Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream Review

My island in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a big, digital dollhouse. Except it’s even better, because instead of housing mass-produced toys, it’s brought to life by hilarious recreations of myself, my friends, celebrities, and fictional characters built with its in-depth Mii Maker. It’s childlike fun to dress them up, feed them dinner, and meddle in their fictional romantic drama. But unlike a kid’s toy, each Mii has a life, mind, and uncanny voice of its own, resulting in a deeply funny and equally personal civilization simulator that constantly rewards your creativity. The more ideas you give it, the more fun you get out of it as you form a colony of Miis that ends up being a direct reflection of you: your personality, inside jokes, and silliest suggestions. It spits out share-worthy clips like a factory – which is why I can’t get over how difficult (or impossible, in some cases) it is to share my favorite moments, characters, and creations. What good are toys if you can’t play with your friends, or at the very least show them off? It turns what should be an extremely social experience into a disappointingly isolating one, and that major issue puts a dark cloud over this otherwise delightful paradise.

Before you can observe your island residents, you have to create them, and a lot of my 35 hours in Living the Dream were spent designing Miis in its revamped version of the Mii Maker. If you’re coming straight from Tomodachi Life on 3DS, this is a big upgrade, with lots of customizable hair options where you can mix and match styles for the bangs and the back, secondary hair colors, and far more flexibility when it comes to things like eye shape and pupil details. Oh, and Miis can have ears now! These custom characters look better than ever, as all of Tomodachi Life benefits from the jump to HD resolution with sharp graphics that still maintain the simplistic charm of the original. I’ve never been the best at designing Miis, but thanks to the advanced capabilities of this new tool, I felt really great about the character I made for myself.

I was also forced to get good at making Miis, because sharing them with others is extremely limited. It’s restricted to local wireless, meaning you can only send a character you’ve made to someone in the same room. This is an enormous downgrade: In the 3DS version, you could save any Mii to a QR code and post it online, and other people around the world could scan it to instantly add that Mii to their own game.

I’m not the most artistically inclined person out there, and I know lots of people planning to play Living the Dream will probably be in the same boat. I love so many of the Miis I’ve seen people making in the demo, but instead of feeling excitement when I see a fantastic creation online, I feel a pang of disappointment knowing there’s no way for me to get that exact character on my island. Sure, I could put in the work to try and recreate it myself, but I know my limitations: It just wouldn’t be nearly as good.

Fun fact: Those 3DS QR codes I mentioned are still active, and there is one ridiculous workaround to bring ancient Miis from the internet into your new island. You can break out your old 3DS and scan a Mii QR code, copy that Mii to any amiibo you have laying around, scan the amiibo on your Switch, and finally import the Mii into your game. I added a bunch of my old 3DS Miis to Living the Dream this way, including official Nintendo-made Miis of Shigeru Miyamoto, Reggie Fils-Aimé, and many others. If you’re one of the roughly two million people who bought the Switch remaster of Miitopia, you can smuggle Miis through its sharing tools, too, but due to its unique makeup system, lots of them don’t transfer very accurately.

In 2026, does it really make sense that the most reliable way to directly share Miis across the globe requires 15-year-old hardware, plastic toys, and a bunch of busy work? I don’t think so. It’s just sad that artistic ability puts a limit on your potential in Living the Dream in a way it really didn’t last time, and that to get the most out of it, you’ll have to love making Miis – or at least accept that you’ll spend a ton of your time in the character creator.

Island Life

It’s a shame Living the Dream stumbles in such a major way, because I adore the rest of it so much. Once you have a few characters roaming around – a huge improvement from the 3DS version where your island was a large menu instead of one interconnected space – it gets really fantastic. I started by adding myself, my fiancée, and two of my all-time favorite Major League Baseball players. I’m so impressed by how accurate and detailed the personality customization is. By simply adjusting a few sliders, each Mii is assigned one of 16 personality types, and I found they captured the exact essence of the person I was recreating more often than not.

