Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream

• Genre: Life-Sim
• Spoiler Free Review: Sorta? I don't know what is considered spoilers in a game like this, but there are some major event screenshots included.
• Partners: Alice most of all - since she provided me with items and a dozen of the Miis I used. I also had some other friends make Miis of their tabletop characters for me to use, and of course some Miis of my friends I have previously acquired from them.
• Time Played: 90 Hours
• Too Short/Long: It's solid and it's definitely one of those games you can play pretty much as much as what you want. I think I actually rolled credits closer to about 60 hours. I may still play a bit here and there.
• Did I cry: Nah.
• Soundtrack: It has some cute sounds but nothing I'm gonna jam out to outside the game. Like Pokemon
• Why I played: Alice was really excited for it, and we had a little adventure trying to get it. It was actually pretty ridiculous, and we had to go to like 4 different place - one multiple times. I ended up playing the demo and thinking it was pretty cute and picked up another copy so we could "play together" and share some of the stuff we made.
• Jank: It's mostly pretty jank free. I'd say the most jank lies in the fact that certain controls change menu to menu, resulting in my often "miss-clicking" so to speak. Press the wrong button and doing the wrong thing.
• Difficulty: There is zero difficulty to this game. It's something you play, but isn't designed to create any kind of challenge.
• Pleased/Disappointed: I'm pretty pleased. I wasn't originally interested in it at all, and ended up playing quite a bit, and will likely play some more. I ended up playing Pokopia over 125 hours before hanging it up for now, so I might play this a bit more, though I'm not sure Tomodachi Life will keep my interest quite as long - I'm pretty much just seeing the same things over and over at this point, and any remaining interest would be just creating new Miis - which I do have a lot of fun with to be fair, or doing some serious customization to my island.
• Recommend to others: I definitely would recommend this if it's your type of game, or you find it easy to be amused by your own jokes so to speak. A lot of the game is giving them prompts to use in interactions, so it's like you're co-creating the joke because you're making them say the thing you told them to. There are a lot of fun and lolrandom interactions, and if that sounds like something you'd enjoy you should definitely go for it.
  

Unfortunately I've summarized most of the main points of the game above in some way or another. Tomodachi Life mostly has you making miis, customizing your island, and making them interact. It's basically a digital dollhouse for those who have lost the wonder of banging a couple figures together while having a two-way conversation with themselves.

Because of it's recent release it'll probably be compared to Pokopia a lot - or maybe it's just me doing that. In my mind these are similar - if not exactly the same style games. They're both games where you are gradually getting more and more characters and doing little tasks for them. Pokopia is a more of a "Game" in the traditional sense as you have your own character and have to work toward some things on your own. Tomodachi Life is more about just watching what happens and you get to be a part of that.

To be fair Tomodachi Life has something in much more abundance over Pokopia, and that is mini games. In Pokopia there are... two... three? And I don't want to do any of them. In Tomodachi Life there are like 10, and some of some varations, and I only hate about 2 of them - but a few are pretty rare. In my 90 hours, some I've played dozens of times, while others I've played 2-3 times tops. That said, these mini games are generally pretty short and simple, they could easily have another dozen little games like this. 

I imagine due to the level of customization in both - it would be a nightmare to try to manage development, but I think for me the perfect sweet spot would have been if they could have combined all the best things from both Pokopia and Tomodachi life. Like throw custom miis, more item creation/customization and the kinds of interactions and relationships you have in Tomodachi life into a more structured game like Pokopia and you'd have the perfect game of this variety. I do see some limitations in Tomodachi life that seem unnecessary, and I think that's due to them releasing it for Switch(original). It could have been just a little bit better of a game if it was exclusively a Switch 2 game, like Pokopia. I mostly played it on my Switch 2, but I did check it out a little bit on my regular Switch because I wanted to take it with me and still don't have a case for my Switch 2 and performance was noticeably inferior on original Switch as is before I really added tons of customization to my island and I'm not even maxed out on Miis(but kind close).

Anyway, here are bunch of extra screenshots I find cute or amusing.