There are a handful other games that are equally bizarre for their mundane normalcy.
There are a few other quizzes, which challenge me to do things like guess what an item is when the camera is zoomed in on it so closely it only shows a cluster of pixels, or determine which character is being shown on the screen based on their silhouette. This quiz that Chuck gave me is one of the most exciting games the Miis ask you to play. Here's an example of what would happen next, using my Mii named Chuck as a guinea pig: "Please play with me!" he or she would would chirp, beaming up at me expectantly. The Mii would usually be grinning ecstatically, bouncing up and down and flapping their arms so intensely I thought they were trying to fly. When I'd slide over to one with the console's stylus, I'd get a peek inside their window.
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Once I got settled into Yanville Island with my first batch of Miis, I started seeing a little green icon pop up on their windows from time to time. When you build these Miis, these virtual citizens of your island, you give them names, faces, personalities, even the voices with which they can speak to one another:Īgain like The Sims, this kind of gameplay might strike gamers who only love shooters or platformers as boring.īut there's one part of Tomodachi Life that seemed incredibly tedious even by those standards. There are a few options to import ones from other people's games, but relying on that too heavily would be missing out. They all start the game housed in a single apartment complex:īefore you get to this point, you have to actually make all these Miis. You give your islanders everything they have: food, clothing, shelter. At the outset of the game, you're assigned an island and implored to start peopling it with Miis, the quirky little humanoid avatars who have usually been consigned to the menus of Nintendo's consoles.
Tomodachi Life is similar to The Sims in this regard. Instead of performing superhuman feats like mowing down hordes of Nazis or bouncing on top of giant magical mushrooms, The Sims let you create a number of characters who could indulge in all the boring shit you already do in real life: get a job, buy a house, pick out outfits, go on dates, get married and (eventually) have kids. Its success was inexplicable because, at face value, the game sounded like it was jettisoning all the ideas and features that people love about video games.
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Tomodachi Life has often been described as Nintendo's take on The Sims, a series that's had a seemingly inexplicable and meteoric rise to the level of a pop culture phenomenon since it first debuted 14 years ago. Kirby and the Forgotten LandĪlong with swallowing his enemies whole to take their powers, Kirby can now wrap his giant gob around inanimate objects to control them. It's the most tedious game I've played in a long time. So let me try and attack each of them in turn. But Tomodachi Life doesn't either at first. I know they don't make much sense on their own. Whenever I typed one of them to a friend, they usually responded with something like, "lol" or, "um. These all come from scattered gchat messages.