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.
