Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a follow-up to the social sim released on the 3DS in 2014. After a week of solid playing, I have concluded that this game is more demanding than the average cozy title. Initial comparisons to the likes of Pokopia or Animal Crossing don’t quite ring true.
After living on ‘Ali Island’ for a bit, it’s clear they’re completely different species, even if Tomodachi Life fits the cozy label.
While both games involve managing a community on a secluded piece of land, the DNA of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is actually much closer to a virtual pet like a Tamagotchi than a traditional life sim.
In Animal Crossing, your villagers add depth to your world while you focus on fishing or decorating. In Tomodachi, the Miis are the game, and they are relentlessly demanding. You aren't living alongside them; you are their God and parent, constantly tending to their basic needs, feeding them, and controlling their social lives like some weird, power-hungry puppetmaster trying to make them all get along.
Creating a Mii is fantastic; the customization is really quite in-depth and expands as you play. I created my immediate family and then assigned them relationship roles that match real-life connections (you have to nurture this in-game so that the Miis realize they are real-life relatives). It's a nice touch when building out your family tree.
Initially, the randomness is fantastic, creating some hilarious interactions and situations. You might be pairing up a couple in hopes of starting a romance one minute, while feeding eggs to another Mii who is contemplating breaking out of the game the next. It all seems to be wonderfully random and crazy until the gameplay repetition kicks in.
Every day follows a predictable script: you wake up, check which Miis have problems, feed them, and watch a few events. The problem here is that these events pop back up so often that they make your daily check-ins with your Miis a rather dull experience. The frequent news broadcasts hosted by the Miis that activate as you unlock new things for the island become increasingly grating; thankfully, there is a skip button.
While it is fun to try and make my Mii move in with Mr. T from the A-Team, and trying to create fictional characters as new residents on your island can be a blast - they all begin to feel rather samey despite being able to tweak their personalities and appearance. It becomes a game of maintenance rather than a game of discovery, where the reward for your effort is often just a slightly different hat or a repeat of a joke you've already seen three times.
That isn't to say the game lacks depth in its creative tools. The customization options, as I mentioned above, are quite good, offering a solid range of clothing, interiors, and personality settings that let you make each Mii feel distinct. Dressing them up in ridiculous costumes and seeing how their synthesized voices react to different phrases is where the game shines brightest. Sure, it is fun to have a Mii that is constantly practicing karate in the street at midnight after giving them an instructional DVD, but the limitations soon surface the more you play this game.
If you’ve played the wonderful Pokopia, where the gameplay is a phenomenal blend of Minecraft and cozy life sim, you’ll notice a distinct lack of focus in Tomodachi’s world-building. In those other titles, the environment is a place you actively shape, a living, breathing space that reflects your creativity. In Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, the island feels more like a static menu screen where things happen to occur, rather than a place you are truly constructing.
One of the biggest letdowns for me was the lack of social elements in this social sim. For a so-called “social” sim, the lack of social features is quite shocking.
You can share Miis locally, but this isn’t an ideal solution for people who don't live close by and want to meet up. It also makes me jealous seeing the far more creative players' versions of celebrities and other characters that I would love to drop on Ali Island to shake things up. Tomodachi Life for 3DS featured a QR code sharing system like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which made it simple to download other players' creations; for some reason, here, Nintendo took a step backward.
Despite my gripes with repetition, there is still a core loop here that works if you’re looking for a game to play when you don’t really want to be challenged. It is a cozy game after all. The music is catchy, the UI is snappy, and there’s a level of WarioWare-esque weirdness here that you just won’t find anywhere else. It’s the kind of experience that’s perfect for a ten-minute burst, but it struggles to hold up during extended play sessions.
You eventually hit a wall where your Miis have nothing new to say, and the island has no more secrets to give up. It is fun to watch all your island inhabitants interact without your direct influence, but the random events and needs seem to cycle through a very shallow pool of available options.
It’s a solid, quirky title that manages to be memorable despite its limitations, but it lacks the variety needed to be a true classic. It’s a weird, needy, and occasionally brilliant little sim, even if it does make you feel more like a glorified babysitter than an island explorer.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a fun game for a while, but don't be surprised when you find yourself ready to move on once the Miis start asking for the fifth time in a single afternoon if they should move out of the house you just set up exactly the way they like.
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