Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream gets an April release date after a wild and wonderful Direct

Nintendo had another Direct stream for one of their early 2026 games, putting the weird and wonderful world of Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream, which is now set to launch for Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 on 16th April 2026.

The weird, waking dream cousin to the comparatively sensible Animal Crossing, Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream gives you an island for you to populate with Mii characters and then act as their caretaker. There’s an element of The Sims where they will be able to wander around and find their own things to do and have their own desires, but it’s much less hands on.

It will start with creating your main character and other island residents, with the Mii character creator having been expanded for this game with new options such as face paint, eye-lights and more. You can also set each character’s dating preferences, and then determine some of their base personality. The intention is to create family and friends, but you can also fiddle with these options enough to create a teddy bear, for example.

With people on your island, they’ll sort of do their own thing, but you can prod and push them in a direction. Get two people to meet by picking one up and moving them nearby, and they’ll strike up conversation and probably friendship.  They’ll also have desires, so you can hand them food when they’re hungry, give them new outfits and more. Over time, you can mould the characters by giving them quirks, like funny walks, floating, signature greetings, different eating styles, catchphrases.

But then they can have suggestions for people who should meet and give an introduction, or they might develop a crush, fall in love after a typically silly meet cute, and then get rejected. Or confess their love in a situation that you give helpful suggestions for – obviously do it when you’re on a romantic ferris wheel, right? – and suddenly rivals show up for the character to choose between! Drama!

If you get characters to live together, you’ll get to check in on their lives and see how they’re hanging out, their personalities clashing and vibing. Maybe they fight over the TV remote, help each other cooking, or have house meetings.

The island will come to have a bunch of shops for helping you customise, including:

• Supermarket – With daily rotating food, like escargot
• Clothes Shop – Featuring day-to-day clothing and sillier fancy dress
• News Station – The home of MiiNews with bizarre Mii character insert stories
• Renovation Centre –  Choose room interiors such as modern minimalist, football stadium, or a fantasy forest
• Market Stall – Get great deals on items, or grab a mystery bag…
• Photo Studio – Pick your background and scene, choose the Miis to fill the spots and snap photos!
• Island Design Centre – Buy benches, flower pots, and much more to decorate your island. You can also expand the island and use this as a way to create a big metropolis, multiple joined land patches, and even giant portraits.
• Studio Workshop – Create pixel art patterns that can become item inserts for characters, from drawing a pet to latte art, TV backgrounds, clothes patterns, ground tiles, house exteriors and more.

After the original game on DS, Tomodachi Life was an off-beat hit for the Nintendo 3DS in 2013. There were other Mii-based spin-offs like Miitomo on mobile and Miitopia, but the main Tomodachi Life experience is now being revived after well over a decade, and on everything we saw in this Direct, it could be pretty darned great!