The game clearly uses what info you give it about existing relationships, but it also goes off in weird tangents, so that you’ll find yourself the centre of a heartbreaking love triangle, while your mother-in-law and Benedict Cumberbatch have become BFFs. They’re meeting up in the game’s various locations. Yet what makes Tomodachi Life so oddly compelling isn’t what stuff you can control, but all the stuff you can’t.īefore you know it, your Miis are forming friendships. There’s even a bonkers 8-bit RPG built-in. Explore the strange puzzle mini-games, answer bizarre quizzes and enjoy scheduled activities. You can give your Miis the food or clothes or interiors you think they’ll like, and give them advice at key moments. Stop to take notice though, and you’ll soon spot that there’s not an awful lot you actually control. There’s a ranking board where you can find out which Mii has the most vitality, or which one has the most ‘girl appeal’.
The town hall allows you to create new Miis, while a port allows you to swap Miis in and out through StreetPass. There’s a concert hall where they’ll meet to perform the songs you give them you can even choose the style and change the lyrics. There’s a beach, an observation tower and an amusement park, where your Miis might gather and chill out. The more you play and the happier your Mii gets, the more resources open up. You’ll need plenty of it to keep buying more stuff for your Miis. Weirdly enough, they repay your kindness with cash, which you’ll receive through a daily donation box. You then give it to them and solve their problems, and that in turn makes them happier. You go to the supermarket, the clothes shop, the interiors store and the hat shop, and come back with whatever it is they need.
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You visit the apartment block, check on your existing Miis and see if any have any needs or worries, as indicated by a thought bubble full of crazy lines. You get the chance to give them gifts as they level-up, which happens when you’ve really made their day. They like hats, and they also like gifts, which range from guitars, books and laptops to a skateboard or a voucher for a pet. They need clothes to wear and a pre-packed interior with furniture and décor. They need feeding, though Tomodachi Life doesn’t go in for Sims-style micromanagement, and they all have their own likes and dislikes.
Once they’ve moved in, your job is to keep the Miis happy. You can also tell Tomodachi Life of any existing relationships to you as the player, and whether the new Mii is an adult or a child. Give them a voice, a nickname, a favourite colour and a birthday and you’re done. Once your Miis are imported you assign them personalities, through a simple slider-based system that groups them into one of sixteen basic types. In fact, you can make new Miis and move them in as well, either using the 3DS’s camera-equipped Mii Maker (which works from within the game) or the old-fashioned way, from scratch (ditto). Your Mii and any other Miis you have registered on your 3DS can move in. There’s a small island dominated by an apartment block. Rationally speaking, it shouldn’t work, but in practice, it definitely does. It’s a hideously absorbing waste of time, and we can’t stop coming back for more.
It’s becoming an obsession the focus of more than one minor squabble and pre-bedtime bans.
Yet Tomodachi Life has my whole family completely hooked. It’s limited in terms of features, and what features there are don’t work in the way you might expect. This is a Nintendo 3DS game that makes almost no sense whatsoever on paper. Obviously it has the odd misfire – Art Academy or Wii Music anyone? – but few game makers have such a great track record of delivering something new, original and weirdly great. Kawashima’s Brain Training, Animal Crossing, Wii Fit, Pikmin, Professor Layton, WarioWare or Nintendogs, and you’ll see Nintendo repeat this same trick time and time again, pulling in a mainstream audience even if the hardcore gaming crowd goes ‘meh…’. Any games publisher can give you more of what they think they know you love, but Nintendo does something better: it gives you something you’d never even thought of and makes you love it twice as much.
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