I Made the Miis from the Living the Dream Direct

By Kestron

Supergeek Mode

Howdy folks, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream just had its own Nintendo Direct this morning. I, being the casual and not obsessive by any means Mii fan woke up at the perfectly normal time of “Didn’t go to bed” o’clock and watched the recording of the Direct as I woke up as any normal person did. And of course by recording I mean live as Youtube was recording it.
Anyway these new Mii variants have an unprecedented level of customization, being that now you can quite literally Microsoft Paint the faces to your liking. Those who hated the Miitopia makeup system are bawling on the floor.

So anyway I saw the thumbnail for the Direct recording come across my feed many hours later with all of the characters staring at the camera with some of them having a neutral expression and staring as Miis do. Then I started, as I do, noticing the feature layouts. Then I started thinking about how to recreate them.
Aaaaannnnnnndddddd you can see exactly where I’m going and it was all downhill from there.

So some rules, I’m using the Switch Mii Maker just because my Switch 2 was what was nearby. I don’t really use the 99 color expansions even on Switch, like at all. I use the canon colors 💪.
I got as close as I could, a lot of new customization is here to backport. The eyes got a whole system to themselves practically. The “facial features”, wrinkles and the like, also seem to be restyled a lot. This is most noticeable with Carlo. And obviously, like all new Miis, we got lots more hairstyles going on. Surprisingly this really only impacted a couple of Miis heavily. Jess got hit the worst. Also, ears. Breh.
This was a fun little experiment. Mocha was the one that surprised me. Like yeah I got nowhere close and that’ll be the gut reaction, but seriously you go try and make Mocha. I was walking into it expecting to make an amalgamation for memes, was surprised how much of it I was able to mimic.
And yeah a lot of positioning could be probably be even more fine tuned. I just did this quick and dirty on a whim. This also means I just kinda hop scotched the first minutes of the Direct, I wasn’t digging for every single Mii they showed - I know there was an alien in there somewhere briefly.

First up is Yoshiaki Koizumi, the Nintendo executive presenting it for the first minute or two and an interjection here and there. This one probably came out the most accurately. I imagine he had a preexisting Mii as Nintendo execs do that just got rendered in the TL3 engine and maybe some touchups to show off some of the new features.
The same person definitely made most if not all of these, that eye type and Angie’s mouth type are going to be reused a lot. Or at least ones similar.

Next is Angie, the main Mii we’ll be following throughout the direct. She simps for Patrick, and later simps for Hugh. Angie’s main hit was to the hair. She also has one of the new eye types, and a slightly new mouth and nose type. Note the freckles being placed differently here.

We are now introduced to Jess. Jess isn’t super present in the Direct, but she’s said to be a childhood friend of Angie’s. Jess definitely took the biggest downgrade to the hair being backported. There’s just nothing similar in older Mii versions. I got as close as I could to the idea behind the hair, even though some other hairs may have done more to appear similar at a passing glance.

Up now is Patrick. Patrick is the character Angie simps for for the first part of the Direct, until he tells her he’s uninterested. Patrick seems to have a habit of showing off, though he’s not really shown outside of Angie simping.
Not much to say on this one, those eyes are going to bug us on every Mii and the “wrinkle” lines are just not similar on older consoles (why am I referring to the Switch as an older console?). The hair is actually somewhat possible to get close to here.

Dr. Winters is, quote, “Angie’s mentor and professor”, she’s here for a ‘plot twist’ and also to show you can put anyone in the game as a Mii character, not just a burger.
Winters was another hard one to find the right hair for. In this original shot (which was a horrible angle) I initially set the hair color to black, but later set it to grey after I switched reference images to one a bit later in the Direct (foreshadowing!). I am only now realizing there’s a subtle makeup added behind the eyes that’s definitely recreatable but I already got this far into finishing so just imagine I toggled the right makeup on. I’m also not necessarily convinced the nose positioning is right, but this was the positioning I gave it based on the side view before forgetting that was something I was going to change once I swapped references.

Crystal is another not super present character said to be a coworker of Angie’s. Crystal also took a huge hit from the backport. Her mouth has “vampire” teeth for lack of a better term in the new version, and her hair is entirely new, and she leans heavily into the eye types.

Hugh Morris (what a humorous name) is a goofball clown and the first of the facepaint overusers. Angie rebounds from her depression over Patrick to Hugh, and asks him out, but half the island’s population shows up to her… date proposal? asking him out? asking him to be her boyfriend? on the ferris wheel… so her date proposal while already on a date… to usurp her date proposal. In a “twist”, Hugh agrees to go out with Dr. Winters… the professor who’s definitely coded to be older than he and Angie who at least seem to be the same age. This is a very accurate representation of Tomodachi Life relationships. The clown and the professor get together, <palpatine>ironic</palpatine>.
Anyway Hugh’s hat is not a Mii option but one of the outfit options to my knowledge, but we never see him without a hat, and in his first appearance I pulled references from for the other Miis he never opens his eyes once, so I had to pull this image from a bit later in the Direct. Hugh would have suffered the most from the backport, but we haven’t gotten to Mocha yet.

Meet Mocha, Angie’s teddy bear. Yep, accurate representation of a Tomodachi Life save. Mocha is our, for this set of Miis, prime facepaint overuser. I thought I’d just be memeing by even trying, and to be clear I still was, but I was actually kinda pleased with being able to get kinda close at all. The nose, hair, and the eyes here are the only things I can be certain are actually Mii features, and I’m pretty certain the mouth is. everything else is, to the best of my knowledge, facepaint. The eyebrows on my recreation are putting in a lot of work. I did find an option to just have dots for eyes, which would technically be closer, but it looked a lot more lifeless without the ‘sparkle’ in the eye, so I opted for one with something similar.

And there you go. Yes, there are tons of other Miis in a like two second montage, and yes there are a couple of people extremely briefly mentioned and added, they’re not really expanded on at all and it is two in the morning so I’m not gonna bother right now. I might update this later if I feel like it.

Sits up in bed. Gah! Looks startled, lays down and goes back to sleep.