I am not good at drawing. I recognize that this is a skill I could, if I wanted, hone with practice. My issue is that I am impatient, and I do not want to take the time to make something look nice. So when faced with games like Tomodachi Life that rely on user-generated content and promote nearly boundless creativity, I tend to take the path of least resistance. When asked to decorate a slice of cake, I grab the whipped cream stamp and the single strawberry stamp, plop one of each on top, and dust off my hands. Job’s done.
It would be easy for me, in light of this, to go online and wither in the face of all the incredible, detailed designs other people are making in Tomodachi Life. You really can freely visually customize just about anything in this game. Miis are the most obvious, but you can create all manner of objects for them to play with: books, food, toys, pets. You can make custom tiles to decorate buildings and nature. Just poke your nose into the Tomodachi Life subreddit. The front page is riddled with ridiculous creations. As I write this, I’m looking at Hank Hill, a replicated Nirvana album cover, an excruciatingly detailed cat, and, uh…weed. A really detailed bag of weed.
But I’m not here to gush about any of those. I want to show you the incredible power of phoning it in:
That is a single circle of green on a plate, where the plate was provided by the game to put food on. The least possible effort someone could put in, short of doing nothing at all. And it’s also one of the funniest things I’ve seen in Tomodachi Life yet. Seeing this instantly filled me with renewed energy to visit the creator tool and make really god-awful art, and put it in my game.
This isn’t the only incredible low-effort doodle I’ve seen. I’m a big fan of this Hammer Dog, for instance. A little more effort than One Pea, but still a pretty quick-looking sketch that has incredible energy:
You can make signs in Tomodachi Life, which means some people are just using the text tool to make really simple but effective billboards like this recreated meme:
Here’s an example of someone who was clearly putting effort in, but wasn’t necessarily going the full distance: no elaborate shading, no heavy details, the yellow arches are a little wobbly. That’s fine! It’s a McDonald’s sign. It works great and looks nice:
The simple treatment also works for creating Miis. I’ve done a few real basic ones (including an Emily Dickinson that’s just the default feminine Mii with a hairstyle change), but these two are maybe the pinnacle of low-effort but still some effort:
One of the joys of Tomodachi Life is that, as above, sometimes the scenarios just line up perfectly with the thing you’ve created:
Just a couple more. I didn’t want to include too many low-effort creations that were clearly just someone importing images from something else, as the actual act of getting a Switch 2 to support that is a little on the high-effort side. But I respect the power behind just sticking screenshots of Unreal and Unity crashes into Tomodachi Life and personifying them like this:
I realize I’m veering close to high-effort now, but finally, please enjoy this upgrade to the Single Pea on a Plate: “Whole tray of peas.”
Tomodachi Life rules. If you’re avoiding it because you feel you can’t live up to the creative enterprises of people you don’t know and will never speak to, banish those fears now. Make a pea on a plate. Make messy, simple, low-effort art. Be free with me.