(That's heavy irony, bordering on sarcasm, in case you were wondering.)
What you get to learn is that this summer (if you're reading this from the Southern Hemisphere, keep in mind that it's summer for us on this side of the world right now), I'll be doing something I've done in other recent summers: I'm working at a summer camp for kids. That means that I will be living out there at camp for most of the summer, and really just visiting home on occasion, rather than anything you could really call "living at home." Now, since my days off from working at camp are mostly spent trying to run errands, trying to get everything in order, trying to be prepared to work during the coming week, that means that I likely won't be posting much of anything between now and September. Or if I do, it will only be small. (And again, since I'm still a student, I can't promise that I'll post many things between September and April. I will do my best, but keep that in mind as well.)
I may have to send out this post as a kind of parting shot, so that has something to do with why it's so long. And by "long," I mean that this is half the length of a NaNoWriMo draft - it's about 26000 words, which works out to almost 50 pages, not including the pictures. Wow. Scary.
I wouldn't expect you to read this all in one sitting, unless you really have nothing to do for a while. But I hope you somehow enjoy it, and don't worry; if you're really so interested in reading any of the other things I say, I'll be back, and I'll write normal stuff soon. Take care of yourself until then, eh.
- TAB III
P.S. There are still some typos and things in here that I want to edit. I'll get back to that when I have time.
*******
How I Came to Fall In
Do you like "life simulation" video games?
If you found your way to this post by doing a Google search, I'm assuming you do. At least a little bit. Well, congratulations; that makes one of us! As a prize, you earn the chance to read this gargantuan blog post!
(Seriously, I mean it; this is one of the longest things I've ever written, not counting drafts of novels. You've been warned!)
Also, if you want to skip to the main point of this, click here. It starts my "rant," and if you had questions about how babies in Tomodachi Life work, your questions will probably get answered along the way.
Or if you came here just searching for tips on babysitting, you can click here.
I hope that helps.
*******
Me, I've never really been a fan of life simulation games. You would think, what with how much I love story-driven video games, how I love soaking up information about enemies and locales and histories and characters and all kinds of delicious lore (figuratively delicious; don't lick your game screen), and how the biggest compulsion for me to keep playing a video game is how endearing I find the character(s)... shouldn't it be only natural that I love these "life simulation games," too?
I mean, take the Harvest Moon series, for instance:
Whether you just clicked on that link or not, you just need to keep in mind that Harvest Moon is a game about farming -- you know, doing day-to-day chores -- but it's also a game about relationships, and a story that you are slowly telling while you play. That should be really cool, right?
Or for another instance, take Animal Crossing:
(And by now I think you should also subscribe to Peanut Butter Gamer on YouTube, but that's beside the point.)
While Animal Crossing is not quite so story-driven, and the game works in a cyclical loop of seasons and holidays instead of making time pass like it does in real life, it's the same idea. You interact with animals who treat you like a friend and neighbour, you get stuff for your house, which you organize and decorate, and you kind of live a second life in your game. Not referring to Second Life, of course, which is another one of those games in the same genre.
So that begs a question: Why is it that the same person who not only got emotionally attached to Pokémon all the way back in Red and Blue version, but also got emotionally attached to a Siege Tank just because it had accumulated over 70 kills in a mission on the original StarCraft, is now telling you that he doesn't like the kinds of games where you live a life among imaginary people that you're supposed to be emotionally attached to?
Well, hypothetical-and-possibly-imaginary reader, that is a good question that you didn't actually ask me.
My thoughts on that subject actually line up pretty well with an article called "Things as They Really Are," which I can link you to here. It was written by a man named David A. Bednar.
If you want to take this as a warning before you read that, you should know that yes, this was written by one of my religious leaders. But don't think that it's an article going along the lines of, "Virtual reality and video games are evil and sinful! Play them and you're condemned!" No, actually that article talks about a lot of good things that we can do because of virtual reality, some of them things we could never do before the technology existed. It's just that the author wanted everyone to understand the proper place of that kind of thing, and to exercise a bit of moderation if they're going to be involved with some kind of virtual worlds.
Anyways, my thoughts on the subject more or less lined up with the ideas expressed in that article, even before I read it. So it's not that I think that "life simulation" games are bad for you, or stupid -- I just never found much interest in them.
But then Tomodachi Life happened.
"'Tomodachi' Means 'Friend!'"
What drew me to Tomodachi Life was really two simple things:
1) Curiosity
When the game was first announced, I wasn't curious enough to check it out. But when a free demo of the game became available in Nintendo's eShop, I was curious enough that I thought I would look it up. I do that sometimes.
Being a university student who goes to school out of my own country, for some reason I have a ridiculously hard time making friends in the USA. (No offense to any American readers; I'm sure you're great people. At least, I like to believe that.) So I often find myself alone during the school year, and that means that one of the few hobbies consistently available to me, while I'm poor and friendless, is video games. And I'm limited even in those. As I mentioned, I'm a university student. Being a university student means I am extremely poor (by First World standards, at least -- though I have also been temporarily homeless and literally starving during one year at school. Good times). So if I want to try out a new game, my best option, financially speaking, is to try out a free demo and dream about having cool games like the ones in the demos.
(*Sigh.* That's sad.)
That brings me to my second reason for being drawn to Tomodachi Life:
2) For Sale
One day in April, while I was looking through the eShop, I happened to see that this game, which I'd become curious about after I'd briefly tried out the demo, was on sale for a heavily discounted price. So I said, "Hey, I have a few dollars. Maybe this will be worth it. It can keep me busy on my sick days -- and I've been having a lot of those recently." (That's another story.)
