My Tomodachi Life Got Out Of Hand

Tomodachi Life just came out for the Nintendo 3DS and my curiosity took the best of me and I picked it up on release day. Very quirky game with a plethora of stuff to do. The game starts off pretty simply enough. You make your first resident for your freshly created island. You can either import characters from your Mii Maker collection or make a brand new one from scratch, which is ideal for adding any super custom characters you might want, like Nikola Tesla, and Morgan Freeman like I did, or you can use the photo to Mii feature which allows you to take a pic and gets transformed into a Mii. Kind of accurate, but I prefer the more manual approach. For being a very limited character creation interface, you can really make some accurate representations of real life people.

The game slowly reveals new features the more you progress and the more your Mii's level up. The heart of the game is the characters that you end up building. They all kind of go out and do their own thing throughout the day. They might be in their apartments, or they might be at work somewhere on your island. You must keep them fed and happy, or things might start to go awry. A few hours in, and already there's angry and depressed Mii's scattered that apparently don't want to make up. I'll be honest, I've made negative choices in the game to see where things go. I would normally play the nice guy all the way through, but that kind of quickly gets boring. Two characters want to make up? Tough luck, not on my island.

Pros

• The character customization leads to some hilarious results
• Tons of items to collect, sell, and give to your characters
• Really cool features to unlock, such as the concert hall
• The fact that you can give each character their own voice
• The Mii's sociability changes based on different daily factors

Cons

• Takes a while to get enough Miis' created for the game to get fun
• Mini games need a bit more variation
• Takes a while to get a voice to sound clear when making a character

So far I've had a rap battle between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, various hilarious news reports happening all day long, and Fox Mulder performing a metal song. It's a very very witty game that doesn't take itself serious one bit, and it's fun for a quick pick up and feed the Mii's kind of thing.

My Cast of Characters

Conan 0'Brien

Morgan Freeman

Nikola Tesla

So herein lies my out of handness. When I first started the game, I began by making characters representing friends and family. It was fun of course, but after a while I needed something else, and so I made one of my favorite people ever, Nikola Tesla. I brought his "quirky" stats to the highest levels and made him a "quiet" guy. Turns out, he says pretty weird stuff and wants unique hobbies, much like Mr. Tesla himself I would imagine. So I went on that day to make every and any witty character that I could think of, following with Morgan Freeman. Yeap. There he is. I even gave him a powerful voice, or at least as powerful as I could get it to be. My entire island is now overrun with a cast of characters with off the wall stats and I for one am not complaining. Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison rap battle? Sounds right to me.

I'm currently not sure how much playability the game has as I've only played it for maybe 8-10 hours, but so far there seems to be new stuff happening hourly. At night things quiet down and such, but you can always just wake up your characters if you see it fit to do so, but I wouldn't really know why. There are still events that need to be unlocked, and the StreetPass and SpotPass features of the game are sure to bring in more characters and more items to collect.

What I Kind of Wanted To See Maybe Sort Of

So fun game for all ages, that's for sure, but it's sort of lacking in some areas. Mainly that the game doesn't really focus on real life mechanics. One minute your Mii character can be "at work", and in the next 5 minutes they're back in their apartment laying on the ground sleeping. If my Mii is at work, I kind of want him to stay at work for a while. The characters do rely quite a bit on you the player in determining who they get along with with short sequences in which they ask you what you think of "Mii character". If you want some fun, just say that they're not compatible and see where that goes.

Also shops are open 24/7. And that kind of takes me out of the game just a bit. The game does follow real world day/night cycles, so it would of been nice if they did the same with store hours kind of like the way that Animal Crossing takes care of that scenario. Regardless of those few issues I have, it's still a fun game with probably countless more hours of events and items to unlock, and I look forward to seeing what my cast of characters will end up doing in the near future.