The 3DS release of the charming Tomodachi Life exceeded my expectations. The Nintendo-developed product provided a fun sandbox life-sim experience where things often ended up at their silliest and strangest possible outcomes. It felt like a fun one-off experiment for Nintendo, but I always held out hope for a new entry. Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream revives the franchise, and though the technology is vastly improved and it doubles down on the weirdness, Nintendo strips any meaningful social element from the game, creating a massive void for what should be one of its most viral games.
After the initial setup, the Tomodachi Life series is a largely passive experience. You populate a small town full of Mii characters, including face, body, voice, and personality customization. They can be friends, coworkers, family members, fictional characters, or even celebrities – whoever your imagination comes up with. The weirder, the better. And all the dialogue is voiced by a slightly unsettling but undeniably hilarious text-to-voice system that brings their personalities to life. The truly magical part of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is that everyone’s island will be different.
I started by creating myself and a stable of Mario and Zelda characters as Miis before moving on to famous Nintendo developers, and, eventually, celebrities. A typical day might feature my personal Mii hanging out with Waluigi, seeing Shigeru Miyamoto eating dinner with Pedro Pascal, while Rosalina shouts at the sea and Shaquille O’Neal suffers from a terrible case of hiccups. And then, there are the unexpected drop-ins, when you catch two Miis interacting in hilarious ways, or you eavesdrop on a sleeping Mii’s dream. It’s as goofy and quirky as it sounds. I looked forward to seeing what shenanigans were unfolding on my island.
Unfortunately, while I was still surprised and delighted by some of the interactions and cutscenes even 30 hours in, the situations I found my Miis in quickly became repeats. A Mii getting frozen in place and requiring assistance was a mildly humorous bit the first time, but by the 15th time, I was rolling my eyes. This constant repetition quickly took me from eagerly checking in on my Miis every day to doing so out of obligation.
Thanks to custom text fields, you can influence the conversations your Miis have with one another, creating an ever-growing island lingo database that further customizes the experience. After I responded “John Cena” to one Mii asking me to name a celebrity, I would later overhear other Miis talking about the wrestler-turned-actor in a completely different conversation. While this doesn’t cut down on the repetitive nature of the conversations, it does create a fun Mad Lib-style experience. Miis will often interact with each other largely independent of you, but your job, outside of creating them, is to make them happy while socially engineering the community.
This can be done by giving them food and gifts they like (discovered through trial and error), fulfilling requests they have for the island, or playing a handful of microgames. These games range from a first-person take on Red Light, Green Light and naming foods without repeating to a literal flip of the coin. These serve as microdoses of fun gameplay interspersed within the broader passive experience and provide solid rewards, but don’t hang your hat on these mounting to anything meaningful.
As your Miis’ happiness rises, so, too, does your island level. Each time you level up, you unlock more amenities, situational sayings, quirks, and activities for your Miis. I loved spending time creating custom designs for my Miis’ shirts, pants, houses, and more; this came in handy when I was creating a specific character with an iconic look, like Link or Donkey Kong. You can also send your Miis on trips, which allows for fun photo opportunities with real-world backdrops. The more Miis you have and situations you set up for them, the more entertaining the scenarios that play out become. There’s just one problem: Nintendo prohibits you from sharing any of it.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream provides you with the constant feeling of seeing something really funny happen, but not being able to tell anyone about it. Not only has Nintendo removed the ability to share Miis via QR codes, but the developer also blocks players from sharing screenshots and videos you take from the game using the native Switch capture functionality. This is a game that is built on its oddball moments, and not having an official way to share those is massively shortsighted. I understand that, since Nintendo doesn’t censor your custom field inputs, the company might be worried about inappropriate or explicit screenshots and videos making the rounds (which they will no matter what is done to try and prevent it), but there has to be a better solution when this feels like a game designed to be shared on modern social media platforms.
Everyone will approach Tomodachi Life differently, and that is what makes it such a unique experiment. However, if you don’t have the time or creativity to imagine and engineer unique dynamics between tens of Miis, Living the Dream’s removal of the social features cannot serve as a safety net as it did with the 3DS release. And sadly, outside of the daily dose of comedy, there isn’t much more to buoy this release.