Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Why I Absolutely Love It

I have a problem. The problem is that I've played the demo for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream an embarrassing number of times, and the full game doesn't even come out until the 16th. Eight days. I'm counting.

If you've never played a Tomodachi Life game, imagine The Sims but weirder, more chaotic, and somehow more personal. You populate an island with Miis — people you know, celebrities, fictional characters, whoever — and then watch them live their bizarre little lives. They fall in love. They have rap battles. They dream about riding giant slices of toast. It's unhinged, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

It is also, apparently, the kind of game that makes me check the eShop page multiple times a day on the off chance something has changed. Nothing has changed. The release date is still the 16th. I know this. And yet.

The Demo That Ate My Brain

The demo for Living the Dream lets you have three Miis on your island. That's it. Three. I've filled those slots with intention. My Mii is there, obviously. Aidan's Mii is there — and yes, his Mii is already crushing on mine, which is adorable and also slightly surreal when you're in a long-distance relationship and your digital avatars are getting along better than some real couples you know.

(I'm not jealous of my own Mii. I'm not. Shut up.)

The demo has a built-in stopping point rather than a session clock: it ends once you complete a specific in-game goal — your first purchase from the clothing shop — and after that your islanders go dormant. They stay home, stop levelling up, and will only talk about the retail version. It's the gentlest possible push towards buying the full game. Left to my own devices before that point, I would sink hours into watching my islanders propose to each other, fail at rap battles, and buy hats they absolutely do not need.

Your demo progress transfers to the full game, which is the clever bit. Everything I'm building now — the Miis, the relationships, the tiny moments of chaos — carries over on the 16th. Nintendo knew exactly what they were doing. They've already got me invested.

The demo itself is 1.0 GiB (verified on my Switch) – the full game is reportedly around 6.2 GB, though I haven't been able to pin that down officially. Either way, that's a lot more chaos waiting to be unlocked. And where the demo caps you at three islanders, the full game lets you have up to 70. Seventy. I'm already struggling to decide who makes the cut.

Why This Game, Specifically

I've played a lot of simulation games. The Sims. Animal Crossing. Stardew Valley. They're all good. But Tomodachi Life hits different.

Part of it is the chaos. In The Sims, you can control everything — their careers, their relationships, their bathroom schedule. Tomodachi Life says no. You can influence, suggest, nudge. But your Miis have their own personalities, their own preferences, their own ideas about who they want to befriend or date or have a bizarre musical number with. You're not a god. You're more like a very involved landlord who keeps trying to set their tenants up on dates.

Living the Dream does give you slightly more agency than the original — you can now physically pick up a Mii and place them next to another to prompt an interaction, rather than waiting for the game to decide it's time. It's a small thing, but it makes the difference between hoping two specific Miis become friends and actually making it happen. I have already used this power irresponsibly.

Part of it is the Mii of it all. These aren't random procedurally generated villagers. They're my people. My boyfriend. My friends. People I recognise. Watching Aidan's Mii wander around my island, wearing a silly outfit I gave him, trying to learn a song, is strangely tender. It's a little piece of our relationship made tangible, even when we're 8100 miles apart.

There's also something about the Mii format specifically that other life sims can't replicate. Animal Crossing gives you adorable procedurally generated villagers with names and catchphrases, but they're not yours in any meaningful sense. Stardew Valley's NPCs have scripted histories and relationship arcs. Tomodachi Life's islanders have histories written by you — not through dialogue options, but through the act of deciding who they are in the first place. You look at a Mii and you think: I know this person. Because you made them, and you made them to look like someone real.

And part of it — the part I'm slightly embarrassed to admit — is that it's just nice. Not nice in a boring way. Nice in a "nothing bad happens here" way. No combat. No stakes. No pressure to optimise or succeed or achieve anything. Just a bunch of digital people living their best weird lives on an island I pretend to run.

What's New (and What's Missing)

This is the first new Tomodachi Life in thirteen years. Thirteen years! The 3DS original had its quirks, but it also had limitations — hardware constraints, a small island, and one particularly frustrating omission: no same-sex relationships. You couldn't make two male Miis fall in love. You couldn't make two female Miis date. For a game about expressing yourself, it was a weird, arbitrary wall.

Living the Dream fixes that. Miis can now be non-binary . You can set their pronouns (they/them is an option). You can choose who they're attracted to. You can finally have gay Miis. For me, this is huge. My Mii and Aidan's Mii can actually be together. Properly. That wasn't guaranteed — the original game couldn't do this, and for a long time, neither could I. There's something here about games growing up alongside the people who play them.

Island customisation is a bigger addition than it might sound. The 3DS game gave you a fixed island and you just watched it happen. Living the Dream lets you lay it out yourself — place houses, move shops, add paths, plant trees. It's closer to Animal Crossing in that regard, and I mean that as a compliment. Having agency over the space your Miis inhabit makes it feel more like your island rather than a stage Nintendo built for you to observe. I already have strong opinions about where the shops should go, which I recognise is a sign of genuine investment.

