What Made Nintendo's Tomodachi Life So Special? (2024)

On June 6, 2014, Tomodachi Life came out in English on the Nintendo 3DS. It was the sequel to the Nintendo DS game Tomodachi Collection, which never made it out of Japan. Taking place on an island that the player gets to name, Tomodachi Life is a life simulation game (...kinda) starring Miis. Like fellow Nintendo life sim Animal Crossing, the player will spend most of their time in Tomodachi Life talking to residents, giving them gifts, decorating and dressing up characters, and making money. Unlike its older brother franchise, Tomodachi Life is much more of a "dollhouse" experience: the fun comes from watching what happens, not quite participating in it.

While it took over a year to be translated, Nintendo of America was fully aware of the game's potential. The hilarious American Nintendo Direct on the game is still remembered today. Who can forget famous translator Bill Trinen leading a hair metal band composed of former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma, Super Mario Bros. creator Shigeru Miyamoto, and the late former president of Nintendo of Japan Satoru Iwata? What about the legendary scene of the Nintendo staff's Miis worshiping a Virtual Boy?

The Direct succeeded in bringing interest towards Tomodachi Life, and there was a fairly decent advertising push for it as the release date drew closer. It all paid off, as Tomodachi Life has sold 6.72 million units as of March 31, 2024 — but advertising alone can't get a game to move that many units. What made Tomodachi Life so special that people kept buying it?

Taking Away Control From the Player Benefits the Game

The player's decisions are the catalyst for most of what happens in Tomodachi Life: all the Miis that move to the island are either created by the player, imported using AR codes from other players, or the children of Miis that already lived on the island. Miis will often tell the player when they want to befriend another Mii, which the player can choose to let them do or not. The Miis will often have problems that they ask the player for help with, from wanting some food to wanting new clothes, to wanting to gush about their partner.

The player doesn't have to wait for the Mii to have a problem to do most of these things, either: Miis are customizable whenever the player wants to change them up. It's a true "dollhouse" experience that might remind players of when they played with dolls or action figures as a kid, and just like the absurd adventures the player may have put Barbie on when they were five, the game gets the most interesting when the Miis get weird. Unlike playing with Barbies, the game restricts what the player can do and gives the Miis just enough autonomy to create some hilariously unintended consequences for the player's earlier choices.

The point of video games is to give the player control over the situation so they can influence how things turn out: usually, to reach a goal like defeating the final boss or getting a high score. They can be tests of the player's skills or a form of escapism that lets the player control the world. Tomodachi Life is different: while the player can influence the Miis, they can't actually control what the Miis do in many cases.

While an attentive enough Sims player can stop a Sim before they go too close to the hungry Cowplant, a Tomodachi Life player can't stop Miis from befriending each other when the game is turned off, or from changing their outfits on their own between play sessions. This is for the best, though: the game's heavier focus on observing the humor than creating it allows the player to be truly surprised by whatever craziness arises.

One of the All-Time Greats of Japanese Wackiness

Tomodachi Life is an exercise in absurdity, and its sense of humor carries it more than anything else. Miis are voice acted...by text-to-speech. Everyone has a favorite and least favorite food, which they'll react to by blasting off into space or melting into a puddle of grey goo. Miis can decide on a dime that they want to spontaneously age up to 18 years old or to reverse time to become a child again, and the player can help them do that.

The game actually doesn't give the player much control in the grand scheme of things, but that's for the best. Miis have some level of autonomy, which makes the random events even funnier when they happen. The highlights of surrealism, though, are found in the dreams that Miis can have and the "Mii News" reports.

While dreams being wacky is ironically quite realistic, Mii News stands out because everything it reports is supposed to be something that actually happened in the world of the game. This means that any of your Miis could apparently be a deity that fell from the sky and into a net firefighters put out for a kitten, or that there's a real danger of Miis getting frozen in iced coffee during games of hide-and-seek.

That's not to say the player has no control, though! A fan favorite feature is the ability to come up with lyrics to various styles of songs, which the selected Mii(s) will then perform. While this naturally leads to the Internet being the Internet and promptly making Mario sing about explicit topics, there's still a lot of potential for clean fun with the songs. And of course, there are the earlier mentioned "dollhouse-y" elements, like dressing Miis up and choosing what their apartments look like.

Romantic Drama Better Than Any Harem Anime

Romantic matchmaking is a surprisingly uncommon gameplay feature these days. Sure, there are romance elements for the player character in most games, but the ability to choose pairings for people besides the protagonist (or, in this case, the player's "look-alike" Mii) is largely restricted to The Sims and Fire Emblem.Tomodachi Life lets players match up their Miis...kind of. The catch with romance in Tomodachi Life is that it's very randomized, and that lends itself very well to the game's comedy.

While the player can give Miis the go-ahead on who to befriend and who not to, Miis will often get to know each other offscreen anyway. This means that even if the player wanted to make sure that, say, Ganondorf and Princess Peach never interact, they might actually become friends when the game is turned off.

This can extend to romance, though nobody will pair up without the player's permission: out of nowhere, a Mii might ask the player if they should ask someone of the same age group and opposite gender out. This means that if Ash Ketchum previously used the item that turns him into an adult, he could tell the player that he's fallen in love with Daenerys Targaryen. And if the player encourages him, there's a very real chance that Ash and Daenerys will end up married with kids.

Where things get the spiciest has to be in the actual "confession" events. If a Mii realizes they have feelings for another, they'll tell the player about it. The player can encourage them to go for it, as well as give the Mii a setting and a line to use to win over their potential lover. Some Miis are more popular than others, though, so it's not guaranteed that a confession will go smoothly. On top of the possibility of getting rejected, the object of the Mii's affection might not show up at all.

If the Mii's crush does appear, there's a chance that another Mii — or even two — will interrupt the confession to declare their own feelings for the Mii who was invited to the scene in the first place. While the center of the love dodecahedron might choose one of the many suitors, they might also deny all of them.

And in the grand tradition of Tomodachi Life's randomness, the player will have no say about whether the confession is rejected or if any extra suitors crash the party. Can't forget the time a speedo-clad Reggie Fils-Aime interrupted Bill Trinen's attempt to ask Samus Aran out, only for a scuba-diving Satoru Iwata to emerge from the ocean to throw his hat in the ring.

Even though — or even because — Tomodachi Life is a game that thrives on randomness, it's a surprisingly fitting depiction of what it was like to play with dolls as a child. How many kids actually kept their Barbies brushing their hair or taking their dogs for a walk, instead of creating weird soap operas where Ken turned out to be a changeling half-dinosaur and Barbie was a fairy princess who had to kill him? Tomodachi Life is a game for those kids...just without the violence, though Mii fights can get pretty intense in what they throw at each other.

Tomodachi Life admittedly isn't for everyone. While someone in the right mindset could get plenty of hours out of it, it's really a game that's meant to be picked up for five minutes at a time, maybe once or twice a day. But for those who play it for long enough or have enough imagination to fill in the gaps, Tomodachi Life is worth their time. Here's hoping that someday, Nintendo will finally get the memo and make a sequel or re-release it with the Miitopia Nintendo Switch port's makeup system.

Tomodachi Life

Platform(s)

3DS

Released

April 18, 2013

Developer

Nintendo Software Planning & Development, Nintendo SPD Group No.1

Publisher(s)

Nintendo

Genre(s)

Simulation

Engine

unity

ESRB

e

How Long To Beat

200+ hours