Miitopia Review — Eyes Without a Face

After I reviewed Miitopia on 3DS in 2017, I wasn’t terribly impressed. The sport was boring, simplistic, and felt so random that I barely felt like I used to be enjoying it. However, as we’ve realized through the years, video games may be improved considerably from their preliminary launches, and I figured {that a} Swap remake of Miitopia could be the proper alternative for Nintendo to repair the issues of the 3DS launch. Sadly, whereas there are notable enhancements, the core sport continues to be the identical tiresome, repetitive expertise from 4 years in the past.

Miitopia is a sport the place you’re taking created Mii characters–based on your self, family and friends, celebrities, fantasy characters, whoever–and “solid” them as participant and NPC characters in a easy RPG story. The Darkish Lord of Miitopia is ruining the peace and stealing the faces of the populace, so it’s as much as you and your merry band of adventurers to gear up and put a cease to his wickedness, with loads of goofy character interactions and dialogue snippets alongside the way in which.

It’s a cute and enjoyable idea, and to Miitopia’s credit score, the Swap model of the sport incorporates a absolutely revamped character creator that allows you to go all-out with creating extremely detailed Mii characters by layering totally different hair, eyes, facial options, and extra shapes. It takes time to make a very spectacular Mii, however should you’re prepared to place within the effort, you may make some astounding creations. In the event you don’t have that type of time, you should use Miis made by different gamers by coming into their Entry Code or decide from a choice of at the moment fashionable Miis. It’s a bit cumbersome not with the ability to search in-game for particular characters (it took me far too lengthy to discover a good Hank Hill) however with some on-line sleuthing on social media you need to have the ability to discover some good created-character libraries.

When you’ve bought a bunch of Miis assigned to numerous roles, it’s time to set off on the journey. You meet the Darkish Lord, get advised you’re the chosen hero, and rapidly begin to amass a celebration to conquer evil from the land. The visuals and general tone of the dialogue arrange Miitopia as a tongue-in-cheek, comedic tackle RPG tropes, and it succeeds fairly properly on this entrance: it’s nice to take a look at, has numerous cute animations and shiny colours, and the snappy, quip-laden dialogue is of the prime quality we’ve come to anticipate from first-party Nintendo titles. The visible overhaul for the Swap model is superb, including extra element and thrives with out shedding the simplistic appeal of the unique 3DS graphics.

Sadly, all of that appeal begins to soften away when you begin digging into the precise gameplay. Miitopia’s fight and exploration are simplistic to a fault. Exploration consists of auto-running by way of an space and, sometimes, making a option to comply with a path or study an object like a treasure chest. While you encounter enemies, you’ll be thrust right into a turn-based battle… the place nearly all selection of what to do in fight is stripped from you. As a substitute, your social gathering members, apart from your important character,, are CPU-controlled. You possibly can’t even give them normal directions like “assault the identical enemy” or “deal with spells’, they simply do what they need, typically losing assets and letting their “wacky” character quirks take heart stage as a substitute of dispatching foes effectively. Because of this, you spend extra time passively watching fights and exploration occur than truly doing something, and no quantity of cute dialogue could make up for the truth that your high-damage mage simply wasted a flip sleeping–again. A brand new addition to Swap Miitopia’s fight is a horse who will generally allow you to journey it and do particular assaults, however solely generally. Like a lot of the sport, it’s frustratingly random.

However maybe you’re not right here for an in-depth RPG expertise. Possibly you simply wish to watch your entire cute little Mii creations have foolish dialogue exchanges whereas touring and preventing and getting all pleasant after they room with one another. That’s completely wonderful. The issue is the character-interaction component of the sport isn’t all that nice both. You encounter inns incessantly when exploring, and by placing characters in the identical rooms collectively, you possibly can construct their relationships. Higher relationships allow them to study new fight abilities and assist one another out in fights. You can even use tickets earned from treasure chests and enemy drops to go on “outings” with chosen characters to locations just like the seashore, the films, and karaoke, the place you’ll see a brief skit and watch their closeness ranges rise. Nevertheless, many of those skits and dialogue bits start to repeat, rapidly lessening their attraction. You can even select to feed your social gathering members and ship them on purchasing expeditions, which, once more, are topic to irritating random components: You don’t know if characters will like meals till they eat it (dislikes equal lesser stat features), and generally when characters buy groceries, they received’t purchase the factor they supposed to.

In the end, past character-making and really base-level choices, what occurs in Miitopia feels fully out of your management, and what you can management in the end feels simplistic and unfulfilling. So when the dialogue and character interactions begin to put on skinny, you wind up with an RPG that turns into fairly boring after only a few hours. And Miitopia does little so as to add problem or selection to this very fundamental method as the sport progresses, aside from merely regressing you again to Stage 1 with a brand new class and making you re-recruit social gathering members at sure story factors. What’s significantly irritating is that these had been all points with the unique 3DS sport that might have been addressed within the Swap remake.

Miitopia winds up being little greater than a terrific character creator connected to a very easy sport that, whereas charming in its visuals and dialogue, is a principally passive expertise. Watching you recreate your favourite fictional character ships in-game or preventing Evil Man Fieri has some transient attraction, however as soon as these preliminary chuckles fade, Miitopia is disappointingly shallow. I’m certain there’s a terrific RPG but to be made the place you possibly can staff up with Mr. T, Goku, and Troy McClure to battle evil, however Miitopia just isn’t that sport.