My partner’s birthday is coming up, and I’ve developed a couple of habits around the occasion in the years we’ve been together. I always get him an enamel pin and make him a cake, which we eat as I watch him unwrap a copy of some game I love that I know he’s never played. They’ve previously been Switch titles, but we’ve been talking about busting out ourNintendo 3DS-es together lately, so I figured I’d jump back a console generation and make it happen.
As someone who’s loved Animal Crossing since the GameCube days and remains a New Leaf supremacist, I can’t believe the man I love entered the series only recently with New Horizons. He’s never played New Leaf, but that will change in a few weeks.
But I also wanted a third game to round out the collection. I wanted something other than series staples, something weirder, somethingmore. And when I found a listing on eBay for bulk 3DS games that included Tomodachi Life, I knew I’d found exactly what I was looking for.
Tomodachi Life launched in 2013, and you could hardly pry it from my 20-year old hands long enough to get me to pay attention in college. You design your Mii, giving them their own style, voice, and personality by adjusting a handful of sliders, all of which make Miis more in-depth than any other game in which they appear.
Your chosen Mii then becomes the first resident of an island that you own and manage. It’s not long into the tutorial until your Mii grows lonely, and you’ll create a second Mii just as detailed as the first to move into the apartment next door to keep your original Mii company.
The longer Miis live on your island, the more unique they’ll become. They discover favorite foods, Miis they prefer spending time with, and form opinions about what’s happening on the island. There’s a collection of jarringly photorealistic .pngs of prizes to earn from playing mini-games with your Miis, all of which highlight a different aspect of life around your island. You’ll be asked to identify different items from meals to outfits, remember minute details about your residents, or even just spend time doing this or that with your Miis. I mean, what other game has ever given you a reward for using a feather to help someone sneeze?
You grow your relationships with these Miis as you interact, watching as they also build relationships with one another. As the Miis spend time with each other, you’ll watch them become friends and maybe even fall in love. They ask your input before making any major moves in terms of relationships, both romantic and platonic, but giving them the go-ahead doesn’t always mean the other Mii will be receptive. Miis may not have compatible personality types when it comes to making buddies around the island, leaving them feeling dejected. In terms of love, I can’t even begin to tell you how many confessions I had Miis make back in the day that got interrupted by another island resident also confessing their feelings, and their object of affection began dating the interrupting Mii instead.
It’s the kind of mega-weird chaos that I miss on modern consoles, an itch I can’t easily scratch these days, and the fact that it was baked into Tomodachi Life organically made it that much better. Nothing was beyond the scope of possibility, making it both amazing and terrifying.
Tumblr and Vine were both alight with the odd things people made happen in that game back then, from elaborate fandom-centric islands to ridiculous and random additions. I never thought I’d watch players attempt to resolve global conflicts by creating world leaders in the game and having them engage in a public rap battle, but (Tomodachi) Life comes at you fast.
This title was the last time I remember Nintendo throwing up its hands and letting us get really strange with its games. After growing up with so much of that flavor, I really miss it. It was a life simulation game, but in the most ridiculous sense of the term. You can always find ways to spice up other, more modern life sim titles, but those vibes have never been as intrinsically chaotic as they were in Tomodachi Life.
I’m about to pay around $80 to show my partner how unbelievably unhinged this game was while cuddled up on the couch sharing a single 3DS, because wow, is that game expensive nowadays and I am not made of money. But seeing the prices it goes for on eBay for nostalgia nerds like me, I promise it would do numbers on the Switch, too. You’ve always been about family games, and Tomodachi Life can still be that, Nintendo. You’ve always let us play with life in different ways, but please don’t forget that you also used to let us get wacky and weird with it, too.