The new features are genuinely exciting. There's a Palette House Workshop where you can draw your own creations — pets, clothing, food, even buildings. You can design your own TV shows. You can make a pet that looks like whatever you want. The drawing tools work in handheld mode, which means I can finally put my terrible art skills to use.

Face paint is new too. You can draw directly onto your Mii's face, which means I can finally give my werewolf Mii the proper lycanthropic features it deserves. (Yes, I'm going to do that. No, I'm not sorry.)

There's also the ability to have up to eight Miis live together as roommates in a single shared house. (The old apartment building from the 3DS game is gone — each Mii now gets their own home, which they can optionally invite others into.) That's a lot of personalities in one space. I don't know what kind of chaos this will create, but I'm absolutely going to find out.

One thing that's apparently missing: the Concert Hall from the 3DS game. It hasn't appeared in any trailers, though some fans have spotted hints in the promo art that suggest it might not be gone entirely. I have mixed feelings about the uncertainty. The musical numbers were a highlight — watching a Mii you made of someone you know perform a dramatically sincere ballad about snacks is a specific kind of joy. Maybe Nintendo is holding it back for launch day. Or maybe it's just gone. I'll find out.

The Multiplayer Situation

Here's where things get complicated. Living the Dream has local wireless multiplayer — you can share Miis and Palette House creations with friends who are in the same room. But for a transatlantic couple, this isn't exactly useful.

There's no online play. Nintendo's stated reasoning was that they wanted the game to remain "fun and safe" — which I read as: custom Mii sharing with strangers on the internet would go exactly as badly as you'd imagine, and they didn't want to moderate it. That's probably the right call. The heart of Tomodachi Life has always been the people you already know, and there's something correct about keeping it that way. It's just a bit of a shame when the person you most want to play with is several time zones away.

Aidan and I can't visit each other's islands directly. We can't walk through each other's digital towns like we could do in Animal Crossing . What we can do is share Miis — I can send him the Mii I made of myself, he can send me his, and we can see how they interact on our respective islands. It's not the same as playing together, but it's something.

I'm the only one who has a Nintendo Switch, but you get the point.

(I may have already planned out which Miis I'm adding when the full game releases. I may have a list. I may have thought about this too much.)

A Nostalgia Trip With Better Graphics

I grew up on the original Tomodachi Life. The 3DS game was formative for me — one of those weird, wonderful titles that sticks with you. I'd spend hours watching my Miis fall in love, have absurd dreams, and get into fights over nothing. It was strange and personal in a way most games aren't.

I still have my copy. A while back, I ripped it to a CIA file on my Mac so I could play it in Citra. Something about seeing those familiar low-poly Miis on a monitor screen, rendered at a resolution the 3DS could never manage — it hit different. A little piece of my childhood, preserved and playable whenever I wanted.

I remember the specific joy of giving a Mii a song for the first time and watching them perform it with complete sincerity. The rap battles where the lyrics were whatever nonsense you'd typed in. The dreams that made no sense and were all the better for it. The way the game had this quality of being genuinely surprised by itself — like even it didn't know what was going to happen next.

But it was also constrained by hardware. The graphics were charming but limited. The island felt small. Living the Dream on Switch is the same spirit with more room to breathe.

The art style is cleaner, in HD, no less. The animations are smoother. There's just more of it. More events. More interactions. More ways for your Miis to be absolutely ridiculous. It's a remaster in spirit, an expansion in practice, and I am entirely here for it.

The game also runs on Switch 2. I don't have one yet (waiting for WWDC and hoping for M5 Mac Mini news first — I have priorities), but knowing it'll work when I eventually upgrade is reassuring.

What I'm Counting Down To

April 16th. Eight days. I'm going to wake up — actually, knowing my sleep schedule, I'll probably still be awake — and play that game the second it unlocks.

I've already been thinking about my island name. The original 3DS game did let you name your island, but it's been years, so this is new territory.

I'm going to fill my island with people I love. I've got a list — longer than 70, which means I'll need to make some cuts I'm already slightly stressed about. I'm going to watch them fall in love and have arguments and dream about giant food items. And I'm going to be happy, in that specific way that only a low-stakes, high-chaos, deeply personal simulation game can provide.

Is it a bit silly to be this excited about a game where Miis rap about snacks? Probably. But I've spent a lot of my life being serious, being ill, being tired, being anxious about the future. A game that lets me watch a tiny version of my boyfriend wear a fedora and sing badly is exactly the kind of silliness I need.

So: Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. I love it. I'm going to play it too much. I'm going to enjoy every ridiculous second.

And if you need me on the 16th April... I'll be on my island.