And so I tapped the "Download" button, and about an hour later became the proud owner of Tomodachi Life. Yay, I guess!
For a brief summary of how the game works: You have an island. It's a tiny island, but it's an island. You need people to live there. So the game prompts you to make a character that looks and acts something like you, but who isn't literally you. That Mii is not you because you, the player, the person holding the Nintendo 3DS in your hands, are also recognized as a character in the game, alongside the Mii who looks like you.
Then the game invites you to make other Miis who represent anyone you can imagine. Anyone from your parents to your best friend in real life to Superman to Hermione Granger to Abraham Lincoln to Taylor Swift to Luke Skywalker... populate the island with anyone you want to live with your Mii. Once you do that, the characters will start to make friends with each other. They'll also ask you (the player, and not your Mii) for help with certain things, and you'll play some weird but funny mini-games with the characters sometimes. You have little to no control over the things that the Miis do, but that's usually not a problem.
 |
| "Ah, I see you've met your clone. Well, I hope you two can be friends." - TAB III |
I started off quite enjoying it. It made me smile when the character who represents me talked to me, and called me his "look-alike." I would silently cheer whenever I saw the first residents making new friendships, sometimes bridging entire universes together. (I mean, sometimes people I know in real life became friends with imaginary characters who previously existed only in stories I've written.) I used to laugh at the ridiculous things that those characters would get up to and the things they'd say.
Babies.
Babies: Not What You Hoped For
And why not be excited? I mean, heck, isn't it common in our language to call a baby a "bundle of joy?" (*If you're translating this page into another language, I'm sorry if that expression doesn't translate well.)
I'd been looking forward to it when I started the game. From playing the demo, I had learned that Miis could have babies. But it only got me really excited once I started playing the full game, in large part because this was going to be personal. My Mii became the first character in the game to get married. (To a fictional character, naturally. Even the game version of me has no luck with real people. Heh.)
And when my character's fictional spouse told me that she and my character were thinking about having a baby, I was thrilled.
Think about the things that people are excited about when news surfaces that your friend is going to have a baby in real life:
"Congratulations! I'm so happy for you!"
"You think it will be a boy or a girl?"
"Who do you think it will look more like?"
"Who do you think the baby will take after?"
"Oh, can you imagine all the things this child will learn?"
"Do you think it will be cute?"
"This is going to be so much fun to have a baby around!"
And sure, I got caught up in that kind of elation. My imaginary friends were moving on with their imaginary lives, and they were going to have an imaginary baby. And I was especially invested in this particular baby; in a manner of speaking, this baby was going to be "mine." I... might have been getting the chance to see what my hypothetical future child would look like. You know, if I were ever to actually have a child in real life.
Now, like most expecting parents and friends of expecting parents, I set aside the fact that most of babyhood is about hearing crying and watching out for spraying bodily fluids and comforting and sustaining this tiny, vulnerable little person with no strengths, and barely a mind in its brain. In other words, I voluntarily ignored the fact that a baby is more work than anything, and let myself be swept up in the happiness of thinking that a new life is coming into existence, and that you have a chance to love it.
It should have been great. In those regards, it should have been like getting a new puppy: a lovable creature who will be a lot of work to raise, but a happy joy to have all the same. When the baby was born, almost instantaneousl-... *sigh.* Hold that thought; I will get back to that.
When the baby, my first Tomodachi Life baby, was born, a lovable ball of joy was what I was hoping for.
Instead I got this:
Yeah, that's Michael, according to the name that his in-game parents gave him. Isn't he
just
precious.
...And it didn't look like it was going to get any better, since he soon grew into this:
...and later grew into this:
...then this:
...and eventually this:
*Sigh.*
Does it disturb you to know that this is literally all there is to babies in Tomodachi Life?
It disturbed me. But what I found more disturbing was the deep hatred that I felt for this and other babies in this game. Not just frustration or annoyance. Pulsing, burning hatred.
Kids are Fun! ...Really. They... are...
Actually, I scared myself by noticing just how much I loathed these things.
I had learned from the very beginning of my life that taking care of children doesn't just involve playing games and having fun with them. If you take care of a child or children, there's a lot more in the job description. For a few of the things you have to do: keep them safe, silence their fears, mediate in conflicts, feed them, keep them clean (includes diapers, bathing, washing hands, etc.), put them to sleep, help them with their responsibilities, protect them, teach them to develop motor control, teach them good behaviour, be a good example, let them know they are loved, teach them language, responsibly expose them to new sensory experience, provide for material needs, and help them to develop healthy relationships with other people. And there's plenty more to it I haven't even mentioned.
That knowledge has served me well in other stages of my life. I believe I've mentioned on this blog before, I was a full-time missionary at one point. Since it's crucially important to be able to relate to and understand people while you do the work of a missionary, it was extremely important to be able to understand how to interact with children, just as much as anyone else.
After I returned home from that, my first "permanent" job was working with children who had special needs. Can you imagine how hard that would have been if I'd had no previous experience with children? If I didn't have that experience and knowledge, maybe I would have panicked and not realized that there is only little difference between some forms of autism and simple childishness. Children act like children, special needs or not. So it's a good thing that I remembered what it's like to take care of kids; I found that you don't need to freak out when you think a kid is acting weird; they're mostly just doing what kids do. For a child with special needs, mostly you just have to fine-tune and adjust the same practices you use with all children.
