Three weeks ahead of its release this morning, the demo for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream was shared with the world. Now, the day of this long-awaited launch, and having thoroughly exhausted the demo, I join the masses who cannot wait to play the full game.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a sequel to the 2014 Nintendo 3DS title Tomodachi Life. This social simulator game sees you as the benevolent maker, caretaker and observer of a land of Miis, Nintendo’s customizable avatars. While Miis were no new feature (debuting in 2006 with the release of the Nintendo Wii), they were mostly relegated to being used as player characters for the Wii Sports series, Super Smash Bros. games and the occasional Mario tie-in.
While you could pretty thoroughly edit their facial features, the only depth these avatars had was favorite colors, gender and a birthday. You could make all the family, friends and favorite characters in the Mii Channel — where avatars are created and stored — you wished, but there was no interplay possible between these Miis (aside from dangling them from the scruff of their necks, for fun). Tomodachi Life changed that. Now, you could move all your Miis to an island together and watch as their lives and relationships unfolded in front of you.
More than a decade later, Nintendo returns to the series with a new installment. As someone who never played the original game but still sees clips of it posted regularly, I knew this was a big deal: I have seen people hoping for a new Tomodachi Life game since I was in middle school. Having played the demo, I understand why.
The amount of customization Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream offers is awe-inspiring. I came in with fond memories of making Miis on the Mii Channel, so I was already blown away by the sheer number of additional hairstyles and color options afforded in character creation; while still retaining the classic shapes and styles of the original Miis, Living the Dream adds a much greater range of hair lengths and textures than seen before. Similarly, it allows you to break up hair choices by front and back, so you can mix different styles for further customization. Even more, instead of just six skin tone options, the new game offers 14 base skin tones and an additional 100 colors from all over the rainbow to choose from for the Mii’s base.
And if that wasn’t enough, you can also use the face paint feature to draw any additional details on, above or below your Mii’s face. There is a fully realized drawing software included in this section: If you choose the advanced setting, you are given access to a heads-up display color picker (imagine Adobe Photoshop’s, for reference), copy-cut-paste features, hue, brightness or saturation sliders as well as very detailed brushes. People have been having fun with this feature, to be sure.
If this sounds like too much of a headache, don’t worry: When creating a Mii, you can select the “get help” option instead of the more hands-on “from scratch” for an expedited process. I tried this twice, answering questions about characters’ eye and mouth shape from memory, and both times, the results were so successful that my friends were able to guess who the Miis were based on. This helped me get into the actual game much quicker without stressing about the finer details, though I was still able to go back and make minor tweaks later.
After finishing visual customization, you can determine the Miis’ personalities by rating their characteristics in ranges, like where their speech falls between “polite” and “direct” or their energy between “flat” and “intense.” Based on your answer, your Miis will be “bubbly,” “headstrong,” a “charmer” or one of another 13 types, which influence how your Miis interact with one another.
The demo has only a limited amount of gameplay to show, but it is incredibly compelling. It’s just plain fun to see your Miis (be they your family, blorbos or otherwise) say the darnedest things; The game lets you type in any text for questions like Miis’ favorite activities and the nicknames they use for one another. I made two characters in my demo, and seeing them bond with my Mii over a reference to their fictional world made me giddy. There’s no limit to what text you can input, and you can even clarify the pronunciation for it with phonetic spellings for a more seamless feeling. I took one bazillion screenshots of my favorite characters simply interacting, and I got a huge kick out of seeing them fall in love as part of a random event.
If you don’t want particular Miis to fall in love, don’t worry! Even though the events can be random, you can encourage or discourage the partnerships after the random event occurs. And, if you note that the Miis have familial relationships, those events won’t ever randomly occur, a feature that the original Tomodachi Life lacked.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream balances the precision of customization with the lack of control of randomized events to bring a perfect dollhouse where you can also sit back as the dolls take the wheel. Though my fun was cut short when the demo ran its course (and my Miis were stuck inside, reminding me ad nauseam to buy the game when it’s out), I can’t wait to continue playing with my Miis like dolls.
Daily Arts Writer Cecilia Ledezma can be reached at cledezma@umich.edu.
