Image: Nintendo
It’s been a little over a week since the long-awaited sequel for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream has released, and now that I’ve had a chance to rake up almost a work week’s worth of hours playing the game, I thought I would talk about whether it lives up to the original game that was released in 2014.
Tomodachi Life is a game where you create Miis, little characters that originated way back in the early 2000s. With Tomodachi Life or the Mii Maker, you can create yourself, your friends or cursed creatures like the burger boy. In Tomodachi Life, your Miis live in an apartment and can interact, befriend and even have romantic relationships with each other. There are also other things to do on the island, like play games and buy them different things to increase their happiness. It’s like watching an ant farm of random characters, similar to CN city. The original game was very limited with customization, and you would just have to hope your Miis work, meet and interact so they could become friends.
Now it’s 2026, Tomodachi Life just released on the Nintendo Switch, and it has enhanced customization features with several color options, hair options and even the ability to make your Miis have specific bangs and hair. You have a facepaint option where you can draw specific details or even make realistic faces. The Mii Maker has a few more customized voice options, but in my opinion, some of the features are lacking.
Miitopia released in 2021 with a Mii Maker, but it also includes options for makeup and wigs, setting a high bar that Tomodachi Life couldn’t live up to. Now, it doesn’t need to live up to Miitopia since they are different games, but I wish that making your own eyes with the facepaint tool would still allow for your Mii to blink. I made people with heterochromia, and now it's cursed to look at their staring faces. They also removed the full name feature, so all of your characters go by a first name. This isn't my biggest concern, but it was pretty fun to make up last names for some characters. I wish they didn’t remove the favorite color feature because it was just a fun, small addition to the game. However, one big plus is that Miis can now be male, female or non binary and have various dating preference combinations.
Now, for the actual gameplay.
I like that the Miis no longer live in an apartment and that you can customize your island, but I really wish they had the concert hall, rankings or even the compatibility board. I like the new games, but I wish there were more options (though that could also be because my Miis just love to play zoom quiz). I also really like some of the new relationships and the ability to have crushes—the cutscenes are so funny, and it’s nice to see that they’re not just mutual relations. For example, one Mii can consider another a Great Friend, while the other sees them as a Best Friend.
The custom lingo is also really fun, but there is no filter. To offset that, Tomodachi Life is entirely single-player with only local play to trade Miis. I think this actually stunts an important gameplay aspect: children. Your Miis can have children, and you used to get a week to see them grow up, but now that growth is shortened to one cutscene that shows the baby Mii become an adult.
In the old game, if you sent Miis to go travel, they would sometimes visit through the streetpass. Now, there’s no way for other people to visit your island, so if they travel they just disappear.
One of my other issues with the game is that it feels a bit too fast and there’s not enough to unlock. The new game unlocks quirks, or a set of traits you can give to specific Miis, like walk styles, how they eat or how they talk. I think they could have done a bit more with adding quirks since I’ve already unlocked them all. I have a lot of the stuff unlocked, despite playing pretty casually with the 20 Miis on my island. I should also add that I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we only have 70 Miis allowed on an island instead of the original 100. 70 seems adequate. You can also have multiple saves on your Switch to create more islands.
I think the new Tomodachi Life needs to go through a few more updates before I can fully recommend it, especially with the $60 price tag. I know it got an update on Wednesday, April 22, but what was really fixed in that update is somewhat unknown. I think the team should continue to develop the game, but I also love the amount of creativity we’re given. Making custom houses, clothes, food and even pets seems so small, but I’ve seen a lot of creative designs and some very cursed designs created within the game's boundaries. Play the demo before you get the game to be sure this is a game that you want, but as a Tomodachi Life fan, I am content with the sequel.