I left that job when I started going to school in the USA, and didn't have another job until the following summer, which was the beginning of my time as a camp counsellor. Since the assignment of that job is to have a group of children under your care at all times during the week, then take care of another set of children the week after that, and so on... the job covers the full spectrum of everything you need to do for a child, 24 hours a day. (I mean that literally, too; I don't think you could name an hour of the night where I wasn't awake at least once, tending to the needs of a child or children who had wet the bed, missed home, needed a drink, was scared to hear howling coyotes, needed an emergency inhaler, or needed to be evacuated to safety from a storm that had the wind strength of a tornado and a lot more hail. Typical stuff.)
And there have been other instances, outside of work, where I just hang out with kids. It happens in different capacities, from saying hi to neighbour children, to helping a lost child find his or her parents, or just being around friends my age who already have kids of their own. Through it all, I've had some kind of close involvement with kids of all ages, from 0 to 18. I'm already a bit of a veteran at all kinds of practices of caring for children. They range from bottle feeding to sharing recipes; from diaper changing to giving fashion advice; from explaining that the opposite gender doesn't have cooties, to explaining that girls are every bit allowed to pursue their passion even into male-dominated career fields; from telling stories about teddy bears, to swapping favourite episodes of Teen Titans; and from having talks about, "Hands to yourself," to talks about, "Let me tell you why you shouldn't be afraid of growing up."
And do you want to know something?
As much work as these children can be, as much as they can frustrate me sometimes, and as much as I might really, really want to lash out after some kid has dropped a large concrete block on my bare foot (That didn't scar, did it? ...Hmm, looks like it's healed.), or how I might feel like I can't work through the exhaustion to support these children because I'm having difficulty breathing from sickness...
...I still love that work.
And I still love them. I love all of those children, at very least a little bit. All the way up to and including the most monstrously misbehaved kids. I know that because sometimes I go home and burst into tears when those kids and I part ways indefinitely. (Yeah, I... just admitted that. I think my psychologist would be proud.)
So that's what made the babies of Tomodachi Life disturb me so much: How is it that I can find at least a little bit of love for even the most trying of children in real life, and yet these:
...instead they fill me with absolute hatred?
Baby? Boom.
Well, I asked myself that question a lot over the first few weeks of playing this game. After some time, I had kept playing Tomodachi Life long enough for 18 babies to have been born. (The total has gone higher since then; I recently got assaulted by no fewer than nine sets of parents telling me they were going to have babies in the same week. As of today, there have been 31 different babies I've had to deal with in this game.)
I'm kind of one for writing, if you haven't noticed that during the last few thousand words that you maybe read in this blog post already. (Unless, of course, you skipped all the way down to here -- if so, perfect timing.) So I thought, as I often do, that maybe I could understand this sickening feeling of hatred inside of me if I would write about it.
I did indeed write about it. As in, I wrote about my thoughts and feelings before I decided to write this blog post. Guess what I came up with?
16 pages of reasons and explanations about why I hate the babies of Tomodachi Life.
Wow. 'Cause I don't bear a grudge.
 |
| - Photo by Aerostrom, pictured below. |
 |
| (Whoa, hold on! Is this part of an anti-teen-pregnancy campaign?) |
Why don't I do that? Or perhaps even better: why not stop playing the game altogether?
...When the moment here is right, I will answer those questions. For now I'm wondering just how wide to open the floodgates on my immense hatred for the demon spawn that the Miis have the audacity to refer to as "babies."
O, How I Loathe Thee: Why I Hate Tomodachi Life Babies
*This may be the only portion you came for. Feel free to read it by itself; it's still long.
Well... I'll open up, and I'll stop when I feel like I'm ready. And this list is so long, I think these reasons need subdivisions of their own.
Whew. Here we go. Or, here I go. I'm mostly writing this extremely long post so that I can make myself feel better. The only reason I can imagine you'll keep reading along with this is because you've played Tomodachi Life, and you hate the babies at least as much as I do. So, imaginary reader -- even if said imaginary reader is TAB III -- shall we/I?
Mii Babies: From Ugly to Disgusting
Let me get this out of the way from the beginning: Mii babies are ugly.
I'm not even talking about one of those instances where you joke around and end up with babies that look like these:
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
No, I'm talking about babies that naturally come out looking like this (I promise that I did not alter the babies to make them look like this):
|
|
 |  |
 |  |
The makers of the game were merciful enough to give you an option to edit the baby's appearance -- though the characters who offer that option don't do a very good job of making it known to you at first.
When the parents call you to say, "Guess what? We had a baby!" they will ask you a few questions. "Are you hoping we had a boy or a girl?" This is a heavily coded way of telling you, "By the way, player, you are allowed to choose the gender of this already born baby. You're supposed to know that from this question." If you choose the option for "Boy" or "Girl," the parents will tell you, "In fact, we did have a _____." Uh huh. Sure you did. (You can also leave it up to chance by selecting the option that says, "Either is great!" They couldn't have just said "Random"?)
And as the parent reveals to you the gender of the baby, that hideous little monster beast will turn its probably disgusting face towards you... and you will see what nature has given you...
 |
| As the person to originally post this said, "My question isn't so much, 'How about Aiden?' as it is, 'About Aiden... HOW?'" |
Now, while you are trying to recover from your shock, keep yourself from vomiting, or trying to keep from laughing yourself unconscious, the mother of the baby will ask, "How does he/she look?" (No, the mother doesn't say "he/she." I just said that because the pronoun depends on what gender the baby is.)
