As featured in the June Issue of Mage Magazine, Paige reviews Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is the long awaited sequel of Tomodachi Life, which is actually the second game in the series but the first to be released outside of Japan. It’s been over a decade between these games and it might feel like the changes aren’t significant enough. Trust me, there’s going to be an awful lot of comparison in here, I do in fact not believe in judging a game on its own merits when it’s part of a series.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a game in which you create mii characters to live on an island, feed them, dress them up, play mini-games with them and watch them develop relationships with each other. It is much like a living dollhouse simulator, or the equivalent of a fish tank where you prod onto the glass too much. Part of the enjoyment is seeing how close or far your friends and family’s counterparts are to their real ones and putting them in silly clothes and situations. In comparison to many other life simulation games, you only have so much input on their lives although it is a fair bit more than in past releases.

For one thing, due to the island being a continuous area (besides building interiors) you can directly pick up and place miis wherever you feel like, mostly to try and force them to be friends with each other. I’ve never seen a mii introduce themselves to another one unfortunately, or help each other if they’ve tripped or have the hiccups. Miis do walk seamlessly (well, okay, they do trip a lot) to and from locations and will casually meet up with each other. This is fantastic progress to the prior game where everything from the beach, to the restaurant were also places you had to click into as miis would randomly go there, maybe talk with each other or use an item. Often it was tied to designated timed activities which are now non-existent (besides three timed markets).

Miis will have little speech bubbles when they need help, sadly most have just a scribble to indicate distress and are colour coded instead of having cute symbols as in the past. They might request some food or a change of clothes and other items, or will want you to play a mini game or ask for relationship advice. Helping them will give you warm fuzzies which can then be poured into the town fountain to level up the island rank giving you more customisation items. Such as one new type of gift you can betsow upon a mii whenever they rank up, little quirks. These quirks can be things like a particular walking animation to make them float or be bow legged, how loud they speak, whether or not they greet people and so on. It’s a pretty fun way to personalise your mii, you can even give them catchphrases.

In the prior game, you’d usually find a mii getting into a fight every time you turned on the game, but this time around I didn’t see anyone angry until after beating it. It seems mii satisfaction plays a role in the overall island harmony so I had to ignore them for twenty something hours before any real problems occurred. Although the personalities miis have assigned to them do also contribute, and giving them anti-social quirks can increase disharmony.

As the benevolent deity with minor powers on this island, you need to earn money which will be tithed daily by your island residents to collect at the fountain, but helping the miis out with their problems and spoiling them rotten helps to increase the amount you earn significantly. Like in the past, the treasures you earn from mini-games can be sold at the pawn shop but this time they have some purpose. Certain ones like the video games and pets are more interactable, whereas things like some jomon pottery or perfume will exist as images they can place on the ground and talk about but otherwise not do much with. The money you earn can then be spent on food, clothes, interiors and once a day mystery bags to then give back to your miis. Repeat ad infinitum.

When it comes to mini-games, we get the typical quizzes and some new ones like bowling and no repeats. I think it’s a shame they didn’t bring all of them back (aside from the kana butt writing from the first game) and one of them appears only as a playable dream segment. Another thing we’ve lost is some items that let you interact with the miis such as the electric fan, hypnosis set, as well as other things that were useful. I always applied a bath set to any upset miis but I can’t do that anymore. When it comes to the personal items the miis could use on their own I admit most of them were exercise themed but it also seems that they’ve taken out places so then they can’t give you a tennis racket because there’s nothing to hit it against. We do get some public amenities like sprinklers and see-saws they can play with together but not very many. Clothes do have some more categories so now miis can have separate necklaces, socks and back accessories ranging from backpacks to weaponry and magic circles.

A new feature is the ability for miis to live together, as in the prior games they were all in the same apartment complex. This time they get standalone single room houses until miis agree to become roommates, then you get a much larger house with a common area and their single rooms on top. Annoyingly, if the house isn’t full it gets a cute rooftop patio that the miis literally never use. It’s pretty neat although there are some downsides such as miis constantly asking to move in with different miis, nevermind that they’re married or anything like that. Speaking of, married couples don’t share a room anymore so you can’t catch them sleeping in the joint bed with one having fallen off already. A massive downgrade is that after miis get married and have a baby, the baby grows up immediately in a cutscene rather than giving you a few days with the infant, possibly due to this room change. Sending them off the island basically deletes them as there are no longer any mii sharing features.

Little events can occur randomly as you come up towards miis and some are rather similar to dreams in terms of wackiness. Such as a mii sneaking up on another while copying their face, or being scared by an item that then makes them run straight home once the event is over. They aren’t too bad but we could have had more of them. I have a pretty small population and have seen most if not all of them. The same can be said for the news which is only delivered daily besides special news, I’ve had repeats within two days of each other.

Customisation is the real name of the game here, starting all the way from new hair and face options for your mii as well as face paint. The facepaint here is a different system from the make-up in the Switch port of Miitopia, creating a flat layer across the face with not much room to go around it. Which I found quite disappointing as it made it hard to make certain characters. The skin tones are also rather lacking making it hard to create anyone that is somewhere between pale white and tanned. One prominent new addition is the option for an alternate gender identity (non-binary) and dating preferences so now miis can have same-sex relationships with each other, or opt out entirely from falling in love. There was a long running joke about us never getting a new Tomodachi Life after Nintendo got backlash from the 3DS entry not having same-sex relationships, and they then promised to add it into any follow-up entries.

Miis have more familial assignments so if you add your real life brothers, sisters, parents and so on you can be assured they won’t try to date you. An exception is that there’s no in-law option however so make sure to tag them as relatives onto your profile. Miis won’t recognise each other as relatives until they move into the same house for some reason though.

