The long-awaited game “Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream” was released on April 16 by Nintendo. The original game, “Tomodachi Life”, was praised for its customization, unpredictable gameplay and the online community built from people sharing gameplay experiences. “Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream” has all of these qualities with customization beyond what the original game had, inclusion of LGBTQ+ communities and an ecstatic fanbase that finds new ways to push the limits of what the game has to offer. I strongly recommend this game to anybody who has a Nintendo Switch and $60.
“Tomodachi Life 2” gives players the ability to create their own items and Mii’s with the face paint and palette house workshop features. This means unique Mii´s, food, pets and clothes can be made by the player.
Adding face paint on a Mii in certain spots can restrict their expressions, but the ability to put personal touches into one makes up for it. This feature can entertain me for hours as I work on a design for a Mii. Outside of the item customization aspect, every name and nickname the player puts in can be pronounced the intended way through an in-house text-to-speech feature. The Mii´s on my island are from shows and books I like, so the names automatically generated are not pronounced correctly. This feature fixes that. All of these features make me feel more connected with the Mii’s on my island.
A big issue the original game had was the inability to make LGBTQ+ pairings between two Mii’s. “Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream” solves this by letting a player pick a Mii’s dating preferences and pronouns in the Mii Maker. It feels good to be represented in a game as well-known as “Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream”, and to know that Nintendo moved forward from the outdated stigma the original game might´ve pushed.
As people continue to play, more features are revealed and shared across platforms. Fandom spaces, particularly, are flooded with content from the game, drawing in new players daily. However, this influx of new players reveals several issues I have with the game. “Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream” needs more. Despite the large amounts of customization, the game feels unfinished and lacking in some aspects. Nintendo removed features from the second game that took away a lot of the ¨quirkness¨ the original game had. For example, Nintendo removed the sharing feature, which makes adding other people´s Mii´s onto your island impossible and takes away from the community aspect. Hopefully, Nintendo has content updates as they do for ¨Animal Crossing: New Horizons¨.
Overall, the game is a slow-paced game that you need an imagination to enjoy. Otherwise, the game can get boring and repetitive.
