Miitopia

It’s been a little over ten years since the launch of the Nintendo Wii and along with it, Miis.  Back then they were basically just a personal avatar but over time they became actual playable characters in games such as Wii Play, Wii Music, and Wii Sports Resort.  From there they began to make appearances in other games for the Wii and Wii U, and then becoming playable characters in games such as Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros.  Then came Tomodachi Life which was basically The Sims but for Miis.  While I did enjoy Tomodachi Life when I did my review on it a couple of years ago, it did start to get pretty repetitive over time.  I wanted to do more with my Miis.  I wanted to take them on some sort of adventure, fight monsters, and have them grow more as…well, people.  Welcome to Miitopia!

The game begins with a character known as the Dark Lord stealing the faces from several people in a town…no seriously, he just makes their faces fly right off.  It’s actually kind of original.  The faces eventually find themselves trapped in various creatures throughout the land and some of them even being the creature’s face itself.  With the town in peril and the Dark Lord wreaking havoc throughout the land, it’s up to you to put a stop to it…and when I say “you”, the game literally means “you”.  One of the big draws to Miitopia is that the Miis in the game are, for the most part, randomly chosen from Miis that have been created over time.  When it comes to you, your party memebers, and other main NPCs, you can choose to create a Mii from scratch, have one randomly chosen for you, or even use Miis from your friends list and Tomodachi Life.  That’s one of the things I really like about this game; you can literally play as yourself in an RPG.

Miitopia plays somewhat like a traditional RPG.  I say somewhat because while a lot of the elements of an RPG are present, they’ve been pretty simplified.  To start with, you have a world map you use to decide which area to travel through, though it's not free roam and is more akin to Super Mario Bros. 3, which is fine.  However, in each area you basically have no control over movement; you automatically move through the area until you come across some sort of encounter be it with an enemy, treasure chest, a fork in the road, or some random conversation between party members (more on that later).  When you come across an encounter you only have control over your main character; other party members act on their own.  Essentially they’re always set to auto-battle.  Interesting seeing as how there’s an auto-battle function for your character.  However, this auto-battle functionality is kind of an annoyance at some points during the game which I’ll point out as we go.

When you create a character you have several class choices to choose from.  Four are your typical RPG classes such as warrior and cleric, but two are kind of odd: pop star and chef.  Later on you get access to several more classes that seem even stranger than those.  You can also choose a personality for your character that affects them in battle and most of them are beneficial, but one or two can actually be a hindrance.  For example, I initially had my Mii set to being cautious to see what that did.  What it did was make my character occasionally not attack the enemy, but just backing off of it.  Thankfully you can change a party member’s personality at any time while not in battle in case you don’t like the drawbacks of the one you chose.

As your character defeats enemies and gain XP, they’ll eventually level up and gain new abilities depending on their class, and this is the first instance of the auto-battle function being a bit of a nuisance.  While you have complete control over what your character does, you have absolutely no control over your other party members.  The game kind of chooses the best action for the situation but sometimes it’s kind of questionable.  For instance, I’ve had battles where I can easily overwhelm the enemies left with normal attacks, yet the AI decides to use a bunch of MP to completely overkill something with only a couple of HP left.  There is one good thing about that though: HP and MP refill after each stage, but that also leads into another minor nitpick I’ll get into in a bit.

Something that Miitopia has in common with Tomodachi Life, aside from being to use characters from the latter in Miitopia, is relationships between characters.  After most stages your party will find an inn that they’ll sleep in for the night and refill their HP and MP.  When you put two party members in a room together they’ll begin to develop a friendship/relationship.  Each level of their relationship unlocks a new team ability that will randomly occur during battle such as “showing off” to the other character to increase the damage dealt for that turn, or having the two team up on an enemy.  This is something that I really enjoyed.  You can change up who stays in what room with who and build multiple relationships, but at the same time I kept wanting to see how far it can go.  At the same time though, multiple relationships means that eventually you can have anyone pull off a team ability with anyone else.

When you’re at an inn you have a couple of things you can do.  One of these is to feed your party to increase their stats.  As you win battles you’ll find food you can give to your party and each character has certain food that they like and hate.  If they dislike or hate something they won’t get as much of a bonus, while foods they like or really love will give more of a bonus.  You can also spend any gold you find…but this is another thing that simplifies the game.  Occasionally a character might want to buy something such as food, a weapon, or armor.  Instead of just going to a shop to buy stuff you have to give your Mii the amount of money they need and they’ll go and buy the item…most of the time.  Occasionally they’ll come back with something completely different, and you will get refunded the difference, but it’s annoying to know that there’s a small chance you won’t be able to upgrade your gear until the next inn.  You also can’t sell anything you don’t want any more to get gold.  This might be because once you get a weapon or gear, you can switch the look of the gear to anything you’ve already purchased without affecting your overall stats, in case you liked how a previous item looked.  It still would have been nice to be able to sell what you don’t need.

As stated earlier, there is another nitpick that I have to mention: the game can seem kind of easy a lot of the time.  At various moments during the course of the game you’ll unlock something to help during battle, such as HP and MP sprinkles you can use during battle as long as you have some left (they refill when at inns) and a safe spot where characters can heal up and be cured of any special effects.  As you defeat enemies and rescue more faces you’ll begin to unlock even more bonuses after so many faces are rescued.  This combined with having everything refreshed after visiting an inn can make the game pretty easy…at least until the bosses.  I literally had auto-battle turned on for my character and just sat back and watched everything unfold rather easily, but then got massacred by a boss to the point I had to grind a level or two.  There is a point where things kind of refresh themselves so to speak, so it’s not like the entire game can be set to auto-battle as you just do nothing.

The more I played Miitopia the more it felt like another RPG that was released a long time back for the Super NES: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.  FFMQ was intended to be an introduction to RPGs for a western audience and Miitopia feels like an introduction to RPGS for a younger audience.  However, that’s not to say the game can’t be enjoyed by everyone.  The look and feel of the game is still pretty good and the music can be pretty catchy at times, and while the game can be easy for quite a bit of it, it still has a charm to it that kept me coming back and still keeps me coming back to it.  The game can be easy at times, sometimes too easy and simple, but still enjoyable even with the minor nitpicks I mentioned.  If you’re looking for a complex RPG, you won’t find it here.  However, if you want an RPG that’s simple while still being fun, especially for younger players new to RPGs, Miitopia is worth it.