Almost exactly 13 years after the original released in Japan, the long-awaited follow-up will launch for the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream brings back the unusual life sim where players create their own Mii characters, then control their lives. The new installment will be out in the world on April 16th, and I had a chance to play it early for review. As a lifelong fan of the life sim genre, I was excited to dig into what this unique entry has to offer.
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If there’s one thing I can say for sure, it’s that Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is difficult to define. Yes, it’s a life sim, but it’s got a different angle on the concept than most games. Rather than directly control characters, you play as the island’s guiding hand (literally), removed from and observing the drama. This can be equal parts entertaining and frustrating, as it turns out. Those who loved the original will surely find plenty to like in the new Tomodachi Life. But my own experience was a mixed bag. Ultimately, Tomodcahi Life: Living the Dream left me with the impression that it will be a hit for its niche audience and an entertaining oddity for the rest of us.
Rating: 3 out of 5
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Structured creative freedom with Miis and island/item designs | Sense of humor may not be for everyone |
| Quirky spin on a classic life sim feels fresh yet familiar | Mini-games and cutscenes get repetitive pretty quickly |
| Entertaining mini-games add another layer to gameplay | Not as much creative freedom in some areas as in similar games |
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream Leans Into Niche Humor & When It Works, It Works
As anyone who’s played the demo can attest, the first few hours with Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream are just plain fun. You’ve got a good bit of creative freedom when it comes to crafting your Miis, with options to hone them from scratch or through a guided series of questions. Those with more artistic skills than I have will no doubt spend hours creating Mii masterpieces alone. But once you throw those Miis into their new Island home, the fun (and the weirdness) begins.
Living the Dream doesn’t shy away from weird, occasionally cringe humor. After all, you’re the spectator here, setting up a world full of Miis and then tuning in to see what they do with it. That’s one of the strange things about Tomodachi Life. You don’t really queue up actions for your Miis, though you can drag them to items or other Miis to encourage some engagement. But what happens next is largely out of your control. Your Miis will engage with the world based on their personalities and what’s available for them in the environment. They keep this up even when you’re not playing, so you sometimes return to find that the couple you watched fall in love last time is now at odds for no clear reason.
When your Miis get into particularly interesting scenarios, you’ll be treated to a fun little cutscene of their interactions. As you give your Miis more custom language, they’ll incorporate the words you teach them, which can be pretty amusing depending on what route you take with it. These cutscenes are both the game’s blessing and its curse. They put the game’s unique humor on full display, and I definitely found myself laughing along with them. The trouble is, there just don’t quite seem to be enough of them to go around. They started repeating pretty early on for me, with relatively little variation. You can skip but the scenes, but in a game where watching what happens is most of the fun, this doesn’t feel particularly satisfying to do.
The humor comes out in other ways, of course. There’s the sheer hilarity of handing items to your Miis, many of which look like photos of real-life items in strong contrast to the cartoon Miis. And watching how the Miis walk around the map outside of cutscenes can be entertaining as well. After you gift them certain items, they gain new actions that can be pretty funny to watch. For instance, I gave one of my Miis maracas, and she got pretty obsessed with them. Every time I found her on the map, there she was, playing those maracas.
Tomodachi Life definitely has its own unique flavor, making it feel like a gameplay experience unlike any other. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always wind up being a good thing, and I found that I got tired of it far quicker than I typically do with a game in the “cozy” space.
My Love Affair with Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream Was a Blast, But It Got Stale Fast
Tomodachi Life can be an incredibly immersive game… at first. When you’re in the early stages of creating Miis and unlocking new features, it’s easy to want to devote an entire day to the game. I’m pretty sure I did that, in fact, the first weekend I had my hands on it. The trouble is that as you progress further in the game, the “spectactor sport” setup starts to wear on you a bit.
As a player, your role in the game is creating Miis and setting up the island. There’s no terraforming or customization there, but rather the placement of items and buildings. You can get pretty detailed with making your Miis, but once they’re made, they are largely out of your control. At that point, your job is to observe and continue to craft their world. And this isn’t going to be the ideal gameplay experience for everyone. It can feel particularly detached for those of us used to life sims like The Sims 4, where you can queue up specific actions for characters or Stardew Valley when you’re the main character directly interacting with the world and characters.
It’s not that there’s nothing to do as the island’s guiding hand in the sky. You can create new Miis, move things around, or encourage your Miis to talk to one another or interact with items in the world. At a certain point, you can even draw your own items to add into the mix (this is for people with artistic ability, which I unfortunately lack). As you observe, Miis will occasionally pop up with requests or specific cutscenes for you to tune into. They even ask you to play a series of guessing games and other mini-games from time to time. But for me, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is missing some of those cozy game grind staples that keep you engaged. Between Mii requests and your next new Mii creation, there simply isn’t the sense that there’s much to do in the game.
As part of its gameplay loop, Living the Dream incorporates real-time elements, with shops refreshing daily. That does make you want to keep coming back to see what new items you’ll unlock. And checking in on the Miis is pretty entertaining at first, too. But as I mentioned, many of the requests and cutscenes start to repeat, which unfortunately made this game grow a bit stale for me far sooner than I would’ve liked. I enjoyed Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream very much for the first several hours I played it, but after the novelty wore off, I found myself wishing for a bit more.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is available for Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 for $59.99 starting on April 16th. A Nintendo Switch copy of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
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