Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is hard to explain. The best way to understand is to see it in action; a screenshot of Handsome Squidward and Bob Belcher falling in love over their shared appreciation of cannibalism makes it clear that, while it’s a life sim, the game is really a joke-generating machine. Living the Dream on the Nintendo Switch gives you more tools and fewer restrictions to make those jokes stranger and funnier. But while Living the Dream provides more freedom for creativity, it also has big restrictions on sharing those creations, and the game seems content with inside jokes staying within its virtual walls.
Living the Dream is the sequel to a 3DS game that, a decade ago, I called “the weirdest thing Nintendo has ever made.” It’s sort of like The Sims or Animal Crossing, and it’s also a little like a Tamagotchi. You play as an omniscient overseer of a small island that’s populated with Miis, Nintendo’s delightfully lo-fi avatar characters, and you have to feed them and make them happy by fostering relationships and playing games. As you do that, the island will expand with more residents and more things to interact with, so that eventually you’ll have a Ferris wheel, a restaurant, and a TV news station.
What makes the sequel interesting is that it really opens up what you’re able to do. The creation tools in particular are much more robust. There are lots of options for designing Miis such that, even though I am decidedly not artistically inclined, I was able to make very recognizable cartoon characters without too much effort. Notably, unlike its predecessor, Living the Dream has options for things like same-sex relationships and nonbinary characters, making it much more inclusive and open. The island itself similarly has a lot of customization options, though these slowly unlock over time.
The real meat of the experience is setting up situations and watching how things unfold. You can make characters become friends or romantic partners by literally picking them up and putting them next to each other. The game will even frequently ask you for topics that they might want to talk about, Mad Libs style. It’s an acquired taste, but for the right kind of person it can also be hilarious.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Living the Dream is that, at least as far as I can tell, there are no restrictions for what you can name characters or what you can make them say. To really test this, I let my 13-year-old kid run wild, tasking her with creating the most messed-up island her teenage brain could think of. Now my Switch is home to the cast of The Owl House, who love to chat to each other about Hitler, summoning Satan, and human trafficking. Nothing that she threw at the game was off-limits. (Also, I’m a little worried about her.)
That’s all very surprising for a Nintendo game, particularly given the company’s squeaky-clean image and family-friendly fare. And it’s almost certainly the reason why Nintendo has made it so that you can’t share screenshots and videos using the Switch’s built-in sharing features. Without getting into specifics, Nintendo wrote on a support page that the Living the Dream’s freedom can “sometimes lead to humorous, surprising, or unpredictable moments during gameplay,” but also said that “we recognize that out-of-context scenes may be misunderstood or may not reflect the spirit in which the game is intended to be enjoyed.”
Given the problems Nintendo has run into with online sharing in the past, it’s an understandable position to take. It’s also not impossible to share things; you can get around the limitation with a capture card or by simply taking photos of the Switch’s screen. Players already started doing that when Living the Dream’s demo came out.
Since much of the fun of Tomodachi Life is pushing the game to its limits to see what you can make your little Miis do, maybe Nintendo understood that there probably wasn’t any kind of filter it could put in the game that inventive players wouldn’t be able to bypass. Perhaps a full-scale sharing ban was the only option. But that decision also runs counter to the spirit of Living the Dream. Whenever I land on a really good joke, I immediately take a screenshot because I want to show it to people. My kid and I have been comparing stupid images all week trying to one-up each other.
Nintendo’s restrictions aren’t going to stop the really dedicated players. TikTok will almost certainly be flooded with even more phone camera videos of cute little Miis talking about sex and violence. Because those kinds of players are exactly who this game is for.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream launches on the Nintendo Switch on April 16th.
