Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a blast despite lacking new features

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Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is similar to the popular game Pokopia, offering a creative and fun experience, especially for new players. However, those who played the original Tomodachi Life on the 3DS might not find a lot of significant changes or new features.

Tomodachi Life, released for the Nintendo 3DS in 2014, has gained a dedicated following over the years. The game lets you create and customize your own characters, called Miis, and then help them live their best lives by providing food, building stores, and connecting them with other characters in the game.

Enjoy silly minigames like Red Light, Green Light, peek into the surprisingly funny dreams of your Mii characters, and catch up on the latest (fake) news. After more than a decade, Tomodachi Life is back, and it still offers the same charming gameplay.

Creativity at all costs

A core part of the ‘Living the Dream’ experience is detailed character creation. You can design characters based on your friends, family, famous people, or even create truly bizarre and unsettling figures – the possibilities are endless!

Living the Dream lets you explore any idea, no matter how wild or realistic, when creating characters. You also have complete freedom to include diverse relationships and characters, with options for same-sex pairings, non-binary identities, and any dating preferences you like.

You have complete freedom to design your island and create homes for your Mii characters. You can decorate interiors with different patterns and add things like benches, vending machines, and new buildings to customize the island to your liking.

At the beginning of the game, you design Mii characters, which helps you open up new shops and buildings. Making Miis adds a personal touch to the game, and if you happen to create some… unusual characters, you can send them to a deserted island to keep them away from everyone else. It’s probably for the best!

The same again

Living the Dream feels familiar, and that’s okay, but it can become a bit predictable. The gameplay often loops between creating a Mii character, unlocking something new, testing it out, and then starting the process all over again with another Mii. It’s enjoyable if you already have ideas for characters, but for a good portion of the game, there isn’t much variety beyond that.

As the island grows and gets more crowded, you’ll deal with more events, urgent problems, and little issues to fix for your residents – it’s a surprisingly fun minigame when you first try it. While it becomes more engaging, it lacks a major, compelling feature like the quests and creatures in Pokopia that really made me want to keep playing.

But this isn’t necessarily a negative. Players who love characters like those in Animal Crossing – full of personality, humor, and a bit of craziness – will likely appreciate how unpredictable the islanders are. Where else would you find a character obsessed with a Sea Urchin Skeleton cult, or see your grandmother bust a move with breakdancing?

The biggest updates in this game are the ability to let your Mii characters hang out in more places and a more modern approach to relationships with pronoun options. Don’t expect a completely new game, though – it feels like a fresh version of Tomodachi Life for a new audience, and they’re going to love it.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream isn’t groundbreaking, but its quirky humor, imaginative style, and lighthearted gameplay make it a uniquely enjoyable experience among similar relaxing games.

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2026-03-24 16:23