By Casey Hignite
The highly anticipated follow-up to Nintendo’s 3DS cult classic Tomodachi Life came out April 16 across the world, flying up the charts. Japanese video game magazine Famitsu reports that it topped the chart with 565,405 in just the first three days of release, several times more than second place Pragmata at 36,470 sales. Nintendo returns to charming and goofy real-time Mii life simulation with refreshing upgrades to past titles such as overhauled character creation, islands with complete customization, and robust character interactions.
Miis get a new face—literally—in the new creation menu. All new hairstyles, facial features, and adjustment settings make for a wide range of possibilities. Even further, face paint is the first of many drawing features available in the game that radically change what can be created, limiting you only to imagination and your use of the art software, which seems to resemble Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ design creator, only with more options. A question-based editor also accompanies this new system.
All new “little quirks” follow the familiar sixteen personality system from the preceding game. Now, you can gradually unlock traits such as the way your Mii greets others all the way to how they sleep at night.
Islands can be expanded, changed in shape, and customized completely. Players get full access to customization after six Miis are created, and after that, progression welcomes you to choose other types of creation, decoration, or gifts are available to you. The island can be even further affected by the types of language you choose to introduce your Miis to, what you answer questions with, and your decisions about their social dynamics.
The interactions are the core of Tomodachi Life as a series, but the previous 3DS installment was limited in where Miis could interact, if they interacted at all, and when they slept. This one lets you pick them up out of bed to go talk and introduce Miis to each other by dropping them into a stranger’s house!
While the game is criticized for repetition of scenes, complete lock-down of online sharing features, and their reliance on the Mad Libs style ‘lingo’, I have other criticisms. Although the increased range of Mii creation is impressive, it still has limitations in color palettes of skin tone and hair color. The game itself runs… decently… on the original Switch, but is clearly optimized for the Switch 2, although an exclusive edition remains to be seen. Several features seem to be missing from the 3DS release such as the Concert Hall and Judgment Bay.
The missing Concert Hall is particularly odd to me, because there are many scenes where singing does occur, and the melodies for the original songs are certainly in the game as featured instrumentals. There are also scenes where in lieu of singing, the character just makes wordless musical noises. These kinds of peculiar empty spots in the game leave a slightly unfinished aftertaste to it, and leaves me hoping that the game will receive an update cycle to fill in those gaps, even though I dislike this kind of development practice that games like New Horizons received in the past.
Despite this, I overwhelmingly enjoy this new release. It hits a perfect set of nostalgia for me along with creative fulfillment. The game encourages you to be an artist, even with its blind spots. The development of this game is clearly a labor of love. I’d like to give you, from Nintendo’s Ask the Developer series, this quote of Ryutaro Takahashi:
“I hope longtime fans, as well as first time players, will enjoy this brand-new, evolved Tomodachi Life. It’s a quirky game where you create Mii characters of people you know and spend time watching and caring for them. The more you do that, the more attached to them you’ll become. And who knows, maybe you’ll even come to like the real person more?”