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The new Tomodachi Life is made to be shared — even if Nintendo doesn’t want you to
Entertainment Close Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Entertainment Gaming Close Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Gaming Games Review Close Games Review Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Games Review The new Tomodachi Life is made to be shared — even if Nintendo doesn’t want you to In its latest Switch game, the company awkwardly tries to balance player expression and safety. In its latest Switch game, the company awkwardly tries to balance player expression and safety. by Andrew Webster Close Andrew Webster Senior entertainment editor Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Andrew Webster Apr 15, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC Link Share Gift If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Image: Nintendo Andrew Webster Close Andrew Webster Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Andrew Webster is an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories. Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is hard to explain. The best way to understand is to see it in action; a screenshot of Handsome Squidward and Bob Belcher falling in love over their shared appreciation of cannibalism makes it clear that, while it’s a life sim, the game is really a joke-generating machine . Living the Dream on the Nintendo Switch gives you more tools and fewer restrictions to make those jokes stranger and funnier. But while Living the Dream provides more freedom for creativity, it also has big restrictions on sharing those creations, and the game seems content with inside jokes staying within its virtual walls. Living the Dream is the sequel to a 3DS game that, a decade ago, I called “ the weirdest thing Nintendo has ever made .” It’s sort of like The Sims or Animal Crossing , and it’s also a little like a Tamagotchi. You play as an omniscient overseer of a small island that’s populated with Miis, Nintendo’s delightfully lo-fi avatar characters, and you have to feed them and make them happy by fostering relationships and playing games. As you do that, the island will expand with more residents and more things to interact with, so that eventually you’ll have a Ferris wheel, a restaurant, and a TV news station. Related Nintendo is weathering the storm What makes the sequel interesting is that it really opens up what you’re able to do. The creation tools in particular are much more robust. There are lots of options for designing Miis such that, even though I am decidedly not artistically inclined, I was able to make very recognizable cartoon characters without too much effort. Notably, unlike its predecessor , Living the Dream has options for things like same-sex relationships and nonbinary characters, making it much more inclusive and open. The island itself similarly has a lot of customization options, though these slowly unlock over time. The real meat of the experience is setting up situations and watching how things unfold. You can make characters become friends or romantic partners by literally picking them up and putting them next to each other. The game will even frequently ask you for topics that they might want to talk about, Mad Libs style. It’s an acquired taste, but for the right kind of person it can also be hilarious. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Living the Dream is that, at least as far as I can tell, there are no restrictions for what you can name characters or what you can make them say. To really test this, I let my 13-year-old kid run wild, tasking her with creating the most messed-up island her teenage brain could think of. Now my Switch is home to the cast of The Owl House , who love to chat to each other about Hitler, summoning Satan, and human trafficking. Nothing that she threw at the game was off-limits. (Also, I’m a little worried about her.) That’s all very surprising for a Nintendo game, particularly given the company’s squeaky-clean image and family-friendly fare . And it’s almost certainly the reason why Nintendo has made it so that you can’t share screenshots and videos using the Switch’s built-in sharing features. Without getting into specifics, Nintendo wrote on a support page that the Living the Dream ’s freedom can “sometimes lead to humorous, surprising, or unpredictable moments during gameplay,” but also said that “we recognize that out-of-context scenes may be misunderstood or may not reflect the spirit in which the game is intended to be enjoyed.” Given the problems Nintendo has run into with online sharing in the past , it’s an understandable position to take. It’s also
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