Tomodachi Life
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40 free Tomodachi Life trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tomodachi Life turned Nintendo's Mii avatars into the cast of a strange little soap opera. Players fill an island with caricatures of relatives, classmates and celebrities, then watch them bicker, fall in love and belt out songs in synthesized voices. The 3DS game became a cult favourite, and its Switch sequel, Living the Dream, brought the series back after more than a decade away. This quiz covers the whole story: the DS original that never left its home country, the landmarks and odd habits of island life on the 3DS, the people at Nintendo who built it, the controversy around its Western launch, and what changed in the sequel. It is written for anyone who has spent an evening feeding picky islanders, and for Nintendo fans curious about how the series came to be. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Kept in Tomodachi Life's Western title for intrigue, the Japanese word "tomodachi" means what?
Friend
Friend is the literal meaning, and Nintendo kept the word abroad to make the game stand out. In Japan the 3DS game was sold as Tomodachi Collection: New Life.
Q 02Before making births automatic, Tomodachi Life's developers pictured married Miis having babies how?
Laying eggs
Laying eggs was an early idea, with babies hatching out, while a slowly growing belly was rejected as too graphic. In the finished 3DS game, babies simply arrive.
Q 03The name Mii, shared by every Tomodachi Life islander, blends a console's name with which word?
Me
Me plus Wii gives Mii, because the avatars usually stand in for the people holding the controller. They first appeared on Nintendo's motion-control console in 2006.
Q 04Which option, missing from Tomodachi Life despite a fan campaign, did Nintendo add in Living the Dream?
Same-sex romance
Same-sex romance arrived with the 2026 sequel, years after Nintendo apologised and promised a more inclusive follow-up. Each Mii's dating preferences are now set by hand.
Q 05Which HBO host mocked a Tomodachi Life controversy with cartoons pairing off Nintendo characters?
John Oliver
John Oliver used Last Week Tonight to spoof the row, showing Nintendo mascots as couples. The row had flared when Nintendo said the missing feature could not be patched into the 3DS game.
Q 06Tomodachi Life's North American website offered Miis of Christina Aguilera and which basketball star?
Shaquille O'Neal
Shaquille O'Neal and the pop singer were offered as QR codes on the North American site, each dressed in custom outfits. Scanning a code moved the star onto a player's island.
Q 07Reviewers often likened Tomodachi Life to which other Nintendo series that had a surprise hit on the 3DS?
Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing is the usual comparison, yet Tomodachi Life keeps the player outside the action as an all-seeing observer who never walks the island in person.
Q 08Which Nintendo series has a Tomodachi Life stage whose background Miis come from the player's console?
Super Smash Bros.
Super Smash Bros. turned the Mii apartment block into a fighting arena on the 3DS in 2014, with the handheld's saved Miis watching from the rooms. It came back in Ultimate.
Q 09Which Nintendo designer, long keen on player avatars, turned Tomodachi Collection's face maker into Miis?
Shigeru Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto saw the DS prototype and pushed to rework it as built-in software for the Wii. Many colleagues first judged the simple faces too crude.
Q 10Tomodachi Collection stayed in Japan largely because its Mii voice software could not handle which language?
English
English sounds proved too complex for a voice program built around Japanese speech. The producer suggested trying again on stronger hardware, and the 3DS sequel finally managed it.
Q 11Tomodachi Life's Miis speak real words, unlike the invented language of which rival life-sim series?
The Sims
The Sims gives its characters a made-up tongue, so one IGN reviewer praised the Miis' understandable speech for adding an extra layer of context to island gossip.
Q 12Time on a Tomodachi Life island runs in step with what?
The console's clock
The console's clock drives island time, so mornings and nights match the real day. Nintendo warns that changing it can block money collection for a day or two.
Q 13Living the Dream's sound director processed Tomodachi Life's realistic new Mii voices to sound how?
Robotic
Q 21Tomodachi Quest, a retro minigame in Tomodachi Life's amusement park, spoofs which video game genre?
Role-playing
Role-playing fights in the turn-based style of Final Fantasy pit a party of islanders against inanimate objects, including a Super Scope light gun.
Q 22Tomodachi Life opens with two jobs: naming the island and creating which special first Mii?