Again, this is a terrible and indirect way of asking you if you want to edit the baby's appearance. If you answer the question with, "So cute!" -- which, you know, you might say because it's the polite thing to say in real life, no matter how gross you might think a newborn's red and slimy face looks -- then the game records your answer of, "Leave the baby the way it is; I'm throwing away the only opportunity you'll give me to alter this baby to make it look decent." If instead you say something a little more honest but rude, "Hmm...", then the game will take you to a screen where you can alter the baby's facial features. (Notice, as I'll bring this up in a later point, that you can only alter facial features.)
As I said, you can joke around with this.
|  |
And if you decide to let that joke exist by confirming that the appearance is ok, but immediately regret your decision -- or, if you don't like the baby's appearance or its randomly selected gender, and you're laughing too hard to do any real editing, then you can do what I do sometimes:
As they say in Dungeons and Dragons, or in a lot of board games, or a lot of RPGs for that matter, "re-roll!" In this case you do this by closing the game without saving, then turning the game back on again and going through the process of the parents telling you about their baby.
This doesn't promise good results, but it does promise one thing:
 |
| "Oh, that's nice." |
 |
| "Mmph...! Heh... hee hee hee hee... Kee hee hee...! Ahem. Let's try this again." |
 |
| "Hello!" |
 |
| "Oh, so you... did...? (That... IS a girl, right?)" |
 |
| "Tee hee hee hee... ha... ha... A HA HA HA HA! Whew. One more try." |
 |
| "Hello! Good to see you." |
 |
| "Yeah, so I've heard. Er, I mean... never mind. I take it you want my judgment on how she looks?" |
 |
| "Heh. Heh heh heh heh! She looks so angry. Try again." |
 |
| "WAH HA HA HA HA HA HA! I'm sorry, I can't keep it in any longer! WAH HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!" |
 |
| "A HA HA HA HA! Ha... ha... whew. Comparatively, this is better. Let's keep her like that." |
More horrendous babies, and probably a lot of laughter. Or weeping, there's that too.
Now, as much as I would sometimes like to, I don't heavily alter the appearances of babies in this game. I will do some alterations a lot of the time, but I want them to be subtle.
 |
| (Notice the never-smiling mouth?) |
 |
| (Ta-da! I fixed it.) |
And why is that? Is it because I find something morally wrong about performing plastic surgery on an infant?
...Actually, when I put it like that...
I think you can see how that applies here. I won't let that principle slide even if I'm playing a game with imaginary people; I have to be true to that principle at all times, or I'm not true to it at all.
Anyways, with that said, I will advise all players of this game: never answer the parents' question of "How does [baby] look?" with "So cute!" Because guess what? Take a look at that baby's weird frilly bonnet that I really, really hate:
Guess what you can't see?
That's right -- the baby's hair, or the lack thereof.
So if you're like me at all (it would be kind of nice if you're not), always answer, "Hmm..." even if you don't plan on altering anything. Just say that so you can get a good look at the baby and check that the hair and other features are ok. Maybe it doesn't bother you so much, but I find myself so repulsed that I want to get sick whenever I have to look at one of these bald babies.
Ugh.
Be advised, though, that if you choose to alter a baby's hairstyle in any way, the baby will be stuck with the exact same hairstyle until it grows up. And when the baby is a little older, you may not like that so much.
 |  |
On the other hand, the alternative isn't all that great in itself. If you leave the hairstyle as it is, you have no control over what hairstyle the baby has as it gets older. In fact, it usually changes to a different one every day, and many of them are just unfitting.
Speaking of having no control, you also have no control over how the baby's facial features grow or change. A lot of babies -- at least, the babies of White parents -- are born with blond eyebrows. I mean, that on its own sometimes makes me want to vomit, and it's made worse when a baby with dark hair still has thick, blond eyebrows. And you can't control whether the baby will grow normal-coloured eyebrows, or when that happens, if it does.
Even worse, you can't control how the nose grows, so sometimes you have babies born with noses like this:
...that then turn into this:
 |  |
Ah, but that brings me to my absolute least favourite thing about these babies, the one that gets bile rising in my throat half the time, and the other half the time makes me want to kick a soccer ball off of a tee... for... some reason...
What is up with the HORRIFYINGLY OVERLARGE HEADS?!
Take a look at this chart:
As you can see, even if by chance you've never recognized this about real babies: infants and very small toddlers have different proportions than more developed humans. In comparison with their whole bodies, a baby's head is about 25% of its height, as opposed to an adult's head, which makes up approximately 13% of an adult's height. So yes, a baby's head looks larger.
But do you notice that Tomodachi Life accomplishes this effect by naturally giving babies the shortest possible face option, and then naturally placing all of the baby's facial features as low as possible?
 |
| (On a more grown person, the eyes should sit at the halfway point of the head, and all other features usually correspond to that. With a baby like this one, the eyes are only about 2/5 from the bottom of the head.) |
On a bigger person this would look absolutely wrong. For a baby, however, it seems the only way it should look. Having the face so low means that the baby has no chin and has an exceptionally huge forehead, which makes the whole head seem large. As it should. I can deal with that. But tell me this:
WHY ARE THE BABIES' HEADS LARGER THAN THEIR ENTIRE BODIES?!?!
Look at this! When a baby faces the top of its head in perspective towards the camera, the entirety of its body disappears!
 |
| Original caption when I posted this on Twitter: "She's happy because they traded in their baby for a giant ball of chocolate." |
Granted, I know that Miis are not exactly proportioned like regular humans, and they are intended to look exaggerated and cartoony. Proportionally, their heads are kind of big. But nothing like this atrocity of heads that outweigh the rest of the body.Just imagine if you saw something like that in real life. Would that not creep you out?
