Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream

 This game has a hold on Mii.

I played this on my Switch 2.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is either the second, third, or fourth entry in the Tomodachi series (depending on which games you feel like including) and while I haven't played the original Japan-only game or its localized 3DS followup, I did put a bunch of time into Miitomo, the spiritual-successor iOS social... thing that Nintendo tried a decade ago. While that one may be lost to time, I have incredibly fond memories of it so I've been looking forward to this new entry. Luckily, it hasn't disappointed.

I suppose I might need to do some work to explain what exactly this game is, since it's kind of unlike a lot of other stuff I've played. Essentially, it's sort of a Sims-like where you create Miis to place on an island and then, with occasional minor direct-involvement, basically just watch your created characters mingle and interact. You can feed them and they have moodlets that'll demand your attention to address, but generally speaking this is something you largely just watch. It's a bit like an antfarm in a way, or a dollhouse in a different sense. As I mentioned your Miis will have certain emotional and active states that lead to you answering prompts or playing quick minigames, but for the most part this is a game where you need to make your own fun.

The prompts you're given largely serve to make your time watching your little guys more interesting and memorable, as phrases or names you mention will be added to the pool of things your Miis will bring up in conversations. It's a bit Mad Libs in the way it all comes together, and while you have some context as to how these words might get used later on the grammar and exact usage is almost always a bit awkward or at least surprising, though usually humorously so.

In addition to having words and names that'll come up in conversations, you also have access to a place called the "Palette House" which allows you to draw your own objects, foods, and clothing to add to your island. I am neither a great artist nor a particularly creative person, so my creations tend to be things I've encountered in various forms of media. Fictional foods, pets, outfits, etc. are my bread-and-butter, and I take a particular kind of joy in representing those things with the relatively limited tools at my disposal. Sure, I've seen some fantastically detailed works going around on the Internet, but I happen to like rendering things in a somewhat simplistic style so as not to horribly stand out from the Miis who'll be interacting with these things.

As for those Miis, like my Palette creations I was almost entirely inspired by characters from things I've played/read/watched. While I have added a representation of myself to my island, this game has largely been a way to watch people from one game mingle with people from a different one. The strange-bedfellows nature of it all adds a level of comedy that is probably hard to convey secondhand, but just imagine a villain from a comic you've read, say, sharing a meal with the love interest from a show you've watched. People who'd never in a million years meet are suddenly best friends, or roommates, or even in love, and the sheer comedy potential of it all cannot be overstated.

When creating your Miis you get to dictate certain things about them including their name, voice, personality, gender, pronouns, and who they'd be attracted to, and that last one comes up way more than you'd think. Love, actually, is all around this game. Miis are constantly bumping into one another and falling head-over-heels for somebody they've never interacted with, and you run into situations where you're suddenly invested in the romantic wellbeing of two radically different people. It's great!

I've mentioned already that these Miis will have moodlets and certain things they want out of you, and one of the most common asks is getting them acquainted with one another or repairing a relationship that's soured (or starting to sour). If you haven't done so already by, quite literally, picking one person up and moving them towards the other, you'll often be asked to "introduce" two characters. However you do it, you'll watch a brief cutscene where the two Miis either hit it off (or don't), or agree to move in together (or don't), or fall in love (or don't). 

There's definitely a repetition to this game that becomes fairly obvious the more you play, though I ultimately don't mind too much. You'll be watching the same conversations and same interactions, just with different nouns swapped in Mad Libs-style, and while some sequences are somewhat uncommon, there were a lot that showed up basically every session.

One thing that perhaps added to the repetition is something I intend to talk more about in the future; that is, the fact that I've actually been running multiple saves of this game. Each Switch "user" gets their own island, so I created a few more "users" and have a second island devoted to recreating characters from Umineko and a third that's solely focused on some of my OCs. I've been sticking to talking about my main island for this blog post, but I think I'll eventually want to write something and update you all on all three of my saves. This game is an engine for generating stories and interactions and there have been some great developments.

Shifting gears, there's also a whole island building aspect to this game. Somewhat like Animal Crossing (though with far less real-world tedium) you have control over where to place businesses and individuals' houses, and can also customize the map with objects you've purchased or even things you've designed in the Palette House. While the individual tools may seem fairly rudimentary, when taken together you have a lot of power over how your individual island looks and feels. As you can see below, my island "Kamurokinawa" is my attempt at recreating, well, Kamurocho and Okinawa from the Yakuza games. I also have a lake in the southeast but this is all still a bit of a work in progress so I haven't fully committed to that.

You see, I still have things I want to do in this game and, because I'm juggling as many saves as I am, some of that stuff will probably take some real-world time to accomplish, but I've been having a blast and I figured one-month-in was a good time to finally write something about it all. I do have more I want to say, in no small part because I've been running three saves and I honestly just want to gush a bit about some of the happenings on my island(s), though whether that'll be a future blog post or just a section of my monthly wrapup I haven't yet decided. Until then, I have a thread on Bluesky that I've been updating periodically and you can read through that if you want some more immediate updates.

We're not quite halfway through the year so things could easily change as I play more, but this game is feeling like a shoo-in for one of my favorite games of the year. I struggle to think of anything that I'd enjoy more than playing with my blorbos like this, and I highly recommend it, limited and repetitive though it may be. It might be more a "toy" than a "game", but it is a very fun toy.