Living the Dream has had one hell of a first month

Of course, anyone who has been tuned into the Tomodachi Life community for over a decade could have told you it would be a big deal. The series’ original game was a cult phenomenon that ranks high among the best-selling Nintendo 3DS games, with over 6.7 million copies sold. Fans waited 13 long years (eat your heart out, Star Fox) for the follow-up that felt like they’d never get. All that pent-up excitement finally spilled out into Living the Dream when it launched on April 16, ultimately selling 3.8 million copies in its first two weeks.

One month later, the hardest working community in gaming hasn’t taken its long-awaited moment for granted. Living the Dream has inspired fans to create, share, and band together to turn a game with no online features into a social media platform. Through that, they’ve found the agony and ecstasy of an imperfect sequel that trades some of its predecessor’s weirdo charm in for something else entirely. As limited as that mechanical game can be, it feels like fans have only begun to uncover its possibilities together.

In Living the Dream, you are the hand of God controlling your own personal reality TV show. You are free to make anyone you can think of into a Mii, teach them to say anything, and create tons of custom items that the game will cycle into its absurd life simulation. Your fun largely hinges on your creative ability considering that so much interactivity lies in the game’s custom creation suite, which lets you make anything from presents to house interiors pixel-by-pixel.

That emphasis on creation over everything else has made Living the Dream a bit polarizing among long-time fans. The sequel ditches several beloved features from the original Tomodachi Life in pursuit of a Mad Libs simulation where your creations slot into scripted events. There’s no Concert Hall where your Miis will sing, beloved minigames like Judgment Hall are absent, and characters have fewer nuances to their relationships. That, combined with a lack of online sharing, has left some fans hoping that DLC is coming down the line. Without future updates, there’s a palpable fear that Living the Dream could wind up being a flash in the pan.

Betty Boop sits on a fountain in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.

Having played 30 hours of it myself since launch, I get that worry. At a certain point, I began to see the mechanical nature of Living the Dream reveal itself a little too much. My Miis were having the same conversations with new words slotted in, repeating dream sequences, and falling into strict relationship dynamics that rarely surprised me anymore. I started to cool on it after being enamored with it in the weeks I was playing before release while reviewing the game. Was it a fun game I genuinely adored, or just a pretty good user-generated content machine?

It took seeing the game out in the wild for me to really appreciate the vision. If there was ever any doubt that Living the Dream would find its community, that was squashed within days of the game’s launch. Some fans quickly got to work building external tools that could help their fellow players. Tools like TomodachiShare gave fans a place to post their Miis, while Tomo Board served as a relationship tracker. Most useful of all was Living the Grid, a fan-made site that allows people to turn any image into pixel art that can be recreated in Living the Dream’s creation suite. Like Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ stalk market trackers, these early sites made it clear that fans actively wanted to make the game more enjoyable for one another.

A Tomodachi Life fan site lists a Mii version of Agnes from Umamusume.

It’s been off to the races from there. If you spent any time on social spaces like the Tomodachi Life subreddit over the last month, you’ve no doubt witnessed players gleefully sharing their best creative flexes with one another nonstop since launch. I’ve seen the cast of Avatar: The Last Airbender turned into perfect Miis! Pokémon Pokopia translated to an in-game Switch via a cross-stitch pattern! A whole Costco! Each new absurd creation was the product of a community committed to one-upping one another. It read like an unspoken challenge. I see your 2002 Ford Taurus and raise you the AO3 page for a piece of Goku fan-fiction.

That spirit has turned Living the Dream into a perfect meme generator, for better and worse. For every clever creation, you can find a dozen ironic Charlie Kirks. Low-hanging memes especially dominated the first week of the game’s release as users shared clips of their Miis saying the crudest things fans could think of (something that’s possible due to the fact that Living the Dream has no filters whatsoever). The early dominance of juvenile tomfoolery rubbed some players the wrong way. In a sharp critique of the culture forming around the game, writer Abram Buehner posited that a certain player base was only engaging with Living the Dream as a platform for generating viral content and racking up cheap social media engagement. “Is it meaningful to put Charlie Kirk on your island, or is it just intoxicating to watch the likes roll in on your post about it?” Buehner asked.

Three Miis sit together in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.

It’s a valid concern. In an era where so much is reduced to social media performance, it can be dispiriting to see a clever, good-hearted game reduced to a cheap laugh box. One could turn the fact that so many players flocked to that kind of play back on Living the Dream, arguing that its cut features drastically reduced the kind of fun players can create. Your reaction to that observation, though, will likely vary depending on what your relationship is to online meme spaces. In following the Tomodachi Life community over the last month, I’ve seen lots of similarities to deep-fried meme groups I used to frequent on Facebook in the late 2010s. From an outside perspective, those groups were just full of online jerks posting stupid memes to rack up applause from the crowd. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong in that diagnosis!

There’s even nuance in shitposting, though. The groups I was part of gradually evolved from a collection of random memes to an actual community. People naturally started riffing off of one another’s gags, building a shared language of nonsense jokes that linked total strangers together. It became an act of communication. It also worked as a tool for creative workshopping. Every well-made joke pushed someone else to up their skills to effectively “yes, and” a bit. The likes and engagement weren’t the appeal after a while; it was being able to make your friends laugh in weird new ways. There can be sincerity even in stupidity.

I’ve seen that reflected in the Tomodachi Life community over the past month. My favorite meme has revolved around… cigarettes, of all things. After one player shared some cigs they created in-game, other jokesters started joyously riffing on that idea. The game’s subreddit filled up with newborn Miis waving around a pack of Marlboro Reds, while TikTok videos showed players turning their houses into different cigarette packs. It all culminated in one user creating a plate stacked with 500 cigarettes, a reference to a joke from The Orville, which they made by painstakingly placing each cig one at a time. It’s a completely stupid escalation of an already dumb bit, but one that got a genuine rise out of other fans who were in on a joke they had crafted together.

500 cigarettes sit on a plate in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.

This flavor of collective riffing isn’t just good for moronic humor, though; some genuine revelations have risen from it, and it has widened the potential of Tomodachi Life as a digital toy. Early on, I found a Reddit user who turned their house exteriors into perfect replicas of SpongeBob, Squidward, and Patrick’s homes in Bikini Bottom. I then watched in real time as other players started trying similar things on grander scales. One player started turning their island into Mario’s Mushroom kingdom by recreating Princess Peach’s castle and placing colorful hills around it. Most recently, a Reddit user went one step further by using the exterior tools to recreate Minecraft’s blocky art style on their island. I can feel the creative baton-passing that led from point A to point B, and it has left me eager to return to Living the Dream to see how I can completely transform my own island.

In some ways, it feels like Tomodachi Life players are hitting the bottom of the barrel after one month. The initial hilarity of seeing the simulation unfold for the first time has lost its novelty as the machine has revealed itself. I’m seeing fewer new discoveries and more remixes of what I’ve seen before with new Miis and phrases slotted in. But in another way, it feels like we haven’t seen anything yet. There’s still so much room to tinker with the creation tools, embracing Living the Dream as a canvas begging to be painted and repainted. Whether that’s accomplished by astonishing art or dumb memes isn’t important. What matters is that players hang their works up in their online galleries to give someone else a brilliant idea, or, at the very least, a good laugh.