Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is one of the weirdest and most absolutely endearing games I have ever played. One part social simulator and one part endorphin-blasting island builder, it feels like there’s a nigh endless amount of laughs to craft and satisfying stuff to do. I just wish it were easier to share your creations and island with friends, as that’s been made bizarrely difficult.
I actually never had the chance to play Tomodachi Life on the Nintendo 3DS back in the day, and only really experienced the many memes that came as a result of it. When the chance to review Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream popped up, I was curious to see if it was as funny now as it seemed over a decade ago, and was quite pleased to find out it’s actually even better – for the most part.
The premise is simple, and the tutorial goes just far enough into detail without dragging on. You have a little island that you fill with Miis, either from your Switch/Switch 2 system or from scratch in-game. The Mii maker is ridiculously detailed, even before you get to the ability to draw whatever you want on the Mii’s face. Anyone or anything you want to make is well within the realm of possibility in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, whether it’s family and friends, celebrities, fictional characters, or just random goofs.
At the heart of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is the way all these Miis interact with one another. There’s a very surreal and bizarre sense of humor to the game, which will see your Miis having strange dreams about tree branches or watching ants make weird shapes as they walk in a line. You can input phrases and terms that the island inhabitants will talk about, too, giving you the opportunity to add your own nonsense to the mix. Seeing what hijinks unfold is consistently comical in a way that no other game has really pulled off for me.
The entertainment you get from the interactions with one another largely comes down to the sorts of characters you’ve made. I’ve had a blast seeing my friends clash with, befriend, or marry everybody from Walter White to Aerith Gainsborough, and a similarly goofy time comparing my island to those of my friends’. The fact that you can’t entirely control what all of the Miis do adds some extra chaos to everything, creating an unpredictable social experiment out of the most ill-fitting characters you can imagine.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream has a nearly endless amount of content.
Even outside of the social side of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, there’s a lot of content to take in. Increasing the happiness of island residents through interacting with them and the like unlocks new buildings and activities to better customize your Miis and island, and you can even do some basic terraforming to shape your island however you please. I felt like I was always unlocking something interesting to mess with, whether it was quirks to make each Mii even more like the person I based them on, new tiles to build the island with, or even new object types you can customize. Every time I’d decide to stop playing, I’d remember some small thing I could do in the moment, leading to another hour of playtime by the time I realized what had happened.
Speaking of which, the customization available in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is pretty mind-boggling. You can create custom items of any type by just drawing them out, allowing you to make anything you can concoct in your own twisted imagination. It’s wild how much you can do in this title, as clips online have likely proven to you by now.
That being said, my only real complaint with Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream comes from how hard it is to share pretty much anything from the game. Given that you can make custom items and Miis, you’d think there’d be a way to share codes with friends so they could use your items too. Unfortunately, there’s no such system in place, and you can’t even upload screenshots and the like to the Switch app to share with friends. I get that Nintendo is likely trying to curb raunchier humor from being associated with the game, but I mean, they surely know that’s a losing battle. Instead, it’s just harder to mess around and share things with friends.
Great
The Final Word
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is one of the most ridiculous and customizable social sims around. It’s absolutely chock-full of silly features and a surprisingly rich breadth of content, meaning pretty much anybody will be able to have a laugh playing the game. I really wish it were possible to share this fun with other players, so it’s a shame Nintendo has made it pretty impossible this time around, but this is an otherwise excellent oddity that will produce hours upon hours of wacky joy.
