Assorted Tomodachi Life screenshots
You cannot send screenshots from Tomodachi Life to your smartphone or social media - probably because the game has no text filter, so you can make the characters say shocking things, and Nintendo is right to consider that a brand risk. However, you can dump the screenshots if you plug your switch into a PC, which I've done. Here are some of my screenshots, and some thoughts about the game's narrative systems...
The first resident of the island was Mamdani.
My husband then immediately trolled me by adding Lydia Tar. It is very easy to get all these characters to say preposterous things to one another by putting news items or memey shit into the island lingo:
He also added Nein Nunb, whose home I immediately turned into a hamster cage. He is the only island resident who owns a laptop.
To the island residents, I am Demiurge. Here is Ripley from Alien asking me for food hand-made by the demiurge:
There are a series of random events where characters see bugs tracing shapes on the ground. Here's Stephen King in a skeleton suit observing one of these events. So far I've seen two different ones - I suspect there are more, because once you build a system like this you probably want to milk it for all it's worth. The moment I saw this event I was delighted at how odd and funny it was and how cheap it must have been to make. The game is really efficient about its art assets in this way.
One high-scope art asset is the cutscene that plays whenever a character eats their favorite food. A moment like this is worth slamming expensive assets onto because it is very relevant to the player's future decisionmaking. It's good to make this moment more expensive and memorable because this knowledge is valuable to the player! Unfortunately, it also seems to play every time the player eats their favorite food, which gets annoying. Here is Lydia Tar realizing she loves to eat nachos, which causes her to shoot a laser out of her mouth over the ocean:
About attaching higher-detail story assets to things that are important to the player - if you've ever played Caves of Qud, you might recall that only the most interesting, mechanically complex, and powerful weapons - the sultans' relics - have substantial procgen story attached to them. Players are not fond of reading or watching cutscenes, but they will gladly consume more detailed and time-consuming narrative if it is attached to things that are mechanically valuable or important to them. Tomodachi Life relies on this a lot, too.
Another thing that the game will do is hide higher-cost, more-detailed assets inside systems which are mostly filled with lower-cost, skippable, shorter assets. The dream system is one of these. While some of the dreams just rely heavily on animating the 2D food and "treasure" assets across the screen, some of them feature interactive minigames. The funniest one has the dreamer imagining themselves and another character as spinning tops in a Beyblade-style arena... while full-sized versions of these people stand to the side and stare at themselves spinning. Hiding an absurd, high-cost asset in here is very funny!
There's also a lot of variation in the presentation (and likely development cost) of the minigames. About every 15-20 mins, the characters will offer you an opportunity to play one or more minigames. I usually get 2 minigame offers at once, timed closely together. Most of them are simply guess-the-item quizzes - guess the item based on silhouette, guess the item based on a zoomed-in section of the image, guess the MISSING item from this group of silhouetted items, etc. Most of these quizzes use the same UI. They all recycle the 2D food and treasure assets.
However, every once in a while, a character in the restaurant may surprise you with a more elaborately lit and animated coin-cup game. This only has happened to me so far when a character in the restaurant got the "minigame alert" icon.
Here's the context of the meet-cute I described in my previous post - clicking on Gollum just as he was walking towards Ms Marple. The game immediately queued up a narrative event which took advantage of the fact that they were walking toward one another, and played a "fall in love with someone you bump into on the street" cutscene at me. Here's the restaurant, with the corner they collided at to the left. Gollum hasn't approached yet:
Here's the meet-cute. It feels very seamless thanks to the heavy use of backdrop images... but you can see that it is actually putting some shots in the level at the point of the collision.
Here's the physical aftermath. Characters are right back in the world where the event occurred. You should note that this event procced even though Gollum was walking "with" Ripley when I clicked on him - the event ran in such a way that it interrupted the pawns' assigned task to walk to the restaurant together.
