Miitopia Review

When resting at an Inn you’ll be able to spend your hard earned gold on new upgrades for your team, feed them stat-increasing foods and even play games of chance with any tickets you may have come across. The most important element, however, is shacking your teamates up together so they’ll increase their social bonds. As this rank levels up your party will help each other out and team up on attacks, so it’s important to have a party that likes each other. Anyone who’s played Tomodachi will be right at home with this set up, and it’s where the game most echoes its spiritual predeccesor. Everything that happens in an inn room is just as madcap as the apartment block that preceeded it – a great thing, for those not in the know.

Adventuring does start to become a little repetetive about ten hours in – your adventure routes are the same routine over and over, and even battles stopped challenging me once I had high end gear and a team that continiously saved each other from harm. Luckily, you can auto-battle your way through every fight when you’re feeling overlevelled and speed through the on-the-road sections by holding down a button, which definitely helped alleviate the tedium. Also, Nintendo have a keen sense of when to put in a big story beat, asking you to assign roles and watch your mayhem play out just as your attention starts to flag. It doesn’t get rid of the repetition entirely, but it helps.

Presentation:

Miitopia definitely excels when it comes to its visuals. Everything looks very pretty, with backgrounds boasting a painterly look and the map screen being a delight, but more importantly is the top-notch design work. In your first few hours you’ll come across a few of the game’s many enemy types and you’ll see what I mean: RPG tropes such as Golems and Banshees are present, but are so full of character that they instantly set themselves apart from the pack. The Goblins are a great example, as they hop around in an increasingly uncomfortable manner – honestly, I was creeped out by them. Even beasts that are usually devoid of character, such as Slimes, are at least boasting the face of a stolen villager to get a laugh.

The music is also really great. It’s weird and wacky, as you’d expect from a game like this, but the tunes are all cute and hummable. The main menu music that sings at you in inane sounds reminded me of Locoroco in all the right ways, and the little faces that dotted the I’s of Miitopia completed the effect. Also, there’s a load of aural comedy derived from sound cues, all of which is brilliant and, if you’ll forgive the pun, hits the right notes.

Conclusion:

“Miitopia” is a game that has no right being as great as it is. I didn’t think taking the freeform comedy of Tomodachi and forcing it into a more convetional game, let alone a genre as stiff and rigid as an RPG, would ever work, but Nintendo have proven me wrong. It can get a little repetetive at times, but Miitopia never lets you be bored for long, throwing weird jokes or hilarious storylines at you to keep you invested. It’s a surprisingly brilliant mix of ideas that really elevates it above its oftentimes boring peers, and if you own a 3DS and a sense of humour you really owe yourself to give this one a try.