Tomodachi Life is undeniably charming.

Game Info

Platform3DS

PublisherNintendo

DeveloperNintendo SPD Group No. 1

Release DateJun 6, 2014

Tomodachi Life is tailor-made for people who used to put their friends' names into Oregon Trail, just to see what kind of horrors they could subject them to.

There's a strange kind of power in games like that; like XCOM, with its nameable soldiers, or The Sims' customizable families. Exerting virtual control over your real-life friends can be a joyous thing, especially when the scenarios you're forcing them into are utterly bizarre. And if you take one thing away from this review, let it be this: Tomodachi Life is, hands down, one of the most bizarre games ever released.

It's not just the situations your Miis will find themselves in — daily rap battles, ensemble musical theater performances, occult worship of inanimate objects — it's the very structure of Tomodachi Life that's perplexing, and not always in a good way.

Jun 06, 2014 Tomodachi Life is not really a life simulator. If you were expecting a sort of Animal Crossing with Miis, you are going for a huge disappointment. As it is, Tomodachi Life is a fun game to play for a few minutes once in a while: it gets pointless and repetitive fast, but it's always fun to see Miis interact and do weird things. Nov 15, 2019  Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Tomodachi Life - 3DS Digital Code at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users.

Tomodachi Life doesn't fall neatly into the life simulation genre, as titles like Animal Crossing or The Sims give you much more agency over the actions of your characters. The Miis who inhabit your island, either imported from the 3DS' Mii Maker app or created from scratch, will pursue relationships and form behaviors with little input from the player.

Life sims typically have a core gameplay goal of self-improvement and progression, but in Tomodachi Life, that thread is virtually non-existent. Each Mii has a happiness rating, which you can attempt to boost by spoiling them with gifts, food, clothing and interior decorations, but there's no guarantee that they'll actually like your offerings. When that rating 'levels up,' you get the opportunity to teach them a catchphrase or song, or give them a toy or furniture set. The list of rewards to choose from is small, and the progression loop becomes perfunctory very, very quickly.

The joys of Tomodachi Life aren't found in its mechanics, though — they're found in its humor, which is hardwired into every single facet of the game. It's the most comprehensively funny game I've ever played; from item descriptions, to dialogue (and the absurd vocaloid delivery of that dialogue), to the seemingly infinite number of events that Miis can take part in, every single joke manages to connect.

There's also something kind of magical about its single-player social game structure. It was weirdly thrilling watching my friends' Miis serendipitously develop traits they possess in real life. Similarly, it was fascinating watching them develop into their antitheses — a real-life party animal became a brooding lone wolf, while the shyest person I've ever met somehow became the island's de facto social chair. With a button press, you can capture those moments to an SD card, and share them with those real-world acquaintances; assuming they can take a joke.

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Friendships will form between unexpected neighbors, which could eventually blossom into romantic relationships. The latter is a bizarre occurrence — the game not only disappointingly prohibits any same-sex match-ups, it also doesn't let you dictate who develops feelings for whom. I suppose that's the nature of love, but I cannot stress the frequency with which my islanders became infatuated with, essentially, the wrong people.

More than once, my brother's real-life wife attempted to set him up with one of my friends. Not a single one of my imported Miis matched up with their real-life counterparts, turning my copy of Tomodachi Life into a kind of bizarre swinger's party. You can establish the familial connections of your own Mii, ensuring that, for example, your sister doesn't develop a crush on you; beyond that, it's a free-for-all.

As disquieting as that may be, the wide variety of interactions you'll witness between your characters are endlessly entertaining. Those relationships, along with the vast number of outfits, room designs and meals that circulate onto store shelves every day, make Tomodachi Life feel like a game that could be endlessly playable. Unfortunately, its few — for lack of a better word — 'traditional' game mechanics are awfully repetitive, enough so to dull the rest of the game's more compelling components.

For example, your villagers will frequently flag you down with requests for food, or a new ensemble, or for help getting a reluctant sneeze to come out. There's a decent mix of demands, but you'll still be fulfilling each one dozens of times, finding them more and more uninviting as time goes on. Sometimes your Miis will challenge you to a WarioWare-esque micro-game, which are similarly repetitive and occasionally super infuriating.

I suppose that's the most bizarre thing about Tomodachi Life; it wildly succeeds when its interactivity is pushed deep, deep into the background. When not attempting to guess what kind of food your Mii will like in service of improving an arbitrary stat, you can instead focus on the moment-to-moment delight your islanders provide. Just this morning on my island, Krampus, the Austrian Christmas demon, became best friends with Peter Gallagher's character from The O.C., which I did not orchestrate or anticipate. I cannot wait to see how that friendship blossoms.

Wrap Up:

Tomodachi Life is undeniably charming

Tomodachi Life has its flaws, but its charms are undeniable. Even at its most repetitive, it's enormously likable, because it has a message that few other games really possess: When you don't have control over life, wonderful things can happen on their own.

