Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream Review

I’ve always been a little hit-and-miss with social simulation games. Like all good Nintendo fans affected by the 2020 lockdowns, I sunk a moderately concerning number of hours into Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but the open-ended gameplay saw me fall dramatically off the game once I hit the credits and was largely left to my own devices. I therefore wasn’t expecting Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream to pique my interest the way it did, but I’m a sucker for the unconventional, and the zany humour that was showcased in the January Nintendo Direct put the experience squarely and firmly on my radar.

The Tomodachi franchise is a series of games designed around Nintendo’s iconic Mii avatars. Living the Dream, the third instalment in the franchise and the second released for Western audiences, is set on a customisable island that you can build into a small city, where up to 70 residents will get to know each other, navigate conflicts, and otherwise live out their lives. That’s largely it, but don’t be fooled – thanks to extensive player-driven customisation and the offbeat, deadpan writing, there’s a surprising amount of entertainment value woven into the game.

30 seconds before disaster…

Once you’ve started filling your island with Miis (more on that later), there’s a steady stream of things to keep you occupied that characters will bring to your attention. You can play minigames together, eavesdrop on their conversations, or help out when they need relationship advice, a new outfit, or a new look for their home. This flow of bite-sized interactions creates a welcome degree of structure if, like me, you can flounder a little without some direction, while also allowing you the freedom to go off and pursue other activities such as renovating the island if you so choose. Much of the entertainment value comes from seeing how your Miis live out their lives in this world you craft them; the Miis will often keep themselves busy, and whether you’re laughing at their weird conversation topics or their terrible lyrics as they sing to each other, there are enough moments worth watching to keep you looking for more.

As you play, the Miis ask you questions about people, concepts, and activities, and the things you tell them will pop up everywhere throughout their daily lives. As with other aspects of the game, there is a lot of scope for creativity here, and much of your potential enjoyment in the game more broadly comes down to what you put into it in these moments. You could give your Miis interests that would be appropriate to talk about in front of your grandmother, but let’s be honest – sometimes you have to disappoint your elders in the name of entertainment. There’s a real earnestness to the way your Miis approach conversation, and watching your favourite characters excitedly bonding over their love of ritual sacrifice or making plans to overthrow the government together is genuinely hilarious and takes a surprisingly long time to get old. Did I mention there’s no language filter? You can have the Miis swear, insult each other (and you), and go full unfiltered gremlin if that’s what your heart desires, and it’s a hell of a lot more entertaining than it has any right to be. (Unsurprisingly, Nintendo has disabled screenshot upload for this title.)

I love you, Pearl

There is, however, a bit of a sense that you’re sitting there laughing at your own jokes sometimes, since a good amount of the humour comes into the game through what you write yourself and the other dialogue, while pretty good, is heavily recycled. More broadly, the interpersonal conflicts also leave something to be desired as a source of entertainment; there’s a big focus on romance, and the love triangles and unrequited love get old quite fast. I’m also not sure whether I was just really, really unlucky with the game’s RNG or was somehow doing something that prevented it from happening, but it took me over 60 hours with the game to see my first full-on argument (at which point I saw three in quick succession), which is an exceptionally long time in a free-form game that most people are likely to play in shorter bursts. The arguments and the personalised insults the Miis use to attack each other are very amusing, though, so it’s well worth hanging out for them.

While there are other smaller disagreements that happen as Miis go about their lives, in most cases your agency is limited to cheering up your Miis after the fact. It would have been fabulously entertaining to have more active ways to manufacture conflict between Miis as part of the regular gameplay, such as giving them topics to bicker about. At times it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re playing with slightly stubborn dolls, leading to an odd contrast between the moment-to-moment addictiveness of the game’s humour and a sense that the gameplay loop is not something that can really be sustained for the long term. That said, given the aforementioned number of hours I was able to put into the game, you can probably take that last point with a grain of salt.

I wish I was as cool as her

While your residents are off doing all the things that Miis do to keep themselves busy, you can also spend hours upon hours in the Mii creator, designing your own original Miis or recreating recognisable characters from your favourite media. I particularly loved the hairstyle choices, which comprise a range of styles and textures that can all be customised using fun colours and highlights. The game also introduces a face paint option to draw designs directly onto and around your Miis’ faces, enabling a huge degree of extra freedom for expressing your creativity (and, most importantly, for recreating your pets in loving detail). In addition to setting a main personality type, you can also periodically grant your Miis quirks that help their true selves to emerge over time, although it would have been great to see a bit more variety within these.

The previous instalment of Tomadachi Life was criticised for its narrow gender and romance options, but it’s clear Nintendo has taken this feedback on board for Living the Dream. The game introduces a nonbinary gender option and also has customisable romance options that allow you to select any combination of genders or none at all as dating preferences for each Mii. Pronouns and preferred clothing styles for special cutscenes can also be set independently of gender, which is a nice touch that makes the experience more inclusive.

Admittedly, I would not trust any of these guys with cutlery

The game also offers an extensive range of customisation options beyond the Miis, with a comprehensive island builder and the Studio Workshop where you can create custom food, treasures, clothing, home designs, and island decorations. As someone who was never the best at visual art, I’m always a little leery of games that feel as though they need you to be artistically talented in order to pull off something pleasing to look at, but the art tools here are very good – and importantly for me, amateur-friendly. There’s a range of templates in addition to features such as pattern fill, shapes, and stamps, and the copying tools are especially helpful for creating symmetrical clothing. You can also add other details to your items, such as giving books a blurb or giving video games a soundtrack, and it’s very entertaining to see your residents interact with all of the things you’ve made after the fact. There’s unfortunately no support for the Switch 2’s mouse controls here or elsewhere in the game, but the touchscreen controls do the job.

The game’s general aesthetic is also quite artistically forgiving, with a certain intentional incongruity built into the art style by default. Treasure and giftable food assets are flat photographs of real-world objects that are entirely at odds with the more polished 3D modelling that make up the rest of the world, so if the best you can do is a hastily scribbled apple, it will fit in just as well as a pixel-perfect reproduction of a Campbell’s soup can. This contrasting aesthetic admittedly isn’t one I’d normally go for, but it really grew on me over my time with the game, and in the broader scheme of things it helps to emphasise the deeply idiosyncratic personality that sets the experience apart.

Final Thoughts

For a game where much of the entertainment value comes from watching semi-autonomous avatars live out their semi-independent lives, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a surprisingly addictive experience. While the repetition in the writing really underscores just how much of the game’s substance comes from you personally, the offbeat humour leads to some truly hilarious moments, and the scope for creativity makes the world a canvas limited only by your imagination – and your Miis’ pseudo-free will.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 // Review code supplied by publisher

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