By Wyatt Boyle | KOAL News | Photo courtesy of Nintendo of America

Filled with adorable chaos, Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream dropped April 16. A long awaited sequel to its 3DS entry, Living the Dream has taken the internet by storm and left fans enamoured. I recommend the game even though I might not be the “target audience” in some aspects.

Tomodachi Life is a series about creating “Mii” characters and dropping them into a world owned and managed by you, the player. It belongs to a “life simulation game” genre, where players can watch their characters grow and interact with one another.

Each Mii character has one of sixteen personalities and their own likes, dislikes, and relationships with every other Mii. You can give them treasures, toys, clothes and feed them. The Mii’s have very surreal, somewhat harsh voices that give them even more character then they might otherwise have. The game makes it very clear that Miis are not human and it doesn’t pressure you to be life-like, which adds to its charm. The game has a cap of seventy Mii characters you can add onto your island.

While interacting with Mii characters, players continually fill up a “happiness” bar. Each time the happiness bar is filled, the Mii character will “level up,” and you can give them an item or a quirk to customize them and their behavior beyond their initial personality.

I once read that Tomodachi Life has a “fever dream” feel, and I think that sums it up exactly. The way the Mii characters speak is just ridiculous and unnatural, and they have outright bizarre dreams and encounters with each other that you can only scratch your head at.

Living the Dream in particular features and promotes a fully customizable island, as well as other content like food, pets, and housing options. Players can add whatever they can dream up — so long as they can also draw it.

I can’t draw. I love this feature and just wish I could use it more.

Living the Dream lets players “face paint” on certain Miis to create things like teddy bears, R2D2, or anything that might not fit onto a traditional Mii. I haven’t used or taken advantage of this feature. I can’t draw.

Living the dream is basically my first Tomodachi Life game. I never really played Tomodachi Life for the 3DS. I played it a few times with my little brother on his 3DS and replaced a few words in “create your own song” concert hall prompts with the word “poop” — which was peak comedy to a twelve year old — but I’ve had very little personal experience with the game. 

Beyond playing it with my brother, I didn’t really care for it. My interest in the series was finally piqued when I watched YouTuber Poofessure and saw all the goofy, inappropriate antics he put his miis up to in the 3DS entry. I became more invested than I thought I would into his ridiculous looking characters like Beefboss, Fishsticks, and Grass Hoper, and found myself ecstatic once Living the Dream was announced.

I didn’t play the game’s demo, because I knew I’d be left jonesing for it even worse than I already was in the three week window between the demo and game’s full release. I preordered Living the Dream 40 minutes before it came out, and was able to play it right after its release at midnight EDT. 

I was addicted to it during my first few hours of play, and have started playing it about an hour or two a day over the last week. I’ve added myself and my siblings to my island, Kanye West, and several fictional characters because I’m a massive, anti-social nerd. 

I can’t even fully say why I was so into the game off its release. Maybe it was because it was something new. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to slam my device into the wall because I have terrible teammates who are annoying me.

That aside, there’s something satisfying about solving “problem” bubbles as they pop up, and expanding the island. I’m not the largest fan of creating Miis, but the experience isn’t annoying or unfun. It’s made easier by the “create from existing Mii” button, which allows you to copy or edit Miis from more than one template.

Some of the biggest drama in the Tomodachi Life series always revolves around relationships. And overall, my island has been pretty mild. I shot down any early romances, or characters who went “I think Wyatt has a crush on me!” over the first few days. No, I don’t, and I wanted to make sure there was a wide selection of Miis for my characters to choose from before the relationships started in earnest.

Maybe that was a mistake, but it just speaks to how much control the player has over this world and its characters. 

At the time of writing, I’m still not far enough into the game yet to speak definitively on every aspect of relationships. But they seem pretty tame after the initial confessions and events building up to them. Some islanders want to get married after only dating for three days, it’s like they know they live in Utah.

Speaking of control, throughout the game you can build up an entire database of “island lingo” which your Miis will use in casual conversations. There is also no filter on the game and what you can tell your Miis to say to one another. If you want your Miis to talk about “pounding their snizz” — or something far, far worse than I can write in this article — there is nothing preventing it. 

Whether or not that’s a pro or a con is subjective. I, unfortunately, love it.

Despite the game’s success and charm, there are definitely certain features that don’t feel entirely fleshed out, or that seem to just be missing.

In the 3DS Tomodachi Life, players could give their Miis items upon level up such as Nintendo gaming consoles to make them interact and hang out with other characters. “Level up” items in this game feel extremely un-impactful, I’ll give one character a bubble blower and the other Miis don’t care about it. I’ve given my brother’s Mii a camera, and no one takes pictures with him or has any conversations with him about it.

It feels like these items should have provided natural feeling points for Miis to interact. That way, players would be incentivized to hand out more level-up items to see more interactions. But it seems like there’s just nothing attached to them, and it’s honestly a little bit disappointing.

Additionally, it feels like there should be a lot more decorations you can buy and use to beautify your island. And while you can draw and add anything into the game, it feels like many things are just missing. This was likely meant to be remedied by the unlimited customization options. But anything that I create, the Miis won’t always interact with like a vanilla object.

Events also feel repetitive after only a few times watching them. I don’t mind this too much, but with how many years we waited for a sequel to the 3DS Tomodachi Life entry for, I expected a little bit more.

Paying $60 for a game is also a bit rough. There are so many indie games you could buy for cheaper than $60 that will likely give you just as much content and gameplay. 

With all that being said, the cons don’t outweigh the pros of the game. There are still a lot of genuinely thought-out and intuitive systems and gameplay loops. Tomodachi Life Living the Dream is a charming adventure that’s meant to be played for longer than a single week.

Nintendo has announced no plans to update Tomodachi Life Living the Dream. For more information on the game or to purchase it, click here.