Tomodachi Life was reviewed using code provided by Nintendo. You can find additional information about Polygon's ethics policy here.

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Where does the line between toy and game lie? You get the sense that with Nintendo it's never mattered too much, as evidenced by the chunky playfulness of its hardware - the DS was built to withstand a tumble from a child's bicycle basket - as well as the exuberance of its software. When you're revelling in the joyous arc of one of Mario Kart 8's drifts, or in the tactile bound of Mario himself, the line is gleefully blurred.

In Tomodachi Life, the 3DS life simulator making a belated outing in the west after a couple of successful series releases in Japan, that line comes more sharply into focus. It's an odd game - quite aggressively so - yet its excessive eccentricity isn't really enough to excuse how little room it leaves the player, and how boring it all quickly becomes.

The oddness shouldn't come as much of a surprise, since Tomodachi Life has emerged from Nintendo's SPD Group 1, the team behind the anarchic WarioWare series and a studio that stars Metroid creator Yoshio Sakimoto. The lack of interactivity, though, should. WarioWare's always been about deconstructing what it is to be a game, while Tomodachi Life goes out of its way to avoid every really becoming one.

You start off by taking your Mii, or more truthfully a Mii fashioned in your likeness, to an island full of hazy distractions, where there are parks to wander, cafés to idle away time in and fairground attractions to ride on. It's all held at arm's length, though, and you're never given direct control over any of the characters. Instead, it's a case of prodding them through menus, seeing to their wants and desires, and slowly populating the island with a cast of your own creation.

There's fun to be had in observing the island, for sure, and the quirky humour that's held together the rough-edged aesthetic of the WarioWare games makes for a likeable distraction for the first few hours. You're encouraged to put friends as well as celebrities in the apartment blocks of your island, which makes for some curious partnerships. I placed Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr together in the hope they'd hit it off and have a child, but he's become besotted with Princess Zelda while she spends her nights round Fernando Alonso's house, lost in starry-eyed conversation.

The incongruity of it all makes for a novelty that takes its time to dull: by night you can peer in on the inhabitants' strange dreams, while by day they'll pair up for rap battles by the fountain, meet for coffees and idle chats or simply roll around the floors of their apartments. You're never much more than a voyeur in any of this, though for a while you're a happily bemused one.

Islanders make friends with each other or perhaps even fall in love - and with a little encouragement here and there, they'll even get married, move in with each other and have children who are free to stay on the island or travel, via the wonder of StreetPass, further afar to inhabit other islands. They each have their own wants and desires and their own tastes: it's perfectly possible to dress each and every one of them in the style of your choosing, culled from one of the many shops around the island that are restocked on a daily basis, but there's no guarantee the set of rabbit ears you're so keen on won't set the islander off in a huff.

The thin thread that keeps you coming back is the happiness of your islanders, each of whom levels up the more attention you pay to them, while a simple star system reflects the well-being of the general populace. It's a thread that snaps all too quickly, though - keeping islanders happy is about nothing more than a succession of mini-games that quickly become repetitive, and simply throwing more stuff at them to numbly consume.

The grim economy soon chips away at the game's slightly forced grin, and the joy that once met each appearance of an islander soon becomes something a little less upbeat as they blithely seek more attention only to waste your time with another mini-game or to consume another meal. Tomodachi Life is different enough to Nintendo's other life simulator, Animal Crossing, to escape comparison, yet the company would still have done well to study how that series gently embeds itself in players' lives.

It's the lack of agency that ultimately works against the game, a fact starkly spelled out in the controversy that's eclipsed much of the run-up to Tomodachi Life's release. The inability to recognise same-sex relationships is a problem, yes, but it's just one of several in a world that leaves so very little room for the player, offering little by way of self-expression.

Revisiting one of the best launch titles ever.

What's left is nothing more than a novelty, albeit one that's perfectly captivating while you're under its spell. The abundance of surreal moments - when you chance across Shigeru Miyamoto singing to himself in the bath, or when a news flash shows you Raymond Carver sliding down the neck of a giraffe named after Alonso - make for a game that's fun to tell others about, but dull to play. Like Yoot Saito's strange Dreamcast virtual pet game Seaman, Tomodachi Life is deservedly destined for cult status - but as anyone who spent long, lonely nights trying without success to get a depressive fish to understand their simple commands will attest, that doesn't necessarily make it hold together as a compelling game.

Tomodachi Life is a simple, throwaway toy, then - one with plenty of cute tricks, but not quite enough of them to stop you from tossing it aside after a handful of hours. There's no shame in that, of course - especially from a company that's excelled in novelty ever since Gunpei Yokoi's Love Tester, a device obliquely referenced in the metrics that measure the compatibility and chemistry between each of your islanders. Yet despite its exuberance and eccentricity, it's hard to recommend a life simulator with no real sense of simulation, and very little in the way of life.

5 /10