This spring has been a particularly good one for life simulators, largely due to the releases of Pokemon Pokopia and Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. The Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 have been home to some of the best cozy games in the last decade, so naturally, players are spoiled for choice when it comes to Switch and Switch 2 life sims. Still, games are expensive, and if you can only afford one game between Pokemon Pokopia and Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, it’s worth discussing which one you should choose?
While you could call both Pokopia and Living the Dream cozy games, they’re vastly different experiences; “cozy game” is more of a label than a genre, after all. So, if you’re stuck between which of the two to buy, there are a few major points to consider: how do you feel about town building, how do you feel about customization, and how do you feel about in-game relationships?
Fire Emblem: Three Houses’ Garreg Mach Monastery Rebuilt in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream
A Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream player painstakingly recreates the entirety of Garreg Mach Monastery from Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
Exploration Versus Instant Creation
Town building lies at the heart of both games, but is handled quite differently between them. Pokopia uses its town creation mechanics to give players missions that help serve the story and give the player a reason to explore beyond their initial settlement. Living the Dream’s town-building elements are new to the Tomodachi Life series, but are probably the game’s second-deepest system behind socializing.
Pokopia takes the “building” part of town-building quite literally, dedicating the story to creating enough places to bring back Pokemon and eventually humans. The player, as Ditto, will build many kinds of structures while also exploring the region to find materials like Pokemetal to make new things with. It allows for a lot of customization since the player will have such a selection of materials to use for each part of a building, and adds longevity to the game by making the player work for those materials through exploration. The player character is also more hands-on in construction, as unless they use a pre-made building kit, they’ll have to place each part of their idea down brick by brick, just like in real life. Well, as real as things can be when swallowing sixteen different variations of drywall to use for later, anyway.
New Questions Added!
GameRant Quiz
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Living the Dream puts the player in a more “omnipotent” role over their town, letting them generally select entire pre-made buildings to drop on a grid with a single click along with plants, benches, and more. It’s definitely less hands-on than Pokopia, but it’s also much more convenient. And for players who want to make their Miis’ homes a little more interesting, you can eventually unlock the ability to make your own designs for houses and other decorations at Palette House. And at some point, you probably will, as there’s only one pre-made house design and the number of other decorative objects is admittedly quite low. But while you do have a limited selection of 3D shapes to choose from for overworld objects like houses, the ability to draw whatever you want on those shapes busts the creative possibilities wide open. For players who aren’t as into making their own designs, though, Living the Dream unfortunately lacks online content sharing to help cover for that weakness. So, if you’re primarily looking to build your own town, Pokopia has a clear advantage.
Structured Versus Unstructured Customization
Since you can make things piece by piece in Pokopia, you can build the blocks into whatever shape you want. The sheer creativity shown in the many creations of the Pokopia community is honestly kind of shocking. And while collecting what you need in order to build things in the first place can take some time, some clever resource farming can make it easy to get what you want in a pinch. But if you want different colors for different items, you’ll need to get enough dyes and take them to Smeargle, who can only change color or pattern — and not for every item, at that. There’s a lot of freedom in the shapes of the structures you can build, but less freedom in actual design. That’s not to say that the selection of colors or patterns is limited, but compared to Living the Dream’s drawing feature, there’s naturally less to work with.
That being said, Pokopia’s more limited customization might have an advantage over Living the Dream’s for some people: structure. Drawing on a Switch screen isn’t easy even if you’re decent with a real pencil. Putting rails on what the player can do also makes building less overwhelming, and limiting the palette to pre-made designs also makes things look cleaner than a freehand drawing would. It’s a nice compromise between coloring your creations and keeping things organized.
Living the Dream gives the player more freedom than Pokopia by comparison, and that could be a pro or con depending on how the drawing mode in Living the Dream makes you feel. Thankfully, the demo lets you use the drawing mode by giving your Miis face paint, so you can test it out without spending a cent. There are cheap styluses you can buy that work on the Switch in case you don’t want to draw with a controller, and there are multiple drawing tools in-game to help you make whatever you want. But fewer guardrails means more to think about, and Living the Dream’s drawing mode unfortunately lacks a lot of features that would make things easier. If we could at least have a blending tool beyond the “soft” brush and layer modes, it’d make a big difference. And even Animal Crossing had a symmetry toggle for its drawing mode, so why doesn’t Living the Dream? Regardless, as one Pokemon fan’s starter Pokemon Miis show, the Mii Maker is expansive enough to make some great Miis even without face paint.
