Miitopia: A requiem for Nintendo's abandoned masterstroke, Street Pass
When the New 2DS XL ships at the end of July, it'll appear side-by-side with a pair of new games Nintendo announced last year and has only now given us a chance to try out: Hey, Pikmin! and Miitopia. I'm still not sure what I think of Hey, Pikmin!, which takes the exploratory 3D world of Pikmin and turns it into a sort of puzzle platformer — it seems solid, but so did last year's incredibly disappointing Chibi-Robo: Zip Lash at first glance.
Whatever my ambivalence about this Pikmin spinoff, though, I can say with certainty that Miitopia is right down my alley. Produced by the same team as Tomodachi Life, it feels in every respect like a culmination of Nintendo's 10-year ongoing experiment with Mii avatars and the gamification of system-level social features. And with the Switch maintaining Miis but dropping 3DS's addictive Street Pass and Miiverse features, Miitopia (perhaps unintentionally) serves as something of a swan song as well.
I can understand the why of Switch's abandonment of Street Pass. Much as I love that feature of 3DS — by far, my single most played entry in the system's Activity Log is Street Pass Games — the system's constant passive wireless polling did ugly things to the 3DS's battery life while in sleep mode. A 3DS with Street Pass running needs to be charged every couple of days, even if you don't actively play it; meanwhile, I can let Switch sit unused for a week (yes, that's right: I'm capable of going a full week without playing Zelda) and its charge level will still be above the halfway mark when you wake it. I appreciate not having to babysit the system and keep it plugged in at all hours; but even so, I can't shake the sensation that something precious has been lost as well.
Miitopia doesn't somehow bring those abandoned social features to Switch, but it does at least use the aging 3DS as a reminder of how weird and entertaining Nintendo's Mii-based projects have been. I was hooked on them from day one. I filled out my Wii's Mii plaza with maximum friend codes the first weekend the system was on the market and watched with fascination as the passive online Mii-swapping feature sent so many avatars to my console that it would sometimes sit seemingly dead for 10-15 minutes at a time, nearly overheating as it processed all the new additions to the plaza. Eventually, once I had several thousand Miis in my system, I had to shut off sharing for fear that I was going to give the poor console a literal meltdown.
There's not really much of Wii's shallow Mii world on display in Miitopia, though; instead, it draws on the refined and expanded additions that debuted on the 3DS. Miitopia takes the Find Mii mode of 3DS's Street Pass Games and turns it into a fully fleshed-out role-playing experience. In a lot of ways, it appears to be an intersection of three distinct 3DS releases: Besides Find Mii, it also shows considerable influence from Tomodachi Life (unsurprisingly, given that the same team worked on Miitopia), with a heavy dash of Genius Sonority's RPG trilogy The Denpa Men. Those Denpa Men similarities may be coincidental: Nintendo reps couldn't confirm whether or not Genius Sonority had any involvement in Miitopia. It could simply be that the Miitopia team drew on the same influences as The Denpa Men's creators, several of whom worked on the original versions of Dragon Quest VI and VII. You can also play those Dragon Quest games on 3DS, by the way, so whatever the actual lineage of Miitopia, it's very much a sort of culmination of many of the best things about the platform.
I've spent way too much time over the past six years playing Street Pass Games; I took Tomodachi Life a little too personally; and I enjoyed the Denpa Men games for what they were (inexpensive, lightweight RPGs). So Miitopia hits all the right notes for me.
And if Miitopia turns out to be Nintendo's last big, internal, first-party project for 3DS, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a more fitting denoument for the platform.
