Switch’s new life sim is zany fun

Nintendo’s delightfully strange new life sim reaches for that same appeal. A sequel to a 2013 Nintendo 3DS cult classic, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream puts players in charge of an island getaway inhabited by Miis. There’s no final endgame to watching pint-sized recreations of celebrities squeak to one another in their robotic text-to-speech voices. Rather, your job is to play the role of a shit-stirrer out to manipulate an unguarded simulation until Nintendo is forced to issue panicked emergency patches. It’s a joyous battle between man and machine that we’ve been robbed of in modern tech’s quest to snuff out our collective imagination.

Tomodachi Life’s closest parallel isn’t Animal Crossing or Pokémon Pokopia, but The Sims. You play the role of an unseen God who lords over a quiet vacation town, or perhaps a director pulling the strings on your own personal reality TV show. You create your own cast of characters using a souped-up version of the Nintendo Wii’s Mii Maker, terraform the island to your liking at any time, and decorate it with shops and items that are gradually unlocked as you play. From there, a ridiculous piece of theater is born as your Miis live their lives, form relationships with one another, dream, love, break up, and even have children. You’re just there to watch it all unfold, while occasionally stopping to give your Miis gifts, food, and personality quirks that bring them to life as they level up.

At its most normal foundation, there’s a simple joy to watching emergent stories grow on your island. I’ve gotten to watch the Mii versions of my girlfriend and I rewrite our relationship history, with a little help from me dragging the two characters together to trigger conversations. I watched my avatar form a crush on my girlfriend, get the courage to ask her out, and propose to her over the course of 10 hours. I also watched the digital couple get chased down the street by a giant soda can. The human interactions are interspersed with wacky vignettes that your characters can star in, giving Tomodachi Life a personality and absurd sense of humor that sets it apart from anything like it.

While the simulation isn’t nearly as deep as The Sims, Tomodachi Life gives you an extraordinary amount of directorial power — maybe more than it should. The usual limitations of the Mii creator are alleviated by the fact that you can draw details directly onto your character’s faces. That can be as simple as drawing some clown face-paint or going pixel by pixel to graft the Mona Lisa onto someone’s head. I cobbled together a pretty spot-on Garfield using the tool, replicating the cat’s stripes and whiskers shockingly well. I was even able to approximate a Vocaloid-like version of his low voice through the game’s pitch-shifting controls, and give him his traditionally lazy demeanor with a short personality survey that rarely misidentifies the real character I’m creating.

Much of Tomodachi Life’s joyous novelty comes from that alone. Watching a shockingly perfect David Lynch chop it up with Spirited Away’s No-Face is a visual gag that never gets old. No really, it doesn’t. Nintendo’s Mii avatars are 20 years old, but they still make for expressive caricatures that can always get a laugh out of you. There’s an alternate timeline out there where Nintendo kept improving Miis, allowing you to generate realistic depictions of people, but that would have spoiled the fun. Fiddling with a limited creation suite to approximate Betty Boop is the game.

Living the Dream takes that to the next level in as many ways as it can. It’s not just Miis that can be customized on a pixel-by-pixel level, but you can personalize every object in the game too. While there are nearly 10,000 possible items to collect (clothing items, gifts, town decorations, food, and more), you can also create those objects from scratch. When I introduced a Charli XCX into my town, I made sure to recreate her iconic Brat album cover too, telling the game to treat it as an electronic music album. To really get Garfield right, I created custom orange clothing and drew his body stripes onto them. I introduced Mountain Dew into my world by building off of a generic soda can stamp, and created Skyrim by drawing an open-world vista on a Nintendo Switch screen.

It goes deeper, too. You can draw wallpapers, floors, lawn ornaments, and even the outside of your Mii’s house. It is a terrifying amount of power to put in the hands of modern shitposters — which seems to be why there’s no way to share creations online or even easily get screenshots off your Switch. It’s a disappointing concession that holds back the game’s community potential, but one I understand when so many islands are about to have a Charlie Kirk Mii walking around them.

You’re not just making characters and props in Tomodachi Life; you’re building a language, too. Occasionally your Miis will ask you for topics they can chat with their neighbors about, or you’ll have the chance to give them catchphrases. Anything you type in — and I mean anything — will be inserted into your Miis’ lexicon permanently. The entire game functions as a giant Mad Lib, as the words you type are treated as interchangeable nouns and actions that are slotted into templatized lines. If you suggest that someone should bond with Garfield over “hating Odie,” you’re bound to catch some Miis casually talking about how good they are hating Odie too.

That’s where the charm, comedy, and chaos of Tomodachi Life flood in. If you still have the instincts of a rebellious teen anywhere in your body, you are most assuredly going to conjure them up here. Everyone on my island is constantly talking about how much they love cocaine. The girls gather from time to time to swoon over Luigi Mangione, saying his name out loud in their computerized voices. Elizabeth Holmes had a dream about getting showered in blood.

Image: Nintendo via Polygon

None of these are moments I actively orchestrated. I entered words and objects into the island’s language and watched as my characters mixed and matched them into their day-to-day interactions. Sometimes the results are nonsense; other times the simulation stumbles onto comedic gold so pointed you’d swear someone must be scripting things behind the scenes. One time I gave Todd Howard a “role-playing game” item. He was disappointed, saying it wasn’t a very good fit for him. You couldn’t write a funnier joke if you tried.

If you’re a generative AI evangelist, you might be salivating at the opportunity to compare that experience to cold prompting. It sounds similar on paper. All my anecdotes of The Rizzler falling in love with Betty Boop sound like a dumber version of the viral AI fight scene between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Is Tomodachi Life that many steps removed from Fruit Love Island, an AI-generated reality TV series that’s taking over TikTok currently?

I can see where one might try to turn the parallel into a sales pitch, especially because Tomodachi Life begins to feel disappointingly limited the deeper you get into it. The same few vignettes repeat, the Mad Lib structure becomes too visible, the list of island decorations is paltry, and your detailed items lose their charm when you realize that you’re living in a world made up of JPGs that characters can’t meaningfully interact with. Also disappointing is that the sequel gets rid of the original game’s Concert Hall, a standout feature that let you create your own vocaloid songs. (It launched some of Tomodachi Life’s most iconic memes.) Some of the magic wears off when you recognize the very mechanical construction of it, leaving you wishing there was more. It’s a slippery slope from that hunger for content to the allure of endless generation.

Image: Nintendo via Polygon

But Tomodachi Life’s emergent moments are only as enjoyable as they are because of their technical limits. It isn’t intentional or precise. You aren’t typing something into a chatbot and watching it spit out the thing you asked for like an uncanny Big Mac. Where’s the fun in that? Rather, it feels like you’re hacking the machine as you play, getting a game to do things it’s not supposed to. (The total lack of filters helps.) Tomodachi Life is a program to be outsmarted, not controlled. Every funny screenshot you can snap is a point scored against the machine.

I recognize that childlike joy — something big tech has tried to take from me in its overeager attempts to do my creative thinking for me. I recognize it because it’s the same juvenile thrill I used to get when I tricked SmarterChild’s dumb brain into writing something silly on AIM. I wasn’t under the delusion that I was chatting with an intelligent being in those moments; I was playing pretend with a virtual toy. It wouldn’t have been much of a game if I didn’t have to work for my chuckles.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream makes you work for it. If you take the time to craft the perfect Doctor Manhattan Mii or painstakingly draw a can of Mountain Dew, your creative drive will always be rewarded when your work is immortalized in a hilarious life sim’s ongoing comedy routine. That’s the kind of play you can’t generate.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream will be released April 16 on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 using a prerelease download code provided by Nintendo. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.