Miitopia is far less than the sum of its parts

About 3 months ago I got sick and played through Miitopia. I said at the time that I was going to post a blog about the game but never got around to it, until a FAKE IMPOSTER @imunbeatable80 showed up and challenged me. I simply had to defend the honor of imunbeatable80, who no longer comes to these forums because he finally discovered the greatest game and now he can’t stop playing Billy Hatcher long enough to post. RICS, buddy (Rest in Chicken Suit.)

So why is Miitopia such a mess?

Let’s start with what Miitopia is.

Miitopia, originally released on 3DS (which is important) is sort of half a goof-off Mii game like Tomodachi life and half baby’s first RPG. The premise is that it’s a JRPG where Miis you create (or already have on your system) play all the important roles, from heroes and party members to NPCs to even the big bad villain. It’s a cute idea and was clearly a follow up to the 3DS Streetpass Find Mii games, but expanded out into the scope of a full game. Sort of.

The tone of the game is decidedly tongue in cheek, with the villain being an evil overlord who steals people’s faces, rendering them kind of blank faceless zombies, and your character tasked with going out to save the faces and rescue the blighted land. It plays as a simplified JRPG, with a Mario 3 style worldmap denoting locations and then each location being a linear path with or without branches consisting of a set number of encounters. Mostly you fight enemies but sometimes you might find a treasure chest, and in between battles you have random events like your party members having a bit of a falling out or finding some money or something. It’s sort of simple, mindless, fun. In combat you only control your character directly but since you get to decide the class of other characters when you recruit them you can mostly build a party that fights how you want, though it can be frustrating when a non-controlled character does something stupid like wastes resources or fails to heal when they should (though you have the ability to take characters out of combat to heal them up in a kind of weird system that mostly works.) But combat is simple and easy enough that it’s not a huge issue.

Party management is also somewhat simplified, though in a strange and frustrating way. This, as well as the aforementioned vignettes while exploring, is where the Tomodachi life aspect comes in. After every area you go to an inn where you put your party members into rooms together and they have little wordless stories that affect them in some way, mostly improving their relationship. You also get the option to send them out to buy equipment if they’re in the mood, or play a little minigame. The annoying part is that because you don’t really directly control much of this it can be tough to get the equipment you want, and sometimes party members will just get angry at one another and force you to resolve their spat, which makes the game feel more like being a kindergarten teacher than someone on an epic quest.

So the game is sort of a lighthearted intro to JRPGs with a little bit of randomized storytelling added in, right? It doesn’t sound so bad. And it’s not. For the first area. After which you get to the game’s biggest issue, and the following is a SPOILER so be warned if you want to go further.

Seriously, SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT.

I AM NOT JOKING ABOUT THE SPOILERS.

Okay, so after you defeat the boss of the first area….the evil overlord steals all your party members and you lose your power and start over from ground zero. You do get to choose a new class and you still have some stuff left over from your first adventure, but it’s basically like starting a whole new game. You meet new party members, class them, power them up etc… The problem is that the game has already shown you most of the stuff it has going for it. The story is not intended to be taken seriously and isn’t some joke a minute yuk-fest like Paper Mario, the combat is simplistic and doesn’t change a lot, and while there are new areas and enemy types and all that, it’s all pretty much the same. And the game will do this twice more before you finally in the last area get to gather together all your party members into one unit. It’s almost like being forced to play the same game 4 times, with a few changes that feel like window dressing. And even worse the random Tomodachi Life events start repeating way before it’s over. It quickly goes from kind of amusing to flat out exhausting.

It feels like the people who were structuring the game didn’t understand what kind of game it would be. This is a light and frothy half-parody title, not an epic RPG adventure. Why is it longer than the recent Dragon Quest 1 remake? Why didn’t they do more to introduce wrinkles into the combat? Why? Why?

Now you could argue that this is a baby game for kids, and should be judged as such, but the thing is…there’s some very adult adjacent stuff in there. One of the party jobs is a cat, and to heal party members the cat rubs herself against them like a real cat does, but watching a Mii catgirl do that feels very much like somebody’s fetish. The entire cat class just feels weirdly furry-like to me. And even worse is the imp job, which could best be described as PG succubus, with skills like Naughty Pitchfork, Punishing Pitchfork, Butt Jab, and Sweet Whispers. It’s nothing too over the top but it doesn’t feel like it’s the kind of thing in a game actually aimed at 6-year-olds.

Additionally this game was clearly designed for a system with street pass, where you might have dozens of miis from friends and strangers, especially if you’re in school or college. On the Switch there’s just no way most people have enough Miis to fill out the roster, and while the NPCs have defaults you are expected to make all your characters, and the game feels kind of empty with Miis who don’t represent anyone. It seems like something should have been done to make this work better on Switch, but it wasn’t.

In the end Miitopia just feels like a project at odds with itself. It doesn’t know what it wants to be and so it kind of isn’t anything, except a mess. If it were shorter and didn’t keep forcing you to restart from scratch it could be a decent light-hearted short into RPG for beginners. If it were a little more kid-friendly in its themes it could be an okay game for children. If it had a stronger story to pull you through you could tolerate the restarting gimmick. None of the elements on their own is unforgivable but they simply do not work together. It’s one of those games that raises the existential question of “Why am I doing this with my time?” and it has no answer. On 3DS maybe the answer is “I’m on a bus and I need something simple to play where I can put my classmates into the game to laugh at it” but that doesn’t really work on Switch.

When I started playing Miitopia it felt like a good, breezy, sicktime play. But it's so long and boring I had recovered far before I finished, and it was a serious slog to get through to the end. There are some fun moments and good ideas, but it's a formless mess that doesn't just fail to cohere but has aspects that repel one another. It's not the worst game I've ever played but it has the worst ratio of conception to execution. It is a very well executed version of a totally incoherent idea.