I mean... children shaped like Tweety Bird...?
I think I'll let a couple of Miis sum this part up with the lyrics of one of their songs:
 |  |
Well-sung, you two. Well-sung.
Squirmin' Vermin: Baby Motion and Locomotion
I suppose I have to admit, the ugliness of the babies' appearance isn't confined just to their physical features; it also includes the ways they move.
Two things I will concede: First of all, yes, I know that animation is complicated and difficult. Yes, for a game like Tomodachi Life, the art style is meant to be simplistic, and even a little bit over-the-top and cartoony, like Japanese slapstick comedy. On top of that, the Nintendo 3DS isn't usually meant to handle hyper-realistic graphics and animations. So don't think that I'm expecting the game to deliver me 60 fps poetry in motion.
Second, yes, I know that in real life, babies do not have refined or graceful movements. They flail, they wiggle, and struggle to perform the simplest of actions. They have so little motor control that it's considered an accomplishment on the day when a baby learns to focus its eyes for the first time instead of staring blankly. They have so little strength in most of their muscles that you have to support an infant's head, because its neck is too weak to hold its head up. So it's not as though I'm expecting babies to dance like that one mildly creepy animated baby who became one of the first Internet memes (in a time before we called these things "Internet memes") back in the 1990s.
(You know, this one: Oogachacka Baby)
But why do I still think the movements of Tomodachi Mii babies are ugly? *Sigh.* I'm not glad you asked. I can say that both because you didn't ask -- I did -- but also because I'm not glad to go into this. I feel a creepy, itchy feeling even as I prepare to ask this question:
Do you know what a maggot looks like when it moves?
I'll spare you a picture or video of such, and instead refer you to a couple of these photos, because you will notice they're basically the same. (*I may replace these photos with a GIF if I find good enough photos to make one.)
Congratulations; you are that much more prepared to understand the life cycle of a fly.
Look, I know that when real babies are upset, they might squirm, or even flail if they're strong enough. But generally speaking, they don't do this:
And while real babies might do something like this:
They aren't exactly known for this:
This baby you see pictured here just flailed backwards as quickly as possible, to make me stop trying to help her feel better. She did it so quickly, in fact, that if this were based in reality, a baby like this one would have given herself whiplash, if not a full-blown concussion. Or, considering how large that baby's head is in comparison to the rest of its body... honestly, you might need to fear that baby would have broken its own neck.
...It's not such an innocent game of peekaboo anymore, is it?
Oh, and speaking of necks...
 |  |
...I'm no doctor, but I think they may have just fractured theirs.
I will give credit to the animators of the game, most of the babies' movement gets the point across, even if I do find it gross or unsettling. It's not always the most natural-looking, but it does convey the intended emotion. You know, ""This baby is sad."
"This baby is distracted, and probably has next to no attention span."
"This baby is happy."
And a lot of the things that real babies do, they do clumsily as they learn motions for the first time. In Tomodachi Life, that clumsiness shows in the little things, from babies waving around their toy blocks with completely stiff arms, to wobbling as they learn to walk.
But there is one animation where...
Maybe it's best if I just describe this. When a real baby crawls, there is a surprising amount of motion going on. None of the baby's joints will be stiff; the hips, knees, ankles, and even the toes; as well as the shoulders, elbows, wrists, and fingers will all be in motion, no matter how clumsily they might swing or flex. And at almost no point will you see a real baby hold any of its limbs completely straight. Its knees will probably be cocked outwards, its elbows will always be at least half-bent, and all of the limb segments are somehow helping -- or trying to help -- the baby to move. The baby will probably keep its head mostly upright, though an enthusiastic baby will probably get distracted by something or other, and its attention will shift elsewhere, and thus its head will move. (So will its facial features, for that matter; crawling is a big deal when its the first time you've learned to move to a new location on your own. So of course a baby would have reason to smile!)
And on top of this all, the baby is probably wobbling, possibly really hard. It hasn't had much time to understand a sense of balance, much less fine motor skills, and the little muscle development it has undergone has probably left the baby with uneven strength in the different limbs.
With real baby children, the most common motion of crawling looks a lot like the baby slapping the ground with its hands and flailing its legs while it rocks forward from knee to knee. That causes the torso to pivot along the pelvis a little. Most of the force to propel the baby forwards comes from the knees, and the hands mostly balance. It's a simple way of moving, but throughout it all, it's a flurry of motion.
Comparatively, Mii babies.
But it's worse than just that. With a Mii baby, the motion of crawling makes it seem like the baby is pulling itself forwards with its "hands." (Miis don't have fingers or toes; they just have little knobs for hands and feet. That doesn't look terrible on the adults, but on babies it's just... weird.) The legs almost imperceptibly move, but you get the impression that they are doing none of the crawling. Trust me, real babies do not have the arm strength to drag along their body on their hands if they choose that pose for crawling. In fact, if you watch a crawling Mii baby from behind, it looks kind of like the baby is magically gliding forwards on dead legs. Even if the baby turns to crawl in a different direction, that's not accomplished by pushing in one direction, or from taking smaller "steps" on one side and slowly turning in that direction. No, the motion looks like it's magically pivoting... or doing a slow turn like a villain in a horror movie.
