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Thoughts on Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream

For those unfamiliar, Tomodachi Life is a series of games where you take care of a small island populated by characters you are in full control of creating (they are called Miis, and they have a very simple, malleable design). It's like a Tomogatchi, basically. You create a Mii using the vast customisation offered to you, place them in your island, and take care of their wants and needs. It's a total God power fantasy, basically.

Wee babby Kyle loved Tomodachi Life back in 2014, so I was very excited to see if this new one holds up at all. It's completely uncensored, with none of the usual faggotry, so I had my hopes up. I like having complete and total freedom in my games, I'm a control freak, and typically it means not having an agenda shoved down my throat. The one negative is that I had to download an emulator, and I do not like downloading software on my PeeCee, but that's a hit I must take. It's a bit choppy sometimes, but Ryujinx holds up decently -- at least for now, we'll see what happens when I reach the maximum amount of 70 Miis on the island.

The game is good. It's as sandbox-y as I would have liked it to be, but that's also to its detriment. The game expects you to do everything, and that's fine for the Miis, but it can be really hard to create custom food and treasures for them sometimes. You can even make items to put in the environment, and I've had fun with that, but it's so time consuming to make anything. You have to draw it out or clumsily stamp a bunch of existing items to create something, and if you're not good at drawing (me) then there's only so much you can do, especially with the environmental objects. It has the same problem as that Animal Crossing game from covid times, in that it piles responsibility on the player, but doesn't actually offer them much in the way of complex game systems to motivate them to create.

The first character I made in the game was me, obviously. If you looked at my blog posts you'll have seen the image, and that's the closest thing you'll ever get to a face reveal. Then I made my Chinese friend. Then I made Tony Soprano. I eventually got married to Chie from Persona 4 (best girl) and had a lovely child. I have about 50 miis, and most of them are fictional characters. I actually started dipping into OCs, mainly female ones because I'm a man of equality. I made a blue grandma with fluffy white hair and teardrop eyebrows and called her Rainy-chan, and I made a spider lady and a bean lady. Yes, I just put a PNG of beans on toast right on her head. I love my little guys. Rodney Dangerfield is married to Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction. My Chinese friend is married to a hideous gooner character I dare not speak of. Tony Soprano and my WEB CORPUS friend even got hitched, it's lovely! I'll grab some screenshots next time I play and show them here, because this game is basically a dollhouse, and you really need to reach in and see it all to get it.