Like Find Mii, Miitopia presents players with an RPG based around Mii avatars they create or encounter. In this case, the premise has to do with an evil villain (who is also drawn from your Mii Plaza) stealing everyone's faces — that is, the distinctive, personalized aspect of Miis. So it's kind of insidious and kind of nonthreatening at once, a very lighthearted RPG with stakes about as big as you can reasonably ask for what amount to little thimble-shaped effigies of your friends. And, as in Find Mii, you venture forth with the help of other Mii avatars to take on the bad guy by journeying from one map point to the next. There's no free roaming on the overworld here, simply point-to-point automated walks during which you encounter randomized bad guys. These walks, incidentally, may remind you of the diorama presentation style of Bravely Default and Theatrhythm Final Fantasy... two other notable 3DS exclusives.
Where Miitopia begins to differ from Find Mii is in the particulars of your quest. For one thing, this is not a bite-sized experience designed to motivate you to acquire Street Pass tags. Rather than setting forth with whichever strangers you've come into contact with via Street Pass, you instead create a hero and begin developing a permanent party, one recruit at a time. Mii pals aren't meant to be disposable here; each party member has his or her own class, personality, stats, and equipment, and you build them up the same as you would in any other RPG. The demo I played topped out at a full party of four, but the sequences between combat excursions — which hearken closely to Tomodachi Life — suggest you may be able to create a larger guild and set out with different groups of four at a time.
Actually, it's worth explaining the non-combat sequences, since they have a significant bearing on character growth and the skills and equipment you carry into battle. Between adventures, your party rests at an inn. These sequences are depicted through a cutaway, dollhouse view that allow you to designate different team members as roommates, which allows them to bond. There was a bit of snickering at the press demo as effigies of two male Nintendo executives hung out together in a hotel room and little hearts appeared above their heads, but we're all grown-ups here. The more time two party members spend together in their off hours (regardless of their gender), the more likely they are to help out one another in a pinch.
There's a heavy element of automation in Miitopia's combat; again, Tomodachi Life producer Yoshio Sakamoto's team is probably drawing on classic Dragon Quest influences. Your party members will frequently unleash buffs and heal spells without being prompted... and as always seems to be the case with AI-enhanced companions, those palliative effects may come at times you'd rather they didn't, squandering magic points by healing characters who can still afford to soak up a couple more attacks. Players also have a certain degree of control over healing thanks to the oddly named "sprinkles" mechanic: You can pause combat at any time to perform a free action (that is, not tied to a character turn) wherein you wave what appears to be magical salt shakers over party members. This allows you to heal them, revive them, buff them and more regardless of turn order or MP — though your "sprinkles" have a limited stock and can only be replenished when sleeping at an inn.
Inns also allow you to invest cash in better gear for your team. In keeping with the simplified style of the game, you don't pick equipment from a shop but rather simply purchase the armor or weapons your party members daydream of upgrading to. And you can serve the party food that you acquire along your adventure route, with different meals granting permanent buffs to different statistics. Each Mii has his or her own tastes in food, and you receive more experience toward stat gains by feeding your characters according to their tastes. Like in Metal Gear Solid 3, you know, which also showed up on 3DS…
Despite the game's high of simplification, Miitopia doesn't feel brain-dead. Every quest is crammed with goofy little interactions between your party members, and the presence of more character classes than party member slots forces you to strategize. Just like in the original Final Fantasy... which, incidentally, got a 3DS remake in Japan. On top of that, combat doesn't simply let you breeze through; its stripped-down style and heavy degree of automation for you to remain on your toes, since things can go badly for the inattentive. Kind of reminds of Legend of Legacy in that regard... you know, the 3DS RPG from a few years ago.
In other words, Miitopia brings together a whole lot of different ideas from the 3DS's rich library of RPGs, social games, and life sims into a single unified work. It seems perfectly geared toward the younger audience that Nintendo wants to entice with the New 2DS XL... but I have a feeling I'm not the only old-timer who will probably end up playing it as well thanks to its ability to hit on so many different greatest-hits moments for the platform. In a lot of ways, it feels like the realization of all the interesting little diversions of Street Pass: 10 years of experiments distilled into a proper RPG. Not a bad sendoff — if indeed this does turn out to be the system's sendoff.
