way they’re stored makes it slightly counterintuitive to find your way around when you’re looking at clothes made of four different QR codes (for front, back and each side) if you don’t know your way around the site.

As an example, let’s look at this Giren Zabi uniform from the Gundam series. As you can see, it just shows one code. Click on the picture (and close the ad if it pops up) and then on the “Thumbnail list” on the top right. This will bring up the gallery with all the four QR codes you need to scan.

If you want variety a great place to look at is Bibi design that comes with some really lovely fashions for both ladies and gentlemen and some of the best ground tiles on the net. Navigating the site is quote easy, as the categories are listed at the top right in English.

Another very popular Japanese site is Kotokoto PoToFu Mura. It doesn’t have an enormous amount of codes, but it includes some really lovely sweets-inspired tiles you can use to decorate the ground of your village itself, in addition to some amazingly detailed clothes.

Merci has a very similar range of creations, including some very nice water and garden tiles and some lovely dresses for ladies, ranging from the gothic lolita style to school uniforms and girly swimsuits.

Hiyoko-mura: My Design log focuses mostly on clothes, and has a large selection of dresses and kimono, it also has a few articles of clothing for men, ground tiles, and photo stands. Some of the categories are split in multiple pages in a blog-like structure. To browse further in each category you need to click at the bottom where it says “次のページ” (Next Page).

Moving on we find Ancoroly, that comes with a large selection of quite girly dresses and swimsuits for ladies, and a few ground tiles, mostly inspired to animals and lacy designs. All of them are displayed on a single page so it’s rather easy to browse. It also includes a few pieces of clothing inspired to the Fantasy Earth Zero MMORPG.

Gake Pucchi is one of the best designed sites out there, with a very cute book-like design and a full gameplay diary. It has several designs for ladies (including a really lovely kimono inspired by Final Fantasy X‘s Yuna) and ground tiles and textiles. I especially like the tartan ones. But I love everything tartan, so that’s not surprising.

One last site for today is My Design Diary: ChocoPotato Mura that comes with a lovely range of ground tiles, clothes for ladies and even some textiles. To browse further in each category you need to click at the bottom where it says “次ページ>>” (next page), and to show the QR codes in each post you need to click on “→続きはこちらをクリック☆” (click here to continue).

That’s it for today, but if you want more QR codes don’t worry. The Japanese community is vast and extremely colorful, so as you probably imagined there will be an Episode 2 of this guide quite soon. Remember that DualShockers takes no credit for the creations displayed here, and their respective designers retain full rights to them.

I leave you with a little treat: if you want to wear your very own DualShockers shirt in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, all you have to do is to scan the codes below. Of course it’s not nearly as good as the designs you’ve seen in the sites mentioned above, but hey, I’m a writer, not a fashion designer.