Miitopia the Parent Review: World building madness

A ways back, the Miitopia demo dropped and I was hyped. I loved the original on the 3DS and was really looking forward to revisiting it and experiencing the new things that were added. Then my kids got ahold of the demo and…madness ensued.

My kids couldn’t get over the game. My seven-year-old loved the fact that there was full control over the story allowing you to make every character in the game. My five-year-old was a fan of making insane nightmare Miis and watching them interact with each other. Needless to say, the need for this game became so real that I ended up having to get three copies.

The more I play it the more I realize that Miitopia might be the perfect game for developing kids.

In Miitopia, there is a dark lord who is stealing the faces of everyone in the kingdom and using their energy to power his evil creatures allowing him to overthrow the land and cause chaos. The people who lose their faces just stand around confused and expressionless. They don’t actually get hurt.

Your hero and your team are tasked with heading out and putting a stop to it rescuing as many people as possible along the way. Every enemy has a part of someone’s Mii face on them and defeating the enemy releases the part which finds it’s way home. It’s not as horrifying as it sounds and often it’s adorable. Like large boulders that happen to have a nose sticking out of the front.

The joy of Miitopia comes from the “Mii” aspect. You make your character and team from scratch. Set a personality and then give them a job. Tradition jobs like thieves and mages and unconventional ones like pop stars and chefs.

But then it keeps going. Early on you enter a town but before you enter the town you get a break down of EVERY character that lives in the town. The old woman who runs the store, the “lovey-dovey” couple ignoring the world around them, the town jerk, the mayor, everyone.

From there, using those details of their personalities you then build THEIR characters.

The old lady that ran the store became Betty White. The lovey-dovey couple became Meghan and Harry. The town jerk? Ted Cruz. And I entered into the town and these characters acted exactly like I wanted them too. Meghan and Harry just keep going on about each other, Mayor Quimby was trying to absolve himself of any blame this could give him, and, almost immediately after trouble showed up, Ted Cruz, true to form, started talking about going on vacation.

But this happens everywhere in the world. Before you approach a castle, you have the four guards described to you. When you get INTO the castle, you have the king, princess and other members of the story described to you allowing you to put your own characters in.

My kid’s favorite moment from watching me play was when the villain was introduced and I, taking out a solid year of getting both my kids through distance learning and the constant YouTube their teachers play, took great joy out of making the villain a giant, evil, Jack Hartmann.

Now that my kids have been playing the full version of the game, they’ve been getting so much excitement from watching the characters they’ve created act out scenes for them. And over the course of the game it inadvertently teaches some really solid lessons that my kids needed to grasp.

For example, when you’re not battling your way through dungeons or talking to people in town you end up at an Inn. During this time you can send two of your characters out to go hang out together. Go fishing, see a movie, get coffee, stuff like that. This improves their bond and as they learn to get along together better they learn a slew of important moves and team-up attacks.

Likewise, in battle a lot of the status ailments, instead of things like poison or burnt, it’s things like distracted or angry. These can work the same way as traditional ailments where distracted makes it hard to hit an enemy and being angry might cause your character to just not do what you want them to do. Instead of using a turn to give them an antidote, you, instead, put them in time-out behind the party where they sit for a bit and cool down.

Having better bonds with your teammates might cause one of them to hop back there for a minute and try to soothe them which heals them immediately.

A lot of these bonding moments are done via hundreds of randomly generated moments. For example, I have two characters in my party who are based off my kids. I sent them to a coffee shop so they got along better and they immediately got into an awkward moment as neither brought money.

And by setting your character’s personalities they really shine. My kids got a kick out of adding characters like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes or HiLo from the popular children’s books into their game and watching them battle enemies.

All of this is done in a game where the story never gets to dire, always keeps the humor heavy and, even though you fight, the battles are never violent or scary. Enemies just pop like bubbles when defeated and faces glisten and fly off into the sky to find their way back to their original owners.

My kids have been obsessed with this game like no other. With the funny story, the recipe for random events to occur and a very easy yet exciting battle setup I can’t recommend this game enough for parents.

Side Note: If you’re looking for a bunch of extra costumes for your kids to mess with and have some Amiibos laying around, check out my article here to see what all you can unlock.