I have to say, watching this weirdly proportioned, vaguely baby-like creature move like that is the animation that creeps me out more than any other thing in this game. Fortunately, a Mii baby only crawls for one day of its life; on day one the baby is not able to crawl yet, and on day three the baby is done crawling, and spends its time learning to stand up. I mean, by the time that happens, you have to deal with the annoyance of watching the baby lift itself onto its feet for a single second, then applauding itself for doing so, until it falls down -- and watching that cycle repeat indefinitely. But it's still better than watching the crawling. That crawling is so bad, I've actually found myself deliberately making the babies cry so that they just flail around, flat on their backs, rather than squirming around the room like some zombie pony with two broken back legs.
And speaking of that, I even wrote a song about it in the island's concert hall. (Yes, and as a side note, I have written a lot of songs about how I hate the Mii babies.) The song goes like this:
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |
| (And everybody cheers loudly.) |
Yuck.
I'm always glad when the baby grows out of its "crawling" stage, but it really doesn't get all that much better. To explain this, though, I need another section first.
The Timelessness of Raising a Child: Literally
In case you wonder about the title, it's supposed to be a play on words. Calling something "timeless" means that it's the kind of thing that transcends boundaries of time. It doesn't change from year to year, or even from millennium to millennium. Hence, raising a child is timeless; we've been doing that since the beginning of humankind, and we're still doing it. Or, some of us are. (I don't have kids of my own, as I mentioned. And that makes me sad, dontcha know.)
But if I'm being literal, the term "timeless" would mean that something is "without time." And that's how Tomodachi Life babies are.
In real life, you can bet that you'll hear parents talk about their children "growing up so fast." They say the same thing in Tomodachi Life, too.
So, let's start with a married couple. They'll live together and have a special relationship (meaning, the game recognizes the relationship as "spouse" instead of "friend"). At some point, the Miis will get to a Happiness Level (yes, that's a thing in this game) which reads "Very Happy," "Super Happy," or "Soul Mate." Once both of the married Miis arrive at one of those, eventually one of the parents will tell you that they have been thinking about having a baby.
And... is this the part where small children playing a Nintendo game get to learn about where babies come from?
Nope. Not even close. In fact, having a stork fly by and dropping off a baby wearing swaddling clothes would probably give children who play this game a better idea about where babies come from, as opposed to what they do get.
You see nothing at all. The two married Miis might not even sleep in the same place between the time that they ask about having a baby, and the time that the baby is born. And, actually, that's not uncommon; since married Miis in Tomodachi Life have a house with their significant other, but also an apartment in the island's apartment building, a lot of the time the married couple sleeps in one of the places or the other, rather than together.
Well, fine. Maybe this isn't the best time to expose children to how babies are conceived. But is there at least a time where you see baby's mommy with a pregnant belly? Something to indicate, "Hey, there's a child in there"?
Nope. Not at all.
I will say that as a player, that can cause me some confusion and frustration -- not because I don't know where babies come from, but because I can't always tell when a baby is actually going to be born. Sometimes it happens the next day, sometimes two or almost three days later. There have even been a couple of times when a Mii asked me my thoughts about them having a baby, but a lot of time has passed, and to this day they haven't had any children. What happened, exactly? And why do I get no indication of what's coming or not coming?!
Normally, that's not too much of a problem; this invisible pregnancy, which in no way affects the mother, tends to last somewhere between one and two days. So you don't have to wait and guess on the new baby's birthday for very long.
But that in itself is another small reason that I find these babies off-putting from the beginning.
You see, for a real baby to be born, a mother has to make immense sacrifices of love. For nine months she has to stop thinking of her body as just her own, and instead remember that she is protecting and nurturing a new human life. She will need to endure everything from morning sickness to bizarre food cravings, and will need to put up with how much of a struggle it is to do something like leaning forwards or using the bathroom. And then there's the little matter of childbirth, which we all have to acknowledge is one of the most painful things a human being can experience.
...Just to throw this out here, I think you should probably go tell your mother you love her.
I think most of us, if not all of us, recognize that enduring opposition with someone helps your relationship to grow stronger. How much stronger do you think a mother's relationship to her child is, when for almost a year she has continuously carried the burden -- literally -- of her child, and has completely given herself to her child and brought it into the world? And how much stronger does that relationship become because of the immense pain that a mother has to endure so that a child can take its first breaths?
I mean, I will never be a mother, so I can't really say for certain. But I get the idea that it must do a lot for that relationship.
So, with this invisible, basically non-existent pregnancy that doesn't put any burden or sacrifice on the mother -- or the father, for that matter, since he doesn't need to assist his wife through the trial that doesn't happen -- it already feels like the experience of receiving a baby is cheapened and less significant. It seems so little like a loving miracle, that I can still find it in me to make "joke babies" and "re-roll" the baby's genetics, like I mentioned earlier. I mean, if I saw a mother in this game putting up with the pains and struggles of childbirth, I'd probably have a harder time thinking, "re-roll! Make the baby again, so I can laugh!" But in reality, I do feel that lighthearted attitude, because there's nothing to emotionally invest me in a baby's birth. All in all, it doesn't feel like you or the Miis really earned this.
That feels like a bit of a deviation, so back to what I was saying about children growing up fast. Picture this all as if on a calendar.
Sunday: Married Mii says he or she is thinking of having a baby. You confirm that they should go ahead.
Monday: Probably nothing happens, unless they asked about a baby early on Sunday morning, and you get a call from the married Miis on Monday night. But more likely, you wait until...
Tuesday: As soon as you turn on the game, the call arrives. "The" call, with the mother just saying, "Hi!" And the whole "Guess what? We had a baby!" ordeal begins.
And here is how the baby ages.
