While You Wait for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, Try This Other Mii Game Out

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The recent demo for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream gave fans a small taste of what’s to come, and it was a hit! While people eagerly await the full game, Miitopia is a great way to get their Mii fix. Nintendo’s Mii characters haven’t had a lot of spotlight recently, so the Living the Dream announcement was exciting for longtime fans. The demo suggests this new Tomodachi game will be even more over-the-top and customizable than the previous ones – and it’s left many players wanting more until the April 16th release. If you need a fun, lighthearted Mii adventure in the meantime, Miitopia offers plenty of customization, dramatic relationships, and laugh-out-loud humor.

Originally released on the Nintendo 3DS shortly after Tomodachi Life, Miitopia shares a similar lighthearted feel and focuses heavily on customizing characters. The 2021 Switch version added even more customization options, including a makeup system, keeping Mii characters popular for the last five years. Plus, it’s usually less expensive than other Nintendo Switch games, making it a good choice if you’re excited for Living the Dream or just want a more affordable game.

The Literal Faces of Miitopia

The world of Miitopia was once a peaceful place where Mii characters lived happily together. But everything changed when the Dark Lord launched an attack, stealing faces from the Miis and turning them into monsters. When a brave adventurer arrives in Greenhorne and sees the Dark Lord’s evil firsthand, they decide to embark on a quest to recover the stolen faces, gathering a team of friends to help along the way.

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Miitopia isn’t known for its deep story, but it’s good enough to keep you engaged. Your Mii character develops a little over time, and the game is really fun because you get to create the looks for all the other characters too. While it’s a role-playing game, the real draw isn’t the plot – and the game doesn’t pretend it is. What makes Miitopia special is how much you can customize characters and how witty the conversations are.

Mii-Making in Miitopia

In Miitopia, you can cast anyone as any character – yourself as the hero, your friends as party members, or even turn a disliked character into the villain! The Switch version also lets you customize your Mii’s appearance with a detailed makeup system, so they look exactly how you imagine.

Even before Living the Dream let you customize characters with face paint, Miitopia allowed for wild creations using wigs and makeup. I was particularly happy with my recreation of my dog as the Dark Lord, but I’ll never forget the player who managed to turn a $20 Fortnite V-Buck gift card into a Mii character.

Creating Mii characters can be surprisingly detailed, which might feel a bit much when you first start. The game offers a huge number of customization options – you can change their size, rotate them, pick new colors, and even layer different features, almost like you’re using Photoshop instead of a Nintendo game! Luckily, you can share your creations online with others, something you couldn’t do in the older game, Living the Dream.

Banter and Relationships Drive the Gameplay

Similar to Tomodachi Life, Miitopia lets the characters you create – your Miis – form bonds with each other. The stronger their relationship, the more effectively they’ll fight as a team. While Miitopia doesn’t include romantic relationships, building friendships between your Miis is beneficial for gameplay, and you might even see some flirty looks as they get closer!

The game’s humor largely comes from how characters interact with each other. The Switch version adds ‘hangouts,’ short cutscenes showing two characters (or a character and the horse) bonding and becoming closer. These scenes are usually lighthearted and sweet, though not always laugh-out-loud funny.

Every group has disagreements, and your team will too. Arguments can happen randomly, or when someone uses a skill that upsets another character. These fights will temporarily impact how well your party performs in battle. Luckily, they’re usually quick to resolve – just sharing a room for a few days will usually do the trick, and often characters will reconcile even faster!

Comedy and Combat in Miitopia

The main difference between Miitopia and the Tomodachi Life series is their genre. Miitopia is a role-playing game (RPG), while the Tomodachi games are life simulation games. While Miitopia is often humorous, a good RPG needs to have engaging battles, and opinions on how well it achieves that vary.

Battles in Miitopia are mostly handled automatically. You directly control only your initial Mii character, while the rest of your team acts on their own. Thankfully, the AI controlling your party members is generally quite effective, knowing when to heal and often applying helpful buffs at the start of a fight. However, some players may not enjoy the lack of direct control. While it can feel like your Mii characters have their own personalities, you might wish you had more strategic options during the more challenging parts of the game, especially after finishing the main story.

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While the game’s focus on letting characters act on their own can be a bit distracting, the battles themselves are cleverly designed and enjoyable. The job system offers a lot of different options, with unique and creative twists on familiar classes – for example, the bard becomes a Pop Star and the monk becomes a Cat. Some classes are more useful than others, though; the Tank class is rarely chosen because even its basic attacks use up valuable MP. The main story isn’t challenging enough to make any class unusable, so feel free to experiment! However, if you plan to play after finishing the story, you’ll probably want to carefully choose jobs, as the difficulty increases significantly.

Miitopia takes its lighthearted world and applies it to even the most familiar battle elements. For example, instead of being blinded in combat, your Mii characters might become so sad they cry, obscuring their vision and reducing accuracy. Instead of being paralyzed, they could be overcome with laughter, making it hard to concentrate. And the game even features a bizarre enemy – a giant, man-eating hamburger!

Miitopia Can Be a Fun Diversion or a Dedicated Time Investment

While Miitopia‘s gameplay isn’t exceptional, the fun comes from creating a hilarious party. You can put anyone—like Prince Harry Potter, Squidward, and Princess Piranha Plant—into any role, leading to wonderfully strange interactions. Even after completing the main story, you’ll enjoy plenty of funny scenes between your characters.

One of the things I really love about Miitopia is how flexible it is. You can play it super casually – just a few battles when you have a minute – or really get into optimizing your Mii characters, which you’ll definitely want to do later in the game. And honestly, you don’t have to spend a ton of time with the makeup system; you can just use default Miis if you want! But if you do start messing around with it, recreating your favorite characters with different facial features is surprisingly addictive. It’s great that you get out of it exactly what you put in.

Even if you don’t usually enjoy RPGs, Miitopia is worth checking out. It’s charming and lighthearted, with a focus on creating and customizing your characters. If you’ve been eagerly awaiting Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, Miitopia could be a fun distraction until its release on April 16th—and maybe even after!

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2026-04-05 23:38