Furthermore you can customise almost everything from your own pets (which are pictures that either float or hop along the ground), outside of buildings, clothes and food. The first item I designed was a sea monkey pet, and of course, a can of Red Bull. This involves drawing which can be done on the touch-screen with either your fingers or compatible stylus although I found the stylus I had that came with Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training For Nintendo Switch to be a bit too thick. The tools at hand within the drawing framework were pretty good in my opinion other than sometimes I wanted a bit more space. Terraforming the island is quick and easy, letting you place paths on the grid or even paint bucketing terrain which made me temporarily drain a portion of the ocean. Other customisation options include pre-fab items for decorating the island or letting the miis interact with them like picnic tables, vending machines and sprinklers.

The miis themselves will sometimes ask you to place more paths or things around them and let you see their idea before committing to paying for it. Usually their ideas are horrible and after just letting them do what they want for a while I actually encountered a reduced framerate when moving the camera across the main island view due to the sheer amount of crap on the ground.

Something odd that still hasn’t been fixed is that when they request an item to be placed right next to where they are standing (ignoring that they want the dumbest things in the silliest places) another mii at the same time on the island will be requesting that same thing elsewhere.

Speaking of custom content, one of the bigger new features is the topics system. Miis will ask you what things to start a conversation about, so I might say “The Simpsons” and then a mii trying to make friends will ask them how much they like “The Simpsons” and so on. Which can result in some pretty funny conversations. When moving in together you can invent new activities the miis will talk about (but obviously not actually do). Hot activities on my island are “talking about current events”and “not playing games”. New topics can also be added when miis ask you personal questions such as what celebrity you like so then they’ll start saying other miis look like Lindsay Lohan or whatever you put. If you find whatever they say makes for odd conversation you can remove these topics from the island’s lingo.

I do get a bit annoyed at the fact that most dreams miis have involve an item you made so then you get something that is extremely easy and cheap to get whenever you want. This also happens a fair bit with the quizzes having some kind of bias to the items you’ve made yourself making the guessing games quite easy for mii at least.

The photo studio is back and really fun, one of things I’m still unlocking is more photo backgrounds, many of which seem to be tied to owning particular items or purchasing certain interiors. Unfortunately some other big things that are missing, primarily the concert hall which in the previous game let you assign miis to various positions to a set of dance moves and song tunes that you could customise the lyrics too. It gets a bit insulting when those tunes sans lyrics play in the background of the restaurant. Sometimes we get events when miis sing but they only do so by humming, EXCEPT for birthdays during which they prove that they are still perfectly capable of singing. While we do get a complete lack of a profanity filter this time around (something that was implemented on the system’s end for the 3DS) part of that is because they removed not only mii sharing, but the ability to upload your screenshots and videos of this game in particular to the Switch app on your phone is removed. Meaning I have to plug my Switch into my computer to get these pictures even the ones the game takes like the holidays and studio.

There’s no Switch 2 edition for some reason but the game looks really good and as I said ran smooth on my Nintendo Switch 2 until I placed too many random objects around. Something that’s certainly not lacking is the absurd humor, especially paired with some nice new animations such as the new all time favourite item having my mii child part the seas over her joy at receiving an apple. We still have the juxtaposed images of real food to feed them and actual locations for news backgrounds. I played the Australian version of them game which uses the british localisation, for the most part it was perfectly fine but there are a couple of terms that get used a bit such as “naff” and “welly” that I think only someone who has listened to poms speak would understand what those words mean. I am glad to have that rather than the American localisation at least. There are some funny bits that I feel must be a cultural difference or odd translation though, like whenever a mii is thinking about asking someone out or having a baby they’ll say that they’re “overwhelmed with sadness” which doesn’t seem right. Some visual effects accompany certain conversations that don’t seem to fit either like the miis having a strange conniving look when having a normal conversation that isn’t any kind of evil planning at all.

Now it’s no Sims 4 in terms of lacking content from a prior entry but when you get down to it there seems to be a lot that wasn’t even replaced with anything comparable. It’s one of those things where people who didn’t play the prior games probably won’t care about most of these changes but maybe some of them. I think releasing the “ask the devs” blog was a really bad idea since they stated this game had been getting worked on for many years and honestly unless all this customisation and new lingo system really were that complicated it certainly couldn’t have been a large full time team. I see those Animal Crossing and Splatoon assets. Not mention all the stock images, they certainly didn’t have people going out taking their own photos for those.

It took me a lot longer to reach the credits for this game (longer than Pokopia actually) although part of that is moving the goal posts. As in the 3DS version credits would roll once your first baby grew up, and now the credits roll once you use the fountain to grant a certain number of wishes and give a mii the final holiday that unlocks. I have to say I like that the travel tickets are so much easier to get now, which is funny because you don’t get miis asking for them anymore. They have some customisation items that are tied to the seasons but I’m not super fussed about collecting every item especially since in this one buying a clothing item doesn’t unlock all the swatches for you to buy at your leisure this time around. I’ve even left the game alone for a day or to at this point.

Although this is pretty much the only game my daughter likes to see me play and requests that we watch “us”. It’s a nice full circle moment as back on the 3DS I had named my mii child the same name I would eventually give to my real one. I did get a good thirty (now more) hours out of it and it took me longer to finish than the last game. It’s not like I won’t come back and play it for another week here and there in the future. Still I think a lot of the removed features and items could’ve helped add a smidge more longevity to the game. It’s good, I was just waiting for it to be great.

Review Score