Tuesday: Regardless of what time of day you received the call to inform you that a baby was born, the baby will remain an infant only until the end of the day. In Tomodachi Life, for some reason the "end of the day" is at 5:00 AM, at which point everything changes, including that children grow to the next "age." So if the parents tell you their baby was born at 6:00 AM on Tuesday morning, congratulations; you have an infant on your hands
(literally)
for 23 hours. I hope you enjoy this incredibly infuriating rocking game to make the stupid baby stop crying, because you'll probably be doing it a lot. Unless you want to watch the parents at the side of the baby's basket which is apparently supposed to be... wait, is that a cradle?! You absolutely never use it to rock your stupid baby! Why do you always come crying to me to rock your baby when you can just use the very thing that is made for this purpose?!
Right. I'm calm now. Whew. So, you won't see them ever use the cradle that they sometimes place the baby in, but you will see them frantically playing peekaboo with an infant who doesn't even know how to focus its eyes. Real bright of them.
But if the baby is born at 11:59 PM on Tuesday night, congratulations again; you'll only have that baby as an infant for five hours. And if you're lucky, the baby will go straight to sleep as soon as it's born and you won't hear from it again before you go to sleep yourself and turn off the game. Or, you could be irresponsible/insomniac, stay awake until late at night, and have to deal with a lot of this...
 |
| "Only four more days until I can give you away! I can't wait!" - Agnes Oblige |
Have fun!
Wednesday: Following whatever period of time the baby was an infant, the baby will spend the next 24 hours as a one-year-old. At age one, you will mostly see the baby in the same poses as it would be while an infant: in the arms of a parent, either smiling occasionally or crying like a banshee; sitting on a parent's back while the parent bounces it, and meanwhile the baby either cries like a banshee and flails like this...
...or else it jerks its head back and forth while turning its neck on a creepily straight axis. (Have I mentioned that I don't like babies in this game?) There is a minor change, in that when you leave the parents to try silencing the crying banshee child by themselves, instead of the baby lying in a basket and squirming while the parents try to peekaboo it into submission, now the baby awkwardly lies face-up on the floor and squirms while the parents try to peekaboo it into submission. *Sigh.*
The one notably new pose a baby can be in at age one is lying on its stomach, sitting creepily still while a parent reads a book to the baby, causing you to wonder whether the baby is dead and nobody has noticed, until it barely tilts its head, and gives you the chance to realize how freakishly disproportionate the baby's body is to its head.
Thursday: For the duration of this day, the baby is a two-year-old. Is this cool in any way? No, not really. It's virtually the same thing as the baby being a one-year-old; the baby still gets lifted into its parents arms, where it can smile or scream like a banshee; still has piggy-backs, where it creepily stares at nothing while turning its head eerily straight, or it screams like a banshee; you still play peekaboo to make the thing stop screaming like a banshee, and parents will still end the game by saying, "Oh, it's time he/she had his/her bottle." (Yeah... bottle-feeding a two-year-old. I'm not a parent, so I won't criticize too heavily, but... really? I think that's a bit long to bottle-feed.)
 |
| And boy, does she look THRILLED. |
By the way, keep in mind that Mii babies don't age along the same timeline as real babies do. I mean, I guess that goes without saying, since real babies don't age by one year every week (unless the Twilight saga is real, heh heh). But with real babies, you would usually expect to see crawling, standing, and walking all happen before age two. There are some slight variations to this; some might take a little longer than usual to learn these skills. And some babies will start to show signs of a physical or mental condition that makes them learn these things much more slowly, or they might never be able to do these things at all. Regardless, just know that Mii babies don't learn or age at the same rate as typical children in real life. So a two-year-old in this game will act just like a one-year-old in this game would.
Oh, but I guess there is a difference that you won't often see. On the rare occasions that the baby stops crying and screaming like a banshee, at age two the baby can go in the house's backyard. It just does the same things it would do inside.
...Next!
Friday: And today the baby is a three-year-old. Things kind of start happening today. Baby can walk now! Yay! It's extremely awkward and slow, the baby will still probably fall down a lot, and it's not exactly entertaining to watch. And unlike when the baby was first learning to stand up, the parents won't excitedly applaud the baby for walking. But the baby can walk now. Or, amble around unsteadily.
The parents won't lift the baby into their arms so much --
-- unless it's a bratty kid who cries a lot -- and the kid gets no more piggy-backs. In fact, sometimes parents will even leave the house and take their child with them, at which point you find that the child is capable of transporting itself by walking very awkwardly, sitting on a regular seat at a restaurant, that sort of thing.
But hey, this is progress, right? Actually, for a blessed bit of progress: The baby is now too old to wake up crying and screaming at night. So if you only have one baby on the island and it has turned three, you can rest easily; it won't be waking you up, and you won't have incompetent parents calling for help. Yes, now that is progress.
Saturday: The baby supposedly isn't such a baby anymore. Which is to say, the child is now four years old. Mercifully, the child is no longer able to cry. At all. It feels so wonderful not to hear the crying!
...So now what do you do with the kid?
Well... you can... hmm. I guess you can watch what the baby gets up to. It still plays with blocks, and can actually build things. You won't see the building process take place, but you can see it admire the castle it seems to have spontaneously generated out of random molecules of chaos, and then you can wonder why the heck the baby nearly snaps its own neck by rapidly shifting its neck from neutral position to this:
It can still play in the sandbox too, which is basically the exact same scenario, but with sand instead of blocks.
And it can run around in circles, following some random pattern, sometimes spontaneously hopping up and down in a circle, or sitting down for no good reason in the weirdest locations.
It gets kind of annoying, really.
