Seeing everyone play Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is giving me serious FOMO
I've never been a Nintendo person. And yet, I've never been this completely captured by one of its games until the company's latest release, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.
My rapturous attention to it is equal parts FOMO and genuine amazement at the unhinged ways people are playing this game. It's taken over my timeline and is slowly dismantling my will to resist buying a Switch.
For context, Living the Dream is the third entry in Nintendo's series of casual social simulators — think The Sims or Animal Crossing — in which you oversee and manage an island populated by Miis, Nintendo's customizable avatars (a portmanteau of Wii and me). It shares Animal Crossing's DNA in that you're tending to an island and its residents, but unlike that game, you actually get to create the islanders yourself. Thus, no need for housing discrimination and forced migration to phase out the "ugly villagers."
A massive part of the game's appeal is its creation suite, which lets you draw virtually anything and drop it into the game as an interactive item for your Miis to use. Uncensored, mind you. On top of that, like its predecessors, Living the Dream features a text-to-voice modulator that has Miis speaking in a robotic, Vocaloid-adjacent cadence. Also uncensored. You can even make the TV shows they decide to watch. Big news for fans of yaoi.
It is, in short, the perfect game for post-COVID, chronically online Gen Z. Just ask poor Charlie Kirky what happens when they get hold of your likeness.
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The result is near-infinite replayability and, for those of us without a Switch, near-insufferable FOMO. I want to create an island where my characters bicker over a pack of Marlboro Reds. I want a Mii to dream about him and his friends worshipping the unregistered firearm I left sitting on the beach. The memes and playthroughs circulating online are so genuinely unhinged that I'm not sure a "normal" playthrough of this game is even possible. Plus, in a resounding win for Big Tobacco, cigarettes are practically a staple item at this point, and I've lost count of how many islands I've seen with one.
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We've got a tiny Obama doing a freaky little shimmy. Jennifer Coolidge is enjoying a bottle of Hennessy. Kitty White is getting rejected by Leon S. Kennedy, then immediately harassed on the beach by Miss Piggy and John Pork. I want to be clear that those are all real sentences describing real videos that exist on the internet right now.
My personal favorite, though, is a Mii cast video edited to the theme from Living Single, featuring a roster of Black cultural figures like Steve Harvey, Madea, the Smokestack Twins from Sinners, just living their lives on this little island together. Delightfully, irreverently unserious.
Yes, it's a bummer that the game still lacks real online functionality and built-in Mii- and screenshot-sharing. For a title that has thrived almost entirely on user-generated content going viral, that feels like a conspicuous oversight. Nintendo, we are begging.
But the internet, as always, persists. My FOMO is real, and it is winning. I want my own island. I want to see what my created characters fight over and who they fall in love with. I want to create something deeply questionable and watch the social fallout unfold in robotic text-to-voice. I want in on this. The internet is having the time of its life on a little island somewhere — and I intend to join them.