Levelling up a relationship allows more support actions in battles like healing each other or reversing a status effect. Sleeping in a room together will bring your party members closer together – somewhat like what may or may not happen in real life. At the end of every adventure section you’ll come to an inn, and when you get there you choose which rooms your party members sleep in. Miitopia borrows a lot of the social interactions from fellow 3DS game Tomodachi Life. Casting my old flatmate as a granny was a particular highlight. It does have a huge cast so I struggled groups of friends to create and populate the world after the third chapter, but I never stopped laughing. If you play Miitopia, I would strongly recommend doing the same. I regularly found myself taking photos of my Switch screen to quickly share a hilarious event with the person the character was modelled after. I’m not a big screenshot person, especially on Switch, but I have hundreds of snaps taken from my time with Miitopia. Seeing my friend James fighting giant frogs dressed as a wizard, my podcast cohosts fighting over the love of a princess or my friend Dave cast as the Dark Lord never failed to make me smile.

This made everything that happened in the game that much funnier, adding a new layer of humour to the already pun-filled script.

My wife and son were cast as a mother and baby in the first town. Work colleagues from a previous job filled the desert town in the second chapter. Friends I’d made through recording my podcast filled the castle and its court. You can assign Miis for every single member of Miitopia’s cast, from your party members through to all the NPCs in the towns you visit, and even the game’s big bad, the Dark Lord. I chose to populate the game with Mii recreations of friends and family, often grouping them by how I knew them. Playing this game as an adult has a charm to it as well thanks to the Miis. There’s a lot of reading as none of the dialogue is voiced, but if you don’t mind reading to your child this would be an excellent early game for them to try. I’ve got an 18-month-old son, and I would absolutely be happy sitting down to play Miitopia with him in a couple of years. Some of you reading this might be thinking that this sounds like baby’s first JRPG, and honestly, you’re not very far off the mark.

Nintendo switch games miitopia