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👼 Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream revives one of Nintendo’s quirkiest series after 11 years
🪪 Customize your Mii characters with physical traits, funny voices, personalities, and regular phrases
🤖 Miis communicate with robot voices that you’ll find either charming or off-putting
🤝 Players can interact with Mii or have them do activities with each other
💘 Miis will get closer to becoming friends or more over time
📅 April 16 release date for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream on the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2
Tomodachi Life has resprung on the Nintendo Switch 2 nearly 11 years after the original game on the Nintendo 3DS. This quirky simulation game is a mix between The Sims and Tomogachi, where you can recreate your friends, famous celebrities, and made-up characters into Miis and watch them take on lives of their own.
Your main goal is to keep your Mii characters happy, fed, and check in on their lives on the Tomodachi Island. From there, your Miis will interact with each other and start talking, get jobs, go to the beach, and do other activities. Tomodachi Life’s Mii characters can even fall in love – though in my virtual hands-off demo, one character was confronted by multiple suitors, leading to hilarious hijinks.
If you like weird and quirky games you barely have control of, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream seems like a day one download when it releases on April 16 on the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2.
💆♂️ Mii customization. If you’ve been customizing Mii’s since the Nintendo Wii, most of the creation tools will be familiar to you. You can start by picking a male, female, or nonbinary character, then adjust their physical attributes such as chin, cheeks, eyes, ears, hair, height, and weight. If that’s too complicated sounding, there’s also a new way to make Mii’s with help, which will take you through a guided questionnaire to create a character, and you can tweak it after your Mii is generated for you.
🤖 Robot voices. One of the last steps is customizing your Mii’s voice with a higher or lower pitch, a slow drawl, or a fast talker. No matter how you make your Mii sound, they’ll always come off as a little robotic. On the one hand, it’s strange, like one of those robot-dictated Reddit thread videos on YouTube. But at the same time, the emotionless delivery of the Mii voices makes their more panicked moments and confessions of love more hilarious.
🗣️ Personality. Once you’ve created your Mii’s, you can gift them with personalities like low energy, fast movement, serious thinking, and their overall quirkiness. You can dictate which familiar phrases they’ll use.
🎮 Player controller. Your place in this game is more of an omniscient controller than a direct player. You interact with them directly, but more often you’ll move Mii’s around to have them interact with activities like going to the beach, after which they’ll hopefully become friends or more. You can also group up to eight Miis into a single house like the Big Brother reality series. Ultimately, the Mii’s are their own character with their own agency to create conversations and make their own decisions.
💌 Matchmaker. Once two Mii characters get close enough, they can confess their love for each other. Funnily enough, every example I’ve seen of this has had multiple characters confess at the same time, leaving one Mii character to decide on one partner while leaving all the other parties despondent. Nintendo has also teased a wedding scene and a baby crawling on the ground, but I didn’t see any new gameplay revealing a deeper family and generational Miis in my Tomodachi Life demo.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.