If you can move past the missing tools and are okay with some spare pixels, you really can draw a lot in Living the Dream and have it look good. It took a while, but now my Sephiroth is walking around with his pet Tonberry from Final Fantasy, and Alexander Hamilton himself is listening to the Hamilton soundtrack. Too much freedom in a game can be scary to those who don’t know how to use it, but for those who do, there’s a lot of fun to be had. So for those seeking freedom when it comes to personalization, Tomadachi Life takes the cake. Still, if you don’t want to fight with Living the Dream’s face paint, Smeargle in Pokopia is happy to do the painting work for you.
Pokopia Player Builds Incredible Maximum Security Prison
A Pokemon Pokopia players builds an incredible maximum security prison to keep one particularly nefarious pocket monster in lock-up.
Poke-Friends Versus Mii Love Dodecahedrons
Pokopia and Living the Dream live at two different ends of the life sim scale: “construction-focused” versus “relationship-focused.” Think of a game like The Sims, which sits somewhere in the middle. In The Sims you build whatever structures you want brick by brick, placing furniture of whatever color you want in order to make the best — or worst, depending on how you like to treat your Sims — homes possible. At the same time, your Sims are able to interact with each other, make friends and enemies, fall in love, get married, and have kids. If The Sims is considered the standard for what a life sim should have, then Pokopia and Living the Dream both take major parts of The Sims and focus the game on that feature. Both games have town- and relationship-building, but treat the other type of building as secondary to the main one.
Pokopia lets Ditto make friends with the Pokemon it meets, and doing so will bring benefits like having those Pokemon share materials they find. Eventually, they’ll start calling your Ditto by the name you gave it instead of just “Ditto.” Increasing friendship also increases that Pokemon’s Comfort Level. You can also invite Pokemon to be your roommates, and some Pokemon can even have special conversations with each other if they meet, like Heracross and Pinsir fighting over their horns or the somewhat disturbing conversation about growing up between Pinsir and Bulbasaur. Overall, though, Pokopia’s social mechanics are clearly secondary to the building and exploration. Befriending other Pokemon is cute, but there’s no story or anything to come out of it; it’s mostly just a way to find materials and build up the area’s Comfort Level.
Living the Dream’s approach to relationships is arguably the hook of the entire game. Like Sims, Miis can interact to make friends, fall in love, and even have kids, but Living the Dream arguably has an advantage over The Sims because you often get to hear actual, understandable conversations between your Miis. And while two Miis can fall in love, there’s always a chance that just one of them will — and that the other won’t be interested. Three Miis can even fall in love with the same person, and the drama it can cause is always legendary. The addition of one-sided relationships and webs of romantic drama, plus the randomness of whoever you created being part of that craziness, gives the relationship system a lot of replay value.
Once a couple is married in Living the Dream, things aren’t over, either. They can have kids, but weirdly, for an otherwise lighthearted and E-rated game, Miis can divorce if things go south — and the player might not be able to save the marriage no matter how hard they try. It’s understandable as it means the game won’t lock itself out of ever creating more couples, as another character could eventually become single again, but it’s certainly jarring to watch Mickey Mouse and Wonder Woman agree that they can’t sustain their relationship any longer. While it’s not a dating sim, Living the Dream is a great game for romance lovers simply because the relationship building is so hilarious.
Drag weapons to fill the grid
Drag weapons to fill the grid
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Which Life Sim You Should Choose
Pokemon Pokopia and Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream have their own unique strengths. Someone with the time and money should naturally get them both, but some people might have to choose between one or the other. And which one you should get depends on what exactly you’re looking for in a cozy game: construction or relationships?
Ultimately, each game’s distinct strengths and weaknesses means players should think carefully about their preferred gameplay mechanics before choosing one of the two titles. Living the Dream is strong on both the construction and relationship front, but how much you’ll enjoy the construction depends on how much you like drawing on a Switch screen. Pokopia has fewer customization options overall, but spices up the gameplay process by having you scavenge for construction materials yourself and isn’t as overwhelming with its options. Living the Dream is all about making any Miis you want and watching them interact, but how friendships and romances between Miis develop can be very random and may not end up the way you want it. The villagers in Pokopia are more for completion’s sake and set-dressing, but are still rewarding to interact with and adorable to watch wander around.
If you have a Switch 2 and need to limit your spending to a single game, you’ll get a good experience out of either option. For builders and explorers, Pokopia is the better option, while relationship managers and fans of character customization should pick Tomodachi Life.
- Released
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March 5, 2026
- ESRB
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Everyone / Users Interact, In-Game Purchases