I was labeled as a Perfectionist with the following description: “Reserved. At a glance: aloof. Logical, tenacious, cautious. Speaks matter-of-factly. Imaginative and inspired. Happiest when creating something. Finds beauty in everyone and everything.” If you know me, that’s spot on. You can also set pre-existing relationships to make sure Miis of real-world family members don’t fall in love with each other, and select pronouns and dating preferences, which is Nintendo making good on a decade-old promise to make the next Tomodachi Life more inclusive than the last one.

Treating your Miis well by feeding them food they like, gifting them clothes and treasures, or introducing them to others will increase their happiness and cause them to level up. It’s a great loop: Seeing how they react to different items is fun on its own – if you give them a pet, you’ll often see them walking it outside – and the rewards for leveling them up allow you to personalize them even more through behaviors, catchphrases, and additional gifts. When Metroid bounty hunter Samus Aran leveled up, I gave her the “walk by bounding” quirk, meaning she now hops around the island in slow motion like she’s wearing her Gravity Suit.

Each Mii deals with their own set of problems, and I’m their life coach. The push and pull between the power of shaping my island, its residents, and even its culture down to the pixel against the unpredictability of what these characters will do within those limitations results in surreal situations. And they’re made even more memorable by eccentric writing and quirky text-to-speech voices that say whatever you type in. You set up these scenarios, but how they play out is up to the Miis, and most of the joys of Living the Dream come from observation. I can physically drag a Mii to someone I think they’d get along with, and my real-life fiancée and I delighted in watching the cartoon versions of ourselves fall in love, get married, and move in together.

But sometimes things don’t go so well, like when Samus and Reggie got into a huge, violent fight over who knows more about the reality show Survivor, leaving me to pick up the pieces. I cheered Samus up by giving her a chicken suit to wear and decorating her house like a hamster cage. Naturally, she loved both gifts, and that led to her and Reggie reconciling their relationship. There’s an absurd Mad Libs nature to all of this, where entering phrases with personal meaning makes everything so much funnier. That said, you will start to see through the Matrix after a while and recognize the somewhat repetitive foundation these sequences rely on – I’ve started to skip the conversations when a Mii is trying to make a new friend because they basically always play out one of a few ways. But even after 35 hours, I’m still consistently surprised with new interactions and events that often make me laugh out loud.

That’s largely thanks to sharp writing that’s funny even when removed from my own influence. You can eavesdrop on dinner dates where Miis are talking about an election to determine who has the best voice on the island, or even see what wild things they’re dreaming about, like a strange séance surrounding a shark. The Miis have the most offbeat, sometimes surprisingly relatable things to say that appeal to my dry sense of humor, like when Logan tagged out of a controversial Mii News broadcast by saying, “I assure you I don’t make the news, I just report it.”

It’s great when you see situations play out as they would in the real world. For example, Reggie wanted to get closer to Miyamoto, so I told him they should talk about including Wii Sports with the console – which is a real discussion the two had leading up to the Wii’s launch – and it was hilarious to see these cartoon executives debate the merits of a pack-in game. Even better, every time you enter a phrase for a specific prompt, it’s added to your island’s lingo database. I once told my fiancée to bond with former Seattle Mariners ace Felix Hernandez about watching the M’s lose baseball games. Hours later, IGN’s Jada Griffin asked Logan if he had much experience watching the M’s lose. Trust me, he’s got decades of experience.

It’s also funny when things go against what you’d expect from someone in the real world, like when IGN’s Brian Altano hated every item of clothing I gave him until he fell in love with a full-body dog suit that I’m sure he wouldn’t be caught dead wearing in real life. I recently saw him screaming at the ocean in this costume, begging the world to send an F-Zero AX arcade machine his way. I guess I can’t be sure if that’s happened in real life or not.

Do It Yourself

Tomodachi Life works great as a game to check in on for 20 minutes every day, but if you want a longer project, there are plenty of options that are easy to lose hours to. Brian is best friends with an atrocious Yoshi Mii I made, who lives in a home that I created to look just like a Yoshi egg. I designed it in the Palette House, the hub for non-Mii creations that eventually lets you design home interiors and exteriors, food, clothes, pets, and other treasures to gift your Miis. It’s incredibly flexible: you can make whatever your artistic abilities allow and give it attributes so your Miis react accordingly, like assigning a spicy flavor profile to a food you created. My handcrafted creations don’t look nearly as polished as the stock images that make up the pre-existing objects, but that gives things the vibe of an official playset mixed with some homemade crafts I threw together, which I find charming.

