Developed and Published By: Nintendo
Category: Simulation
Release Date: 04.16.26
Price: $59.99
Before New Horizons came out, I had never played an Animal Crossing game. But after being stuck with New Horizons during the lockdowns right after it came out, I spent way too much time with it and became addicted to these kinds of games. When Living The Dream came out, I was excited because it looked even better than New Horizons. I wasn’t planning on getting it right at launch, but all the hype the first few days after release made me reconsider.
I don’t have much to say about the game, but the stuff I do want to talk about is simply insane. There are two main gameplay loops, and both are powerhouses. The first is the island management and life sim aspect. The second is the insane amount of freedom you have when creating characters and objects. These mechanics are frequently found in other games, but both are far bigger here than any game I’ve played before.
The island aspect is the same as Animal Crossing. You take control of an island and invite residents over. You can have up to 70 Miis on your island, which might not seem like a lot for an entire town, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed after just 20 or so. You literally play God in this game. You have full control over how the island looks. You can change the shape and size and you can change the houses and environments. Animal Crossing and other similar games let you build on a predetermined island but Living The Dream let’s you mess with the canvas anyway you want.
But you also get to insert yourself into the lives of all the residents. Get residents to interact with and become friends with other residents. Feed them and get them gifts. Watch as they live their lives. You can just sit back and watch your island do its thing once it’s big enough, though you do have to worry about things like Happiness. The game itself has a ton of options for how to build the island, but the creation freedom makes it even better.
That’s where we get to the second aspect of the game. I love the life-sim aspect but the creative freedom was what really drove me to pick up the game immediately. For every resident you want on your island, you create a Mii. You can use standard templates or use detailed facial options to create a more detailed one. But then there’s face paint, which allows you to create any Mii you can think of. If you’re designing a mii from scratch and using face paint, you just draw the character you want and the Mii will appear in your game.
Even before I bought the game, I already had a plan. I knew I wanted to get Miis based on Hololive and certain anime characters like Kivia from Sentenced To Be A Hero and Taira from You And I Are Polar Opposites. When I picked up the game, I had ideas for more than 30 anime characters that I wanted on my island. But I had just one problem, I’m terrible at drawing. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get them to look right. This was even after using reference images and seeing what other people have created for the same characters.
So for the first few hours of playing, I was stuck using just the simple templates, and I was still having a lot of fun. I was able to make Miis that looked like me and my friends and a bunch of cool ones just from using the templates and options. If you’re creative, you can use this mechanic to create tons of the best Miis based on characters and have so much fun with the game. But this level of freedom isn’t just for Miis, you can design your own items, clothing, and houses too. This is another reason as to why the look of the island can change so drastically based on the player.
Tomodachi Life Living The Dream is basically Animal Crossing meets The Sims, and it’s nearly perfect in every way. If you’re not creative and just using the tools that the game has natively, you’ll get dozens of hours. But if you are creative, you might spend hours just creating characters and buildings before you even get into the actual game itself. But I do have one big problem that stops me from giving Living The Dream a perfect score.
There’s no way to share your designs for others to use. There are websites where people showcase the Miis and objects they create and some of them have instructions on how to use the face paint to get the desired outcome. People also show their stuff on social media. But it’s not possible to actually take something that someone created and add it to your game, you’ll still have to make it all yourself. I haven’t played Miitopia, but I heard you could share creations there. If you could do that in Living The Dream, it would significantly increase the playability for those who aren’t creative.
9/10