The reveal trailer for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream opens with a Mii sitting on a beach and letting one rip. Turns out that was not an accident. Getting that fart right took serious work.
A debate that started with "break wind"
In a new Ask the Developer interview published by Nintendo on Tuesday, the team behind the upcoming life sim shared more than anyone probably expected about the internal discourse surrounding flatulence. Director Takahashi confirmed there was a genuine split on the team: some developers found it hilarious, others thought it crossed into vulgarity. The compromise? Farting became an optional Mii quirk. You can give your Mii the trait if you want. If not, no pressure.
Here's the thing, though. Once the team decided farts were in, they did not half-commit.
When the fart looked like a grenade went off
Minegishi, one of the developers interviewed, said the team "really obsessed over getting the sound just right," and that they ran through so many retakes that one sound was flagged internally as "a bit too realistic." That alone is a sentence worth sitting with for a moment.
The visual effects went through their own troubled history. Developer Kageyama noted that at one point, the fart effect looked like "an explosion going off." The whole interview panel apparently broke into laughter recalling it, which suggests the early prototype was genuinely alarming.
info
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream has been in development for nearly a decade. Making Miis, pets, buildings, and other items fully customizable reportedly took six or seven years of that development window alone.
The fact that the reveal trailer leads with the polished final version of the fart effect suggests the team eventually landed somewhere they were happy with. Given how much iteration went into it, that tracks.
The bigger picture of a very long development
Farts aside, the Ask the Developer interview covered a lot of ground about what made this sequel such a long road. The developers initially considered redesigning Miis to look more realistic before concluding that realism actually made them less charming. The decision to keep them looking like the same blocky, expressive avatars fans have known for years was deliberate.
Drag-and-drop Mii interaction was also a surprise inclusion. It started as a debug feature, but the team got attached to it and kept it in. What most players miss is the detail that placing two Miis next to each other does not guarantee they will get along. The developers were careful to preserve the sense that Miis have their own personalities and make their own social choices.
For a game that many fans had written off entirely as abandoned, the depth of thought behind even the smallest systems is a good sign. The series has not had a mainline entry since the 3DS original launched in 2013 in the West, so the stakes for this one are real.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream launches this Thursday. For more on what's coming to Nintendo Switch, browse the latest gaming news to stay up to date before launch day.
