For as long as most gamers can remember, Nintendo has been a first party developer, only making games for their consoles and nobody else’s. That’s why Miitomo is such a historical event for them because it’s their first stab at mobile software. And it’s also the first time they’ve made a game on something else besides their own consoles since they ported their arcade classics like Donkey Kong and Popeye to everything under the sun back in the Atari and Colecovision days.  So since it’s so significant (and free-to-play), I decided to review Miitomo here at GamerDad!  (reviewed on iPad here)

Miitomo is pretty much just a reworked, scaled down version of Tomodatchi Life on the 3DS. In that game, you made a Mii of yourself and either put in your friends’ Mii characters or made your own and had them all live in an apartment on an island and interacted with each other in funny ways.  For instance, when I played, I brought in a Mii that looked like Princess Zelda, and my Mii and Zelda ended up getting married and even having a baby.  I named him Zelda Jr.  So yeah, pretty silly stuff.  Miitomo reminds me of that game, just scaled down and reworked a bit.

The first thing you do after downloading Miitomo is make your Mii character. You can do this like how you can on the Wii U or 3DS.  You can make it manually or take a picture and have the game approximate for you.  Or you can link the game to your Nintendo account and have it use that Mii, which is what I did.  Like Tomodatchi Life, Miitomo uses a similar speech software that makes your Mii character speak what you type.  Then your Mii will hang out in his or her little room and you can do a few things with it.

You can dress up your Mii in various outfits that you can buy in an in-game store. You get coins in the game by doing various things, and you can spend them at the shop for clothes.  Or you can use real money to buy more coins, but it’s pretty easy to get coins anyway, unless you just buy tons of outfits.  You can also earn game tickets you can use to play a Pachinko style game to get even rarer clothes, outfits, and accessories.

The other main thing you do in Miitomo is interact with friends. You can link Miitomo to social media like Facebook or Twitter to add your friends to it who are playing, or you can add them via face-to-face mode, which I haven’t tried yet.  Then either the game or your friends will ask and prompt questions for you to answer and share.  These questions run the gamut of general topics like what your favorite movie, game, or food is, to more personal queries like what kind of person you look for in a relationship.  You can read your friend’s answers and give them hearts (similar to ‘likes’), and post comments.

And that’s pretty much all there is to Miitomo. There are a couple of other little things you can do with it, but that’s pretty much the main gist of the application.  I probably wouldn’t have even downloaded it myself, but you can do things in the game that link to your My Nintendo account, which is the new rewards program Nintendo is using to replace Club Nintendo.  By doing things in Miitomo, buying Nintendo games digitally, and other online activities, you can earn coins that you can use to redeem rewards.  All of these are for downloaded games and items only.  I can understand why Nintendo would want to do everything online now, since it gives them more control and keeps people from taking advantage of it, and I imagine mailing out physical rewards was a logistics nightmare.  With that said, I still think My Nintendo won’t be as cool as Club Nintendo was, but at least Nintendo is doing SOMETHING to reward customers.  I’ve already redeemed points to download a My Nintendo exclusive game: a Picross game featuring Zelda characters, which I’ll review next time on this site.

So yeah, that’s Miitomo in a nutshell. While I don’t really give it much praise, I sure do make an effort to play it everyday, if only for a few minutes and then I only do it to get more My Nintendo points.  Plus it’s also significant in that it’s the only mobile game I’ve EVER linked to my Facebook account.  Luckily they don’t bombard your Facebook with posts and emails or anything like that.  For the most part, Miitomo is easy to use and inviting, like many of Nintendo’s other casual games that use Mii characters.  If you’re interested, you can download it for free on most mobile devices.  You might even see me on there!

Kid Factor:

Nintendo’s games are known for being mostly family friendly, and Miitomo looks that way on the surface. But in my opinion, I wouldn’t let a kid download this game unless they’re old enough to use Facebook and other social media.  You can accept friend invites from not only your Facebook friends, but friends of their Facebook friends, so you could potentially have people on your Miitomo list that you don’t really even know.  You are also free to type in anything you like, even curse words that your Mii character will read out loud, as well as other inappropriate things.  You can report any bad behavior to Nintendo, but I don’t know what they do with it as I don’t have that problem.  But then, I’m an adult and can handle those things myself.

Just to give you an example, one of the questions I got asked in Miitomo was what is the first thing I think of when I hear the word ‘ninja.’ I put down “Taki,” a female ninja character from the popular Soul Calibur series of fighting games.  Well, all the comments from my friends for this answer had to do with Taki’s rather large breasts in the game.  So yeah, definitely something to keep supervised if you let your kids play it.  Plus there are in-game purchases, too.  I may be a little overprotective, and your mileage may vary, but I probably wouldn’t let kids play this game unless they were an older, mature teen and up.

Tags: Game Reviews