Here is where things currently stand on my Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream island: I’m married to Dua Lipa, who I only added to the island because I wanted her to fall in love with my friend Nick, who has a thing for her. Nick, in a full cowboy getup, played guitar and sang at our wedding because he’s a good guy who would never let jealousy end a friendship. Meanwhile, my friend Curt has a devastating crush on Sonic the Hedgehog, but so far it remains tragically unrequited. Stewie Griffin and Eric Cartman have also fallen in love with each other, but neither party has confessed as much yet. I wish them all the best.
This is largely how Tomodachi Life on the Nintendo Switch goes. You make a bunch of Miis (you know, the weird little dudes you played as in Wii Sports 20 years ago), perform a tiny amount of daily maintenance to keep them happy and unlock new stuff, and whatever happens next is up to them. While at times it barely feels like a game in the traditional sense, there’s simply no denying how much fun it is.
As a long-awaited follow-up to Tomodachi Life on 3DS (released in 2014), Living the Dream has big shoes to fill. While not every great aspect of the 3DS game made the journey to Nintendo Switch, Nintendo has expanded upon that game’s vision in enough other cool ways to make this a sequel worth waiting more than a decade for.
I hope you like landscaping
Since Living the Dream is launching to a much larger audience than the 3DS game did 12 years ago, I imagine there are plenty of folks wondering what the heck it is. Let me explain it the best I can.
In Living the Dream, the player’s main job is to cultivate and maintain an island full of Miis. You can base them on yourself, your friends, or your favorite fictional characters, celebs, or athletes. Each Mii has a distinct personality set by the player via a series of personality sliders (“Honest” and “Polite” are at opposite ends of one slider, for example), and this dictates how they behave and who they become friends with. Feeding them food they like, giving them stylish outfits, and otherwise fulfilling whatever mundane requests they make will fill up a happiness meter, which facilitates island expansion and other fun unlocks.
And that’s pretty much it! The bones of Tomodachi Life haven’t changed much since 2014, but a lot of things around the edges have been updated to make Living the Dream a more customizable experience than the last game. Perhaps the biggest change is that you can perform grid-based island customization now to make your island look exactly how you want. This also opens up another avenue for unlocking collectibles, as things like potted plants, trees, vending machines, and certain walking surfaces are now locked behind leveling up.
This is the life.
Credit: Nintendo
I have to admit that this is not something I’m very keen on in any game. I just don’t have a good eye for interior or exterior decoration. That said, Living the Dream makes this extremely simple to do and low-stakes enough that you can safely ignore it if you want. One of my favorite features is that, anytime it’s time to place a new structure or item, you can press a “Mii’s Choice” button to make the game put it wherever it makes the most sense. Or, sometimes, it’ll put a vending machine on the beach. Either way, I don’t have to think too hard about it.
Nintendo made the rather brilliant decision to not include a censorship filter of any kind in Living the Dream, so while I’ll refrain from sharing specific examples, I can confirm that you can make them talk about literally anything you can fit in that text field.
Another cool new feature is the ability to create objects, clothing, and even physical features for Miis by simply drawing with a cursor (or, in handheld mode, a touchscreen). Again, I am not an artist, so this is something I didn’t do a lot, but I know for certain it’s going to unlock a new level of deranged nonsense once Living the Dream goes wide.
Even if it’s not something I want to spend a lot of time on, making the Mii Island a more tangible and customizable place is a great move for Living the Dream. People are going to go nuts with it, and I can’t wait to see dedicated players’ Mii metropolises, even though they won’t be able to easily share them online. More on that in a moment.
The voice synthesis is what makes Tomodachi Life great
Imagine this, but in the weirdest robot voice you’ve ever heard.
