Miitomo

Having recently joined the "wonderful world" of smartphone ownership, and having been in the Nintendo ecosystem for a while with two 3DSes (and now a Wii U, not to mention the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, NES, SNES, and GameCube), I was interested in Nintendo's smartphone application, Miitomo.

They call it a game, but I'd hesitate to do so.  99% of it is just your Mii walking around a room.  The "gameplay" is answering questions and periodically changing your Mii's outfit.  Also, every single time you change your Mii's outfit, you have to deflect not one, but two requests to take a picture ("Miifoto") of your Mii in that new outfit.  No thanks, Nintendo, my phone has limited storage space and I don't want to fill it up with pictures of my Mii.

As I've just implied, the usefulness of Miitomo is limited, so even if you're in Nintendo's ecosystem and have a smartphone or a tablet or something that can run it, you may still want to pass it up.  The only thing really game-like at all about it is Miitomo Drop, a frustrating minigame where you drop your Mii in one of a few differently-laid-out boards in a mostly vain attempt to unlock new outfit parts.  Most of the time you'll just bounce all the way to the bottom and end up getting candy, which is only useful for when you're interacting with your friends.

The reason I don't have any information on how the friend interaction works is because none of my friends still play it.  There was an initial boom of activity, as there is with any new high-profile software release, but then it promptly died off, and took the application's popularity along with it.  Its only primary use is to get Miitomo coins for My Nintendo, so you can... wait for it... unlock more Mii outfit parts.

Because apparently having real money transactions in a smartphone application is something that can't be avoided these days, you can also use your hard-earned cash to buy in-game currency to be able to purchase more outfits or play Miitomo Drop.  It's completely overlookable, though, because the daily bonuses give you plenty of stuff, and none of the outfits and outfit parts are really "must-haves".  I've grabbed some stuff that looked neat out of Miitomo Drop, either through sheer luck, or using YouTube videos as a guide to know where and how to drop my Mii in order to get the thing I wanted.  I've also used my Miitomo coins to grab outfit items from My Nintendo.

It's kinda neat, I guess, but as long as the main gameplay only involves answering questions and turning down photo requests, I don't think it's really worth playing for very long.  Miifoto is kind of neat, but just like the rest of the application, it's a novelty that wears off rather quickly.

I will leave you now with the only Miifoto I've ever taken that I'm reasonably proud of.