I spent some time making my dream Link’s Crossbow Training Switch port a reality, and now it’s the most popular video game on my island. I also designed a Seattle Mariners hat for all the fans to wear while watching them lose, and a version of my cat, Wallace, for my fiancée. Unlike real life, she hated him! Designing items can be done with the controller or the touch screen, and while it is very in-depth and generally works well, it’ll never feel as good as using a stylus on the 3DS touch screen. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it runs in 1080p in handheld mode on Switch 2 despite being a backwards-compatible Switch 1 game, which has a top resolution of 720p handheld. Tomodachi Life has the spirit of a portable game, so I was happy to find that Nintendo made sure Switch 2 owners didn’t have to deal with a blurry, stretched image when playing that way, or lean on Handheld Mode Boost, which would remove the important touch screen functionality.

Of course, I’m yet again disappointed that the only way to share Palette House creations is through local wireless, which feels like another huge miss. But that pain is at least eased here since there are literally thousands of clothing items, food, and treasures already built in if you’re not interested in creating your own. You’ll earn them by playing one-note minigames with your Miis like guessing food items based on a silhouette or bowling them over, another element that gets pretty repetitive. You can also buy clothes, food, and items to decorate your island at various shops that open over time, which incentivizes logging in every day. Each store has a set of daily specials that rotate, but after you buy something once, it becomes a permanent part of the shop’s catalog.

Through leveling up your Miis, you can also unlock new items to build with, like different types of roads, streetlamps, and playground toys. How you shape your island is completely up to you, and there’s a ton of flexibility. I decided to group my island into three main areas: a residential district built on floating docks surrounding a lake, a main street with all the shops, and a baseball field, and it’s fun to see which areas my Miis like to hang out in. The building tools are snappy and easy to learn, and I really appreciate how frictionless it feels to create. If I run out of something I want more of, I can head straight to the shop without having to back out of the island builder. You can also decorate the island with paths or objects created from scratch at the Palette House, and I can’t wait to see the crazy creations other people come up with.

That is, the creations from people who jump through hoops to share them. Nintendo has blocked screenshot and video sharing for Tomodachi Life, meaning you can’t upload images directly from your Switch to your smartphone like you can with basically every other game. If you want to share funny moments or creations, you have to transfer them to your PC first with a USB cable or by removing your MicroSD card, or just take a low-quality picture of your screen with your phone. It feels directly at odds with Tomodachi Life’s philosophy of creativity, communication, and observation – even the 3DS version had an option to directly upload images to social media 12 years ago. I can only speculate that Nintendo doesn’t want to host offensive content on its cloud servers, or it wants legal protection by being able to point to the fact that user-generated content was explicitly designed not to be shared. I’m not a lawyer, but regardless of the justification, this limitation feels like an overreaction that genuinely harms the final product as a whole.

When it comes to Miis and items, I do understand why Nintendo wouldn’t give us completely free reign to share anything with anyone in a public marketplace. Shockingly, there is no language filter in Living the Dream – you can make your Miis say absolutely anything, and your Palette House creations can take any shape. It only takes a second to think of dozens of obscene things or scenarios people will surely create, and much of Nintendo’s motivation likely comes out of an interest in protecting kids, which should obviously be the number one priority. That said, this is the generation where Nintendo finally introduced built-in voice chat, and it laid out a blueprint for how sharing Miis and items could’ve easily worked while keeping kids safe: two-way consent with anyone on your friend list. To use GameChat on Switch 2, you already need to be friends with someone through your respective Nintendo Accounts, and then you both need to opt in to receive chat invites from them. It’s an extra step of security when sensitive, unpredictable interactions are involved, and I would’ve liked to see that process implemented here.