Credit: Nintendo
The actual gameplay of Tomodachi Life, at least in my eyes, is not really the appeal here. That said, it is a fun and rewarding loop that can remain engaging for dozens of hours, while never really asking the player to spend more than 30 to 45 minutes playing at a time. One of the best aspects of Living the Dream is that you’ll just kinda naturally run out of things to do before each session reaches an hour, unless you have an ungodly number of Miis on your island. They’ll stop making requests and start operating on their own. You can stick around and watch, or you can come back later. It’s got Animal Crossing-style real-time clock elements, so there are reasons to log on at certain times of day. But, thankfully, I never once felt obligated to structure my real-life schedule around Tomodachi Life, which is what turned me off of Animal Crossing.
In actuality, though, the secret sauce that makes Living the Dream work is the robotic text-to-speech voice synthesis that every Mii uses to speak. They’ll often ask you questions that you can answer in a text field, and then they’ll repeat the answer out loud in all sorts of different contexts. I told a Mii that I like Bruce Springsteen, and now all of the Miis on my island talk about The Boss a lot. Nintendo made the rather brilliant decision to not include a censorship filter of any kind in Living the Dream, so while I’ll refrain from sharing specific examples, I can confirm that you can make them talk about literally anything you can fit in that text field.
I’m not joking when I say the reason to play this game is to just sit and listen to the Miis talk. Their voices sound distinctly unnatural in a way that’s both funny and refreshingly honest in a world full of generative AI garbage. At no point are any of your Miis trying to actually imitate human speech, which is what makes it so charming. Of course, you have full control over their voice pitch, depth, and tone, so you can make them sound really weird, if you want.
This mostly manifests in the form of little comedy skits your Miis will ambiently perform for your amusement. Occasionally, a Mii will ask you to help them befriend another Mii by requesting a conversation topic. Type anything in, and they’ll have a goofy little Mad Libs-style conversation about it. The voice synthesis in Tomodachi Life is not new for this entry in the series, but it is absolutely key to what makes Living the Dream so fun to check in on every day.
I just wish you could use the share button
You can draw whatever you want, but good luck sharing it on social media.
Credit: Nintendo
In Living the Dream, Miis have never looked crisper and more high-definition. There are more cosmetic options for them here than the Wii had, so if you’re creative enough, you can make a virtual facsimile of just about anyone. Nintendo has also made the admirable decision to make this a Switch 1 joint rather than locking it onto the more expensive Switch 2. Unfortunately, this means the game is locked to 30 frames per second and doesn’t currently take advantage of any unique Switch 2 features, such as mouse control, which would have made drawing things and landscaping a lot easier. The frame rate thing doesn’t really matter in a game like this, but no mouse support is a real bummer.
Nothing is a bigger bummer, though, than the lack of true share button support. In Living the Dream, you can press the Switch’s share button to capture screenshots and video clips of hilarious moments, just like you would in any other Switch game. However, Nintendo has turned off the ability to upload captures directly to a mobile device. This means getting screenshots and videos off of a console and onto social media is borderline impossible for the average user.
There’s a loophole that involves putting the captures on a SD card and uploading them to a computer that way, but most people simply aren’t going to do that.
My friends and I do this on weekends.
Credit: Nintendo
I think I understand Nintendo’s thinking here. If the share button worked as normal in a game with no censorship filter, the internet would be flooded with horrible pictures and videos from misbehaving Miis, a bad look for the most family-friendly publisher in gaming. Unfortunately, there are so many funny screenshots I’ve taken that I can’t even include in this review because I can’t currently get them off my Switch.
Lastly, I’ll also mention that I don’t think you can write songs for your Miis to perform in this game, as you could in the 3DS version. It’s possible I just haven’t fulfilled some arcane unlocking mechanism to use that feature, but as far as I can tell, my favorite part of the 3DS version has been excised. Sad.
Even with those bothersome limitations, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is almost exactly what I wanted it to be in every other respect. It’s a different, more lowkey kind of “cozy game” than Pokémon Pokopia. Rather than focusing on large-scale construction projects, you’ll spend most of your time in Living the Dream making funny little talking dolls that look like your friends and pushing them together until they fall in love, or don’t. Most importantly, I laugh literally every time I play it. Most video games can’t claim that.
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