Tomodachi Life is an upcoming title from Nintendo, a cross between the Sims, Animal Crossing and your Mii – it affords players the chance to interact with the other players they meet, their Miis and explore a very weird yet strangely appealing alternate universe. The game already launched in Japan and is penned for a June 6th release in the EU and US and you’re probably wondering what this is all about by now? Well the game is driven on developing relationships with other players and part of that entails two people getting married; still not a big deal right?
On it’s initial launch in Japan players were for a short time able to marry same-sex partners, something Nintendo have now called a bug and since repaired. Upon hearing that it has been removed (same-sex marriage is illegal in Japan) gamer, Tye Marini started a petition called ‘Miiquality’ encouraging other Nintendo fans to approach the company and push them to include the option in the US release.
The story got picked up by Kotaku and they reached out to Nintendo for a response… and this is where it get’s really interesting in an annoyingly stupid way!
Nintendo responded:
Nintendo never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of Tomodachi Life. The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate world rather than a real-life simulation. We hope that all of our fans will see that ‘Tomodachi Life’ was intended to be a whimsical and quirky game, and that we were absolutely not trying to provide social commentary.
The ability for same-sex relationships to occur in the game was not part of the original game that launched in Japan, and that game is made up of the same code that was used to localize it for other regions outside of Japan.
With a tagline, ‘Your Friends. Your Drama. Your Life’ Nintendo actually means ‘Your Life… just as long as you conform to these archetypes, kthxbai!
So the short answer is, don’t expect marriage equality to be shown in the game because Nintendo doesn’t want to put their foot in it, just in case they offend someone but by not taking stand, they have and they are alienating their LGBT fans. Same-sex partnerships aren’t exactly common in video games but they aren’t entirely new or invisible either it just seems that Nintendo aren’t ready to hop on the equality bandwagon just yet!
If you’d like to support the campaign, click the link here and use #Miiquality.
Editor-in-Chief, part-time super villain and hoarder of cats. If you can’t find me writing, I’m probably in the kitchen!