I have missed this utter madness. I remember the exact moment when Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream had me creasing with laughter. After booting up the game, I made my usual stop at the Mii News Station to catch up on whatever nonsense had unfolded since my last session. This time, the top story was someone being caught red‑handed stealing a single celery stick from another Mii’s lunchbox in broad daylight and then being chased around the island for five straight hours before finally giving up. The sheer absurdity of it absolutely cracked me up.
Such wacky events take place on your own tiny island situated in the middle of a vast sea, which isn’t much to look at when you first arrive. Overgrown grass patches, scattered palm trees and sandy beaches make for a barren landscape, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Tom Nook was about to pop up out of nowhere and fleece you to make it more interesting.
However, it’s your Mii creations who are the key ingredients that are needed to produce the laughter-inducing silliness that awaits you. It’s up to you whether the Mii characters that you invite to become your island’s residents are based on friends, family, celebrities, historical figures, politicians, your favourite Nintendo mascots or a mischief-making crowd that contains all of the above, but this is an experience in which you will get out as much as you put in.
Seeing as I lack originality and my creativity clearly has its bounds, I did exactly what I did with Tomodachi Life on Nintendo 3DS, in that my island became a holiday retreat for Nintendo executives past and present. I recreated the official Miis for Shigeru Miyamoto, Eiji Aonuma, Masahiro Sakurai, Yoshiaki Koizumi, Takashi Tezuka, Aya Kyogoku and Satoru Shibata. Even Reggie Fils-Aimé’s back, complete with his kickin’ ass and takin’ names attitude. Throw my own Mii in there, gleefully dressed in the bonus Hamster onesie from completing the game’s demo, and we had quite the unpredictable rabble.
You can choose to create a new, island-bound Mii character using prompts, from scratch, from a Mii already on your console or base them on an existing island Mii. The process is as entertaining as it was when Miis first burst onto the scene back in the Wii days, but now expanded with broader customisation options. Those that you create can be edited later, so you needn’t fret over your creations for hours on end. You can even have as many as a whopping 70 Miis on your island, although I preferred to stick to a smaller merry crew.
An important part of the Mii creation process is determining their personality. Is their movement quick, slow or somewhere in between? Do they have a serious or relaxed attitude? Are their energy levels flat or intense? These choices categorise your Mii, my own digital counterpart (accurately) labelled as a Perfectionist with Logical, Headstrong and Cautious traits. Such results impact how well your Miis will behave as much as how they get along with each other.
As the island’s caretaker, the Miis look at you with gratitude and you can choose what they call you. Suggestions ranged from Fearless Leader and Top Banana to Big Sib and Giver of Life, but whenever prompts like these appear, you are always free to let your imagination run wild and type out your own. I went with O Great One. From here on out, you’re left to look after your Mii characters and watch as they live out their lives alongside each other.
I’ll be honest in that I didn’t find that Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream was a game that I could sit and play endlessly all day. Instead, I’d check in for an hour here and there or leave it running in the background while posting the latest Nintendo news that hit my inbox. That’s not meant as a criticism necessarily, but simply an observation that the experience is more of a slow burn over time than I had expected or remembered.
Your ultimate goal is to increase the happiness of your Mii characters and, in turn, increase the rank of your island. That’s achieved from anything like feeding them food bought from the local Supermarket (that they’ll either love or find disgusting), giving their rooms a spontaneous makeover with interior sets that (hopefully) match their refined tastes, or soothingly rubbing them on their head to cheer them up after they’ve fallen out with another resident.
Feeling Bubbles will sporadically appear over your Mii’s heads to indicate that they are pondering something. These are yellow if it’s a personal request, and orange if they are seeking advice about how best to interact with another resident. There are also notifications to let you know when you can trigger scenes unfolding between your Miis, when you can peer into their dreams after they have drifted off to sleep, and when they want to play a game with you like Coin Spin, Bowling, No Repeats and Red Light Green Light.
Your positive attentiveness to their needs will not only increase each Mii’s Happiness level, but your efforts will reward you with warm fuzzies. These mysterious orbs can be poured into the Wishing Fountain, steadily increasing your island’s rank, which will grant you wishes and broaden the ways in which you can further develop your Miis and the landmass they now call home. That could be unlocking new Prezzies they can be gifted to muck around with, new Quirks that they can inherit to change their mannerisms to be more like their real-world selves, or more landscaping options to further tweak your island.
I can’t praise the Island Builder enough, and I wish the Animal Crossing series could offer this much precision. You will use this impressive toolset to place buildings and objects, change and reshape terrain, lay paths and more. Everything that you place can be freely moved around by simply picking it up and repositioning it, helping me to rediscover some inner calm as I tweaked my island as new content unlocked for me to further personalise it. Your Miis can even make suggestions about how to make it less of a concrete jungle, which you are free to accept or ignore.
If there was a cause for concern early on, it was repetition. I found that multiple Miis would have the same dream (or nightmare) in which they threatened to bite me if I dared to nudge them off a bungee jumping platform, for example. This drastically reduced the more time that I sank into the game, though, eventually alleviating that worry.
It wasn’t long before random skits crept in. When I was asked about which celebrity I liked, the entire island suddenly started having conversations about how amazing Keanu Reeves was (shoutout to “No, you’re breathtaking!”). I even caught Reggie exposing some shocking secrets about Keanu Reeves to Koizumi, which still aren’t known to the public. Scandalous.
There are so many more of these moments to already look back on, too. I checked in on Miyamoto once to find him getting angry at a puzzle game he was playing on his Nintendo Switch. I taught Reggie his iconic “My body is ready” catchphrase, which he wouldn’t stop uttering to everyone, much to their boredom. After Aonuma decided to take a nap on the beach, Sakurai came along and buried him in sand while he was asleep. Three Miis met up in the Restaurant randomly dressed up in robot costumes, and proceeded to have a whole, incomprehensible conversation in “BEEPS” and “BOOPS.” I even discovered Miis circling a bottle of nail polish, worshipping it at one point. That one was weird.
Never being able to guess what will happen next perfectly captures what Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream is all about. It’s packed with so much hilarious material that the best recommendation any review can make is to go and discover it for yourself rather than let someone else spoil it for you.
Goofy, endlessly surprising and genuinely laugh‑out‑loud funny, the world could use far more games like Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream. I’m ecstatic that its chaotic silliness is back in our lives, and you won’t touch another game this year that works this hard to make you smile. This is Nintendo at its quirkiest, and you can feel the team’s enthusiasm shine through in every bizarre moment. It’s simply unmissable.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review Copy Provided by Nintendo
You can read our full Review Policy and Ethics Statement here.