The player's look-alike
The player's look-alike is built to resemble whoever is holding the console, and it moves in as the very first resident of the Mii apartment block.
Q 23Which Nintendo 3DS game includes a seconds-long challenge based on Tomodachi Life?
WarioWare Gold
Robotic voices are a series trademark, so Toru Minegishi roughened the lifelike new speech engine on purpose. Too much realism, he found, stopped a character sounding like a Mii.
Q 14At which Tomodachi Life building do players create new Miis and scan QR codes to add islanders?
Town Hall
Town Hall is the island's office for making, editing and trading Miis, and its options menu hides the delete-save button. The population can grow to 100 from here.
Q 15In Tomodachi Life's reveal broadcast, Eiji Aonuma's Mii chats with which princess from his own series?
Zelda
Zelda appeared as a Mii so Nintendo could demonstrate islanders talking to each other. Mii caricatures of Satoru Iwata and Reggie Fils-Aimé also starred in the April 2014 video.
Q 16In Tomodachi Life's North American release, football replaced a minigame about which Japanese sport?
Sumo
Sumo gave way to gridiron during a localisation that took over a year. Nintendo also changed gestures and currencies so the islanders would feel like locals.
Q 17Which 2016 smartphone app, built by Tomodachi Life's lead developers, was Nintendo's first mobile release?
Miitomo
Miitomo had avatars trade answers to light-hearted questions and passed ten million downloads within a month. Nintendo shut the service down in May 2018.
Q 18In Tomodachi Life, grown-up children can travel to other players' islands through which 3DS feature?
StreetPass
StreetPass swaps data between consoles that pass each other in the real world, carrying a traveller to a stranger's island. Travellers then mail letters home about the trip.
Q 19In Tomodachi Life, a Mii handed its super all-time favourite food shows delight by doing what?
Flying into space
Flying into space is the reaction saved for the one dish a Mii loves most, while hated foods make it retch and add no happiness. Every islander's tastes are different.
Q 20At which landmark on a Tomodachi Life island do Miis gather each day to donate money to the player?
Fountain
Fountain gatherings work as a daily fundraiser, with residents chipping in cash that can be spent in the shops. Nintendo joked that every classy town has one.
WarioWare Gold shrank Mii island living into a challenge lasting a few seconds, one of more than 300 microgames in the 2018 release.
Q 24Which 3DS Mii adventure, in which a Dark Lord steals faces, can take in Miis straight from Tomodachi Life?
Miitopia
Miitopia borrows more than its cast: heroes bond between fights at inns, and party members who quarrel perform worse in combat.
Q 25The prototype that became Tomodachi Collection was first pitched as which kind of DS software for adult women?
Fortune-telling
Fortune-telling drove the 2005 pitch, which stored only names and birthdays until the team added a 3D face maker. That face maker became the basis for Nintendo's Miis.
Q 26Which hands-on feature of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream began as a debug tool for its developers?
Picking up Miis
Picking up Miis let testers force far-flung characters together on the roomier map. The team enjoyed nudging pairs to meet so much that the tool stayed in the game.
Q 27Which Nintendo veteran, known for directing Metroid games, produced Tomodachi Collection and its 3DS sequel?
Yoshio Sakamoto
Yoshio Sakamoto juggled the first game with Metroid: Other M, which stretched its schedule. He later said the delay gave the team room to try odd ideas.
Q 28Which Tomodachi Life staple was almost cut from Living the Dream until a younger designer objected?
Mii News
Mii News survived because the designer argued the sequel would not feel like the series without its bulletins. A shortage of time had nearly squeezed the broadcasts out.
Q 29Tomodachi Collection grew from a plan to remake, for adult women, a Game Boy Color game based on which anime?
Hamtaro
Hamtaro lent its name to a 2000 game in which young girls logged profiles of people close to them to measure compatibility. Female staff at Nintendo asked for a grown-up version.
Q 30Tomodachi Collection's face maker, forerunner of the Mii, drew on which Japanese face-arranging game?
Fukuwarai
Fukuwarai involves assembling a face from loose parts, and the DS prototype worked the same way. Letting users rotate, resize and shift each feature made its caricatures sharper.