Nintendo's Tomodachi Life revival ships after a nine-year development cycle

Overview

Nintendo says Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream launched on April 16 for Nintendo Switch, and that it is also playable on Nintendo Switch 2, according to the company’s launch announcement (Nintendo). The company describes the game as the first new Tomodachi Life entry in more than 10 years and says players build island life around custom Mii characters (Nintendo).

Development Background

In Nintendo’s Ask the Developer interview, director Ryutaro Takahashi said development started around 2017, after the mobile app Miitomo had settled down, and that he and producer Yoshio Sakamoto wanted to make a new Tomodachi Life after they had already “squeezed all we could” from the previous 3DS game (Nintendo). Nintendo says the team rebuilt the series from the ground up and added a new text-to-speech engine for the Switch-era Mii characters, while deliberately keeping them unpredictable and “innocent” in order to preserve what fans valued about the originals (Nintendo).

What Changed

The new entry moves the action from the original’s apartment-block setting to a free-roaming island and positions user-generated content as its central feature. Kotaku reported that the game is the third entry in the series, following the 2009 DS original and the 2014 3DS sequel, and that players can now design custom animals, buildings, food, and clothing that populate the island (Kotaku). Takahashi framed the approach as “combining the gameplay provided by the development team with what players themselves create” to provide what he called infinite ways to enjoy the game.