Look when you follow a lot of gamer YouTubers, you’re going to see and learn about some weird things. One of these things happens to be Miitomo, which to my understanding is a social Mii-dia (get it? I hope so because I’m going to make this joke 1000 times.) app for Nintendo, which I don’t understand. I thought the Miiverse was already their idea of a social mii-dia network, but apparently that’s just their equivalent of a Playstation Network but with way more eight year olds operating without parental supervision.
So to satisfy my curiosity, rather than doing some proper research from external sources, I decided to dive right in by getting the app myself and finding out about it from there. How’s that for investigative journalism? Eat your heart out, Pulitzer.
The first thing I got after the initial app download was a series of three questions and a loading screen. What is it loading? I have no idea. This is very exciting. What could this mii-sterious social mii-dea app hold behind these loading screens advising me to connect to the Nintendo network and reserve my battery life?
Ah. A Mii Creator. Excellent.
This seems like a great first step post-loading screen. Nintendo loves their Miis so their social mii-dia account should be focused on Miis. While there was a period in my life where I thoroughly enjoyed making Miis for fun, I’m feeling lazy right now so let’s test this ‘Use camera or photo’ option. If it’s anything like the Nintendo 3DS, we’re in for a real treat.
After deciding my hairstyle and hair color (which is sort of cheating tbh), I was attacked with a barrage of selfies. Instructions were unclear and I have no idea how to turn off the selfie machine gun so I just kind of let it take 10 pictures of me to form 10 Mii heads.
I would probably take more but I was frightened and a friend called me out because I did this act in a public setting. Getting called out for taking a selfie in public is always embarrassing, even if it is to create your perfect Mii.
You know what? I’m actually sort of impressed with this automatic Mii creator. At the very minimum, it’s a good base to create your own Mii. Personally I chose the most similar head (#9) and adjusted it accordingly to make it somewhat resemble me. I thought everything was said and done after designing the character, but holy wow. This social mii-dia app is intense. I had to choose the voice and the personality for my Mii and it was very detailed. Like down to the pitch and depth for the voice. It took me a little bit to get her to sound natural, but once I did the personality portion was easy enough and MaddMii was ready to enter the world of Miitomo with an easy-going, optimistic attitude.
Finally, after all of this, I figured out what the app was about.
Basically from what I can gather, a large portion of the app is dependent on friends. Thankfully, Miitomo helps you with this. You can automatically import all of your Twitter and Facebook friends into the app to discover who’s using it. Since it’s still new, not too many of my friends are on board. However, YouTuber Chadtronic was there to add me back almost right away so I could start messing around with the app.
Honestly…it’s kind of fun. It’s kind of like “Tomodachi Life” but with your actual friends
and their actual input on their Mii’s choices and lifestyles. I wasn’t expecting to spend the entire 40% of my battery life, but that’s just what I ended up doing as I answered questions and viewed my friends’ answers. I can see on others’ experiences with the app that you can take pictures with your Mii friends, but I have no idea how to do that yet.
Overall, this social mii-dia app is a surprise bundle of joy. It’s simple, it’s cute, and it’s free. While I don’t see it gaining any more prominence other than a cute little niche for Nintendo fans to interact with, I do see it becoming moderately successful as more users sign on for it. If you enjoy answering questions about yourself and finding out more about your friends, then this is an adorable app right up your alley. It’s tons better than the Miiverse with interactivity and the fact that it is accessible from your phone is a beautiful bonus.
Now off to charge my phone so I can keep spending all of my time on my new favorite social mii-dia site.
Be sure to add me as a friend by following me on Twitter. I’ll accept all friend requests, frankly because I need more moo-lah to buy more cute outfits. You want MaddMii to have more cute outfits, right? Also check out my other reviews for other social media sites.
The Maddness 