Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a fun, light-hearted life simulator where you can control a flock of Miis – humanoid beings – as they go about their day. As you control these tiny people and allow them to make friends, you’ll ‘level them up’ and be able to assign specific quirks to better define their personalities.
One of the available quirks… is that your character can be flatulent.
According to a new in-depth developer interview, this particular quirk was the subject of ‘big debate’ at Nintendo.
Tomodachi Life: the great fart debate – quick links
Living the Dream’s strangest quirk
As shared by developers Takaomi Ueno, Ryutaro Takahashi, Toru Minegishi and Daisuke Kageyama, each developer brought their own sensibilities and ideas to the development of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. They also had their own ideas about which personality quirks would make it into the game.
‘The 16 personality types from the first game are still there with their characteristic phrases and movements. But we felt that alone wasn’t enough to represent all the personality types,’ Takahashi said of the game’s development process.
‘Things like “loud voice,” “light eater,” or “sleeps restlessly”. If we forced those quirks into the 16 personality types, you’d end up with a Mii that doesn’t feel like the person you intended to create. So we thought if players could add in those details themselves, they could have fun creating Mii characters that feel even closer to the people they’re based on. That’s how little quirks came about.’
Giving players freedom was key, both to make the game’s quirks feel interesting and layered, and to ensure players could create characters with intention.
Discussing the game’s quirks, Takahashi dropped the bombshell: that being able to ‘break wind’ was actually a major source of debate within Nintendo.
Should your Mii be able to break wind?
‘Some people found it hilarious, while others thought it was a bit vulgar,’ Takahashi explained.
‘After talking it over, we ended up making it a little quirk. If it’s your kind of thing, you can bestow the trait on your Mii. If not, you’re under no obligation.’
Per Minegishi, once the team decided on including farts as a personality quirk, they then had to put in the work to get them just right – and in fact, they tested many sounds before landing on the version that appears in the game.
‘While we’re on the subject, we really obsessed over getting the sound just right,’ Minegishi said.
‘We did so many retakes,’ added Ueno.
Some takes were reportedly a bit too realistic for a game as cartoony as Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, so it became an iterative process.
‘We tried out all sorts of visual effects, too,’ Kageyama said. ‘For a while, the fart effect looked like an explosion going off.’
As outlined, part of this debate was a result of the game’s long development cycle. Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream was in development for around nine years, and so it includes ‘nine years’ worth of ideas’ crammed in, Takahashi said.
It turns out that’s a long time to work on any game, and that the lengthy period of development may just have inspired some of the wilder, weirder ideas we see in the final release. Given the humour and tone of the game, it’s exactly the approach that’s served it well.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is, of course, about living your life.
As much as we try to avoid it, farts are a natural part of living, too.
Also on ScreenHub: Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream review – a dollhouse of tiny dramas
Life on Marvel Island is grand. Life on Marvel Island is sweet. New citizen Loki appears to have made everyone angry by being awkward and snippy in dialogue, and Bucky is pining after his new love Ava, but everything is perfect. In Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, you really are living the dream.
Nintendo’s latest foray into the life simulator genre is an odd one by nature, following in the footsteps of Tomodachi Life games of the past. Like its predecessors, it presents an idyllic and surreal dollhouse-like world where you can create Miis – funny, humanoid characters – and click them together like action figures, to create drama and romance.
Read more …
