Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream review: Soap opera simulator

A vast array of creative options and emergent interactions make Living the Dream a wonderful sandbox of sim-life amusement.

I never really thought about what it would be like if I was running a reality TV show or weekday soap opera full of assorted fellows and weirdos I created, but Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream has been more than a delightful opportunity over the time I was covering it for review. Its options for creativity are varied and satisfying, the interactivity its characters engage in is a hoot, and it’s the kind of game that will give back to you as much as you put in. With only a bit of issue from repetition and late game unlocks, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is another pleasant flavor of cozy sim to come to the Switch library this season.

Your island, your people

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a life-sim in the vein of The Sims. However, it utilizes the player-made characters of the Wii era known as Miis. In its character creator, you can let the game assemble a character, or tailor-make one to your own tastes. You decide their looks, age, personal gender and dating preferences (a huge win for LGBTQ+ fans), voice tone, and personality, and then you set them loose on an island that you manage. You can move them around to engage with each other or buy and give them gifts and clothing, but the best part of Tomodachi Life is that you can just put the pieces in motion and watch what happens.

I had a blast with the character creator in this game. Miis are a good canvas, but you can do an incredible amount of work with the options this game provides. If the game doesn’t provide something you want for your character’s face, you can actually draw it in yourself with both simple and complex art suites. I made a few accessories that weren’t in the game when I wanted to achieve a certain look. The game doesn’t have bulging, veiny eyes, but my sickly goblin pal, Gorb the Flea, does because I drew his face that way. You can do all sorts of stuff if you have an idea and the persistence to get there. That said, you don’t have to exhaust yourself trying to create every character either. You can simply let the game design a character for you by answering a questionnaire about what you want to see. Then you can adjust the final figure. It’s a great setup whether you want to craft each character, move things along, or switch between the two.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is an “always active” game. Once you make a Mii and unleash them, they will live their life on your island with whatever personality you gave them until you interact with them. That can mean feeding them, dressing them, upgrading their living arrangements, or even just answering their questions. And all of that goes on inform more layers of interactions they can experience.

You don’t just get to design the Miis either. You also get to design the island. It’s humble at first. You’ll start by just making a house for your one Mii, building a grocery store to feed them, a clothing store to dress them, and then adding more Miis, more houses, and more shops to the place. I wouldn’t say this is as exhaustive as something like Animal Crossing in how the landscaping tools work, but you can still fiddle, assemble, add, remove, and adjust the island and its structures and decorations to a reasonable level of personal taste.

I was constantly impressed and charmed by Tomodachi Life as my creations were living there. It’s easy to waste a whole afternoon on designing a new food they’ll eat or a new tile to decorate with. And when you want to stir things up, you can just move a Mii near another Mii and let things play out. When I wasn’t making new things that added to the island, Tomodachi Life was also peppering me with small opportunities to discover new things or choose between a daily-rotating array of selections across various outlets that would add new colors to my overall canvas. Simply put, this game is rewarding, and it’s all the more rewarding depending on how much you put into it.

The complex web of Mii life

Living the Dream has two forms of progression in it: Mii happiness levels and the overall island level. If you make sure to provide for your Mii, like feeding and playing minigames with them, they will level up in happiness, and each happiness level gives them a quirk that lets you individualize them further. You can teach a Mii to walk with a swagger, stand shyly, eat suspiciously, or talk with a creepy warble, to name a few options. You can give them a catchphrase or line they’ll say somewhere in their conversations, or you can give them a prop that they’ll engage with by themselves or with other Miis, like a bubble blower or paint easel. Every level of their happiness lets you individualize your Miis all the more.

Island levels come from a currency collected from any Mii you make happy called Warm Fuzzies. As your Miis get happier and become their more fully-realized selves, they’ll award you with Warm Fuzzies that can then level up your island when you have enough. That lets you buy new props, new quirks, buildings, decorations, and even customizable concepts. All of it serves to move things along and ensure you have an steady increase of options to work with.

There are both hands-on and hands-off approaches to keep things moving in Living the Dream once you’ve got a community going. Most of the time when you’re trying to get Miis to form a relationship, you can simply pick them up and put them together. There will be a lot of times when you call their attention and directly engage with them, but sometimes that leads to fun opportunities as well. For instance, sometimes they will ask you questions about what things you prefer or how you might respond in a situation. At one point, they asked me who I thought was as handsome actor, to which I answered, “Mr. Magoo.” That resulted in some of my Miis working Mr. Magoo into their conversations, talking about how dreamy he is, and arguing over who is the biggest Mr. Magoo fan, which is pretty funny if you know who Mr. Magoo is. I will say, however, that the name field has a pretty tight character limit, which sometimes kept me from going all-in on every bad idea as they came to mind.

That leads me to another point that I believe is both a strength and a cautionary aspect of this game: There is no filter. Tomodachi Life lets you create and influence your island as you please with very little restriction. Lingo, creative designs, and many other aspects of this game are only limited by what you put in. You can also clean up just about anything that you don’t like. You can delete Miis, designs, adjust the island at any point, or even remove lingo from the lexicon. That is to say, as much as this canvas has plenty of different creative tools, it also has a good eraser if something isn’t to your liking.

There are only a handful of other caveats to my enjoyment of Tomodachi Life, and they’re not all that big. There will be a point where you’ll run into recycled interactions, especially when you start to get around 10 Miis going that each have to be raised from their Level 1 happiness. Tomodachi Life is pretty good about keeping things fresh, but some of these repeat more frequently than I would have liked, especially with new characters as they make friendships and explore alongside your more seasoned Miis. I also feel like the rewards of the late game level-ups and progression are a little less exciting at certain points. When it feels like you’ve got everything you want, it can be hard to pick what to do with new island levels. It’s a small thing, but I wish the later rewards were a bit more bountiful and varied.

Enjoy your stay!

In the span of one day’s session, my island slob, Shawn, expressed to me that he wanted to share his crush on another Mii, Aisha, who was his best friend and roommate. During the proposal, another Mii, Bibi, swooped in and confessed love to Aisha, who chose Bibi over Shawn. Shawn was heartbroken and I had to have my island mascot, 115-year-old Mama Yaga, come over to console him, after which they played on a seesaw until Shawn worked up the courage to talk to Aisha again. He immediately developed another crush on them, beginning another series of lovable, but unfortunate and goofy runarounds and heartbreak. And that’s when he wasn’t hanging out on the beach with Gorb the Flea or Larry Chipmunk, talking about their favorite sewer clowns or chugging down locally-produced Mutton Slurp soda.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream gave me a unique chance to create an ecosystem that would make a 2000s era TV producer weep tears of joy. I can’t say I ever expected a game to give me this kind of experience, but I guess that’s just what it’s like when you’re Living the Dream.

This review is based on a Nintendo Switch digital copy supplied by the publisher, played on a Nintendo Switch 2 system. Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream comes to Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 on April 16, 2026.

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Review for
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream
9
Pros

• An exhaustive set of creative options
• Expanded Mii creator tools, including gender & dating preferences
• Varied interactions that grow based on your engagement
• Enjoyable island designer tools
• Light and complex art tools for customizing things you want
• Very chill soundtrack
• You can take control or simply let things play out at any time
• No filter: Have fun!

Cons

• A lot of repeat interactions late into the game
• Late game unlocks are a bit sparse
• Naming field is restrictive in some cases
• No filter: Be careful!