Characters in unidirectional or bidirectional relationships can also proc story events which do NOT progress the relationship. Here's an event I got while clicking on Gollum while he was walking behind Ms Marple, after he'd fallen in love.
This event likely only triggers while they're near one another, but I'm left wondering if their heading plays a role - the crush-ee is not facing the crush-er. Of course, the player needs to be focused on the characters to get this event to trigger. Most of the time, these seem to occur when I click on the relevant pawns, but it's also occurred when my camera has recently locked in on them.
I love the relationship diagram UI - whenever a group of Miis are near one another, the game will overlay a diagram of relationships between up to four characters at the top of the screen. Here's one for a group of acquaintances:
And here's one for the looped love triangle between Gollum, Marple, and Mayor Mamdani:
There is a "lovesick daydream" system that I do not have amazing screenshots of... but it involves numerous cutscenes where characters imagine themselves and their crush wearing matching sweaters and hanging out in saccharine lovey-dovey-couples situations. It usually ends up with the character sitting alone in their room, on the floor, and saying this:
Characters who are in love will sometimes also scream at the ocean about this. I once had three recently-rejected Miis wandering the island at once, and they all ended up at the ocean in different spots, and all started screaming at it. They all asked the same question: why doesn't Gollum love me?? Unfortunately I do not have a picture of this - I ran out of screenshot space - so here's a picture of Gollum screaming at the ocean about his love for Ms Marple. (This is why he won't date Sun Tzu, Aragorn, or Mamdani.)
There's an image filter the game uses to depict food, treasures, and people in the clouds. Of course they reuse this effect in many different cutscenes. It's another example of really wringing every drop out of their art. Admirable shit, and very funny:
At a certain point everyone began falling in love with Gollum.
I told Sun Tzu to NOT pursue Gollum, since there was too much competition... he agreed not to the first time, but later had a second meet-cute proc where he fell in love even harder.
I think it's a brilliant decision for this game to offer the player so little control over the pawn behavior - and even to sometimes push back really hard against what the player wants to happen. I think this chaotic friction is necessary for the game to distinguish itself from stuff like Animal Crossing and The Sims. The game is not a dollhouse designed to satisfy your fantasies - it's a dollhouse designed to shock and confuse you and make you laugh!
I'll finish up by saying that I missed screenshotting the funniest event I've procced so far. I'd run out of screenshot space and was unable to record it!! So I'll describe it here.
I added Aragorn to the game so that I could have a character to test techniques for making someone HATE Gollum. There were a lot of characters falling in love with him, and it was getting a little chaotic. I wanted to make a character explicitly for testing how to make people hate each other.
Well, Aragorn fell in love with Gollum the first time they met.
Gollum has been hiding his love for Ms Marple for hours and hours. He barely interacts with her - just yells at the sea about it. But Aragorn I guess had some character traits that made him leap to confessing his love to Gollum immediately. I told him not to, and the game extremely hlariously had him say "what? I wasn't listening!" and then immediately launch into a proposal cutscene.
But he wasn't the only one in love with Gollum. Mayor Mamdani and Sun Tzu were also chasing Gollum down, so they all confessed their love to Gollum simultaneously. Gollum rejected all three of them at once.
The choreography and blocking of the cutscene was uniquely set up for three suitors at once, which I found extremely funny and cool. This game has so many weird little events, and so many variants of each event, and there are so many ways to trigger these moments all over the island and within the context of so many different locations, ground tile arrangements, etc. It's great. I love a good systemic narrative!! This one really leans into forcing the most chaotic moments possible. I'm curious whether the game actually weighted events so that Aragorn would propose immediately in order to trigger the most chaotic proposal possible. I would absolutely die to see how this system works on a granular level and look at, like, all the event triggers for this stuff.
I hope these screenshots make it clear what a great example this game is for people working in narrative design. It does some things cheaply, but it spends a lot of effort on the highest-impact stuff. In a systemic narrative, this is what you want to be doing!!