Miitopia is a remaster from the 2023/17 Nintendo 3DS game developed by Grezzo and published by Nintendo. In Miitopia, an evil Dark Lord is stealing people’s faces and trapping them in monsters. Both you and your party must travel the planet, saving faces and stopping evil at each turn.
There are two geniuses of Miitopia. The first is that it’s an entire game based on Nintendo’s Miis. So each and every character hanging around, from yours to your party members, to the Dark Lord, towards the random townsfolk you encounter, are Miis. Therefore you can make every one of those characters from scratch, or download them from the internet or swap all of them with friends. The second genius is it is a very simple RPG with just enough mechanics to be both super available to new players to the genre while being entertaining for vets too.
Mii customization made a great progress way because the Wii, with seemingly so many choices for facial features. Yet, it truly hasn’t gone anywhere in ten years. The smoothness selection in Miitopia continues to be needlessly gendered. Even your horse hanging around requires a gender for whatever reason. And when you run from your own ideas and select from the most popular online, it’s basically all meme characters.
Nonetheless, having the ability to customize each and every character in the entire game completely is a huge deal. This means creating an entire world of your personal will. If you want to team up with your best friends to fight your bullies, do it now. If you wish to assemble your preferred Nintendo characters to conquer on your favorite memes, go ahead and. There are some really amazingly accurate versions of basically any character you can imagine available, and it’s quite fun attempting to make your own. Until it might be overwhelming since there are just so many characters to give faces to. I additionally wish the sport gave a little more of the description of who each character is in the game and just what role they play prior to making you decide on a Mii for them.
The gameplay itself straddles the line between too easy and just ideal for entry-level gamers. Despite being a turn-based RPG with a whole party system, you simply take control of your own main character. The other party members automatically operate. You can set yourself to autopilot too if you like, however the only decisions you will be able to create are your own, as well as the capability to put party members right into a safe zone or revive them when they’re nearly fallen. It takes away a lot of potential decision-making and gameplay, but it also makes it a really streamlined experience for those whom a more complex system will be a turnoff or barrier.
For your own character, you have typical standard attacks and magic-based attacks. You might also need the opportunity to pick from different jobs and personalities for every Mii who joins your party, which dictates their starting stats and which special moves they will learn as time passes. The actual, more important attribute and what makes Miitopia particularly strong, for me, is the relationship levels involving the party members. Your characters don't begin with substantial amounts of health, and enemies can certainly wipe you out in only two hits if you’re not careful. So this relationship aspect of the game is important to nurture, almost much more than all of your individual stats.
The game is broken into small levels in which you venture down a path, occasionally choosing a direction to go that may have tougher enemies or bigger rewards. Which means you go until you reach an inn, marking no more the amount and start of relationship-building time. Having Miis sleep together within the same room, happening outings together, and sometimes even just random events during levels will result in relationship growth. And with each relationship level between characters come additional skills. These skills range from showing off for your friend and doing more damage to jumping in front of a buddy who would die otherwise, to warning them to dodge, to joining in on their attack.
They’re all supremely useful in doing more damage and healing, especially because some moves increase relationship mid-battle, along with a relationship level-up leads to full HP and MP. Nurturing these stats is paramount to success in Miitopia even more than another two elements of the inn: buying weapon and armor upgrades from gold earned in battles and feeding Miis foods that improve their stats depending on how much that they like that food or otherwise.
Besides as being a fairly unique mechanic, I particularly appreciate the relationship system since it is the best lesson in balancing your team’s growth for brand new players to the RPG genre. The stats and upgrades matter, however their growth is relatively random depending on drops. The relationships are almost all your decision to develop. Because you only control one of your four party members’ moves, it might be simple for beginners to focus only on their own stats. But you can’t survive this game alone. You'll need a balanced party who all like each other a great deal to survive the increasingly difficult battles.
Miitopia is a straightforward RPG with some very un-modern character-creating mechanics. Whether you are charmed by Miis or otherwise is certainly your personal prerogative, however the gameplay is perfect for beginner RPG players using its concentrate on relationships involving the party members. Longtime RPG players alike could find a good time in its relative simplicity.
Miitopia is available now on Nintendo Switch.
