Review: Tomodachi Life - Enemy Slime

Review: Tomodachi Life

Nintendo's bizarre life simulator is oftentimes less interesting than real life itself.

3DS

I don’t think most people were expecting Nintendo to release Tomodachi Life in the US. In fact I’d go a step further and say most people didn’t know what Tomodachi Life was before the release of the rather bizarre Nintendo Direct that introduced everyone to the game.

Released in Japan back in 2013 Tomodachi Life is an unusual “life simulator” in which you populate a private island with Miis and use your voyeuristic skills to watch their every move. You can either move your own already created Miis into the island, or you can make new ones. You’ll also add additional personality traits to the Miis as well as giving them a terrifying robot voice. Once you’ve perfected your character’s personality you can drop them onto an island to live with the other characters you’ve created.

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Yeah I don’t know….

A lot of people like to compare Tomodachi Life to The Sims but I don’t think that’s all that accurate. It would be better to say that the game is like having twenty Tamagotchis stuffed into one interface, except your Miis won’t defecate on the floor and then die when you don’t pick it up in time. The Sims gives you a lot of control over your characters. They will go about their day to day lives, sure, but you can also issue very specific commands to them and basically force them to adhere to your will. Want two Sims to get married? You can make it happen if you try hard enough. Want to force a Sim not to use the bathroom until they eventually die from the stress of not expelling waste? Been there, done that. Miis on the other hand feel very independent and very much outside your sphere of influence. You don’t really have any say as to who they hang out with or when, sometimes a Mii will ask for your advice on whether or not they should talk to or confess love to another person, but the idea will always spring forth from their randomly generated head rather than yours.

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Your Miis can learn songs, you can also add custom lyrics. It’s horrifying.

This of course leads to some rather unusual situations. Mii’s relationships may be dictated by their personality traits that you assigned them upon creation, but that didn’t make it feel any less weird when the youngest person in my apartments would fall head over heels for the most decrepit old man available. When you create a new character you do have the option of mentioning whether or not they are related to you. I imported my Wife’s Mii into the game and listed her as my spouse, but that didn’t stop Tomodachi life from putting us in separate apartments and repeatedly making my Mii fall in love with completely different people on the island.

Of course randomness is kind of in the spirit of the game. Miis do outlandish things and exhibit weird behaviors all the time. Some of the stuff you’ll see is funny, some of it is downright creepy, and unfortunately I was already seeing duplicates of the exact same scenes within the first few hours in the game. Even the funniest bits of Tomodachi Life don’t hold up to repetition.

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Not only do you not have much control over your Miis actions, you also don’t have a lot of say in the world’s customization either. You can re-decorate a Mii’s room, but only with pre-determined interior sets, there won’t be any free-form furniture layouts a la Animal Crossing. The island’s layout is pre-determined as well. Buildings and areas unlock after you achieve certain goals so you do have some say as to the order that the island will fill out, but for the most part everything has already been decided for you.

Day to do day interactions with your Miis leave something to be desired. For the most part your time will be spent feeding them, buying them clothing, or showering them with presents to drag them out of depression after they’re romantically rejected by the oddly alluring elderly man that inhabits your island. Miis do have things like favorite foods and preferred clothing choices, but a lot of their tastes feel random, finding out your Miis favorite things is really just a matter of trial and error.

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Here my Mii showed me what great friends we are by requesting I look inside his stomach.

One particular aspect that’s lacking in Tomodachi Life is its integration with StreetPass and your Mii Plaza. You are only able to import Miis that you have in your Mii maker. Over time I’d amassed a collection of friends in my Plaza via street pass and while I was able to import them by moving them each to the Mii Maker having to leave the Tomodachi life app to do so made it a somewhat time consuming process.

But of course the biggest let-down is that all your time spent setting up your Miis and making them happy really just leads up to…nothing. It’s kind of shocking just how little there is to do in Tomodachi Life. The most interactive part of the game arrives when Miis ask you to play with them. “Playing” usually involves a quick (and incredibly simple) memory matching game, a quiz about the current state of your Miis, or a weird game where you’re shown a zoomed in picture of an object and have to guess what it is.

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Tomodachi Life is an interesting distraction, but it falls flat as a full 40 dollar 3DS release. If you find it in a bargain bin some day I might suggest picking it up, but as it stands there’s just not enough to do or see to justify the purchase.