Currently Playing

I'm currently playing Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream offline! I downloaded and played the demo just to check it out, but it turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would be... and Pengat has really been enjoying it, too!

We live on the island of Zephopolis, a relatively small but cozy island drifting in the sea. Zephopolis was founded by Zeph, its namesake, though he was quickly joined on the island by Pengat, who expressed joy at, quote, "finally living somewhere where I can be warm and it's not freezing all the time". At first, Zephopolis housed only a small convenience store that carried basic food supplies and a fountain for Zeph and Pengat to make wishes in. Slowly but steadily, however, the island has grown, and now features a wide variety of shops and other service providers, including a restaurant where Miis just love to share gossip (sometimes in robot outfits)!

Full stop, I never expected to enjoy this game as much as I am. I played a lot of Animal Crossing back in the day, but I've never even opened my copy of Animal Crossing on the Switch. While everyone else was playing it during lockdown, I was stressing and entertaining myself in other ways. I assumed that I had just grown away from the Sim-like games. But Tomodachi Life is scratching an itch that I didn't realize I still had, and I think a big part of it is just because it's SO DAMN CUTE.

The interactions between the various Miis on the island play out using a variety of facial expressions and body movements. There's enough of a variety that you're not seeing the same ones often enough that you get sick of them, and there are also surprising twists that seem to have a rare chance of happening. Example: a couple on the island recently began talking about how much they loved the other. I'd seen this before, so I knew what to expect - one of them would proclaim a love so large that they would grow to a giant size. But this time... this time, the other Mii grew too! I'd never seen that happen before, and it's those little unexpected moments that keep me watching the cutscenes every time they play. There's so much joy in the world, too, that it's a delight just to watch the small things, whether that's a couple of Miis on a date, Pengat shaking a pair of maracas as if his life depended on it, discussions over a koala plush... there's so much that's just so much fun to watch.

When I first started playing the game, I thought to myself "it's gonna take forever to level up these Miis and I'm not about that grind". I'm pleased to say that I was wrong - levels come quickly, but not so quickly that they're irrelevant. My only real complaint about the leveling system is that it forces you to give the Mii something for EVERY SINGLE LEVEL. At first this isn't an issue, because there's a lot of stuff to give! But... what happens when you've given them everything you want to? Then you have to start giving them stuff you don't want to, like quirks or catchphrases, and that's rather annoying. Fortunately, once a Mii hits level 20, you unlock the option to give them "pocket change" instead - a portion of your money that they put toward a vacation trip. This was excellent to discover because it took away all of the pain of overloading the Miis with stuff I didn't care about.

All in all, the game has been fantastic so far and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a fun, cozy game.