But at last there are a couple of positive things to look forward to. The baby can jump on a trampoline, and dare I say, sometimes I actually find this cute.
(You probably won't hear me say that very often.)
And the baby can supposedly have conversations with its parents sometimes. That is a massive breakthrough.
With that, at night the baby goes to sleep -- though I'll point out that it seems kind of weird to keep having that child sleep beside its parents' bed, when I'd assume the houses have more than one bedroom. But that's not a problem. Sleep well.
...I was talking to the parents, by the way; enjoy this period of time when the game doesn't let your bratty kid wake you up at night anymore. I'll enjoy it too.
Sunday: Happy fifth birthday, little baby. Or, "fully grown adult."
Yeah. Let me explain.
At some point during the day -- probably as soon as you turn on the game -- you are going to get a call from the baby's parents. That only happens once you find yourself facing this view:
But if something happened, like maybe you were checking on someone's house the night before, and then you closed your 3DS and left it in sleep mode during the night, you'll open the game and still be seeing into someone's house, instead of starting off seeing the whole island. Or, if you're really quick, once you turn on the game you can immediately tap the house icon with your stylus, and it will take you to the houses before you receive the phone call. If that's what happens, you can tap the house of the family with the child, and check on the now-five-year-old baby before you get a call from the baby's parents. There's nothing to report here, really, other than that the child will still be doing the same things it did as a four-year-old, but it probably has a different hairstyle now.
Anyways, at some point you're going to get a call from the parents. What, are you like this child's principal at school, and the kid is getting in trouble already?
No... the parents will grace you with this:
Umm...
...
........
WHAT IN THE #%@#&*% IS THAT?!?!
"Happy fifth birthday, son. Now get out of our house. You're old enough to be living on your own."
WHAT?!?!
I will come back to this; this is a rant in itself. But there you go. In one week, this Mii baby goes from being a thought in its parents' heads to being... *sigh.* I don't even know what you're supposed to call that. A disowned kindergartner? I don't know. That's just the life cycle of a Tomodachi Life baby. Really took no time at all.
Getting to Know You: Interactions with Mii Babies
I'm sorry if that title misleads you; in spite of what you might think, through your interactions you're not going to get to know the Mii babies at all.
There's really not much to know, anyways.
It kind of makes me sad, for some reason.
The other thing I didn't mention in full is the only thing you can personally do with babies. I mean, unless you want to count the photo studio, but that's kind of not the same thing. I will say, though, that dressing the kids in stupid-looking costumes like this...
...and making their facial expressions look like this...
 |  |
Or, if you think that staring at the baby and its family through the windows of its house counts as significant interaction, you have that too. Though I must say, I get really infuriated rather quickly after I watch the babies. Again, more on that to come.
But that wasn't the thing I was going to talk about. No, this is about all the ways that you, the player, can personally interact with the Tomodachi Life babies.
Ready for this? It's a very long list:
You can... babysit. To... to make the baby stop crying.
...
Actually, that's it. That is the sum total of your interaction with these children. Aside from watching the child do the things that I mentioned earlier, you cannot have any form of interaction with this baby other than to tap the "Babysit" button when you are looking at the parents' house.
Look at this: the baby can't even hear the doorbell when you ring it.
See, that girl on the floor, she's a guest, and doesn't live in this house. She hears the doorbell, as do the parents. Not that baby, though. So you're not about to spend any time with him.
And... as I mentioned way back at the beginning of this blog post, I am someone who has worked with and lived with children everywhere from age 0 to 18. In sum total, I have had chances to do for other children just about everything that a father would do for his own children.
So, maybe when a child plays Tomodachi Life, they don't miss it, but... I notice so much missing to this relationship with these fictional children. As a player of Tomodachi Life, I will spend no time doing anything meaningful for a child. Do I feed it? No, that's handled -- sort of -- by the parents, who seem to think it's appropriate to bottle-feed a baby until it is three years old, when they start giving it solid food. Do I bathe it? No, and... come to think of it, I don't think the parents do that either. Do I have to change diapers? No, and... oh, my goodness... no wonder the baby cries so much; its parents never change its diaper in five years. That's disgusting.
The list goes on. Do I read to the baby? Do I teach it words? Do I help it learn to crawl, and later to walk? Do I potty train it? Do I find out its likes and interests? Do I listen to its world of imagination, and supplement that imagination with stories of my own? Do I help it develop coordination? Do I play real games with it, rather than calling this a "game?"
 |
| ...Looks more like a terrifying ritual to me... |
No. Not at all. Those things are either handled by the parents, or else they are never mentioned at all. I recently told a friend, I'm worried that if I have my own child, I might forget a simple thing like the fact that babies need to be burped. And Tomodachi babies aren't helping.
So. You have no way to interact with the baby other than that one "Babysit" button. The whole of your personal experience with that child is that you either make it stop crying, or you try to keep it from crying.
As far as you, the player, are concerned, these babies are literally nothing more than crying machines. Your role is to maintain the "on/off" switch for that machine. It's also quite easy to accidentally turn the crying back on; you'll often go into a babysitting game with a previously happy-looking baby, who will burst into screaming and crying with your first action that you accidentally misplaced.
 |  |
Babysitting: Yay.
I guess I should explain how these babysitting "games" work. I'll tell you from the start, these "games" frustrate me, in large part because of how overly simplistic they are. They aren't always easy, mind you, but they're very simple, kind of excessively so.
It's easiest if I explain the peekaboo "game" first, the one that you play with one-year-olds and two-year-olds.
In that "game," (I think I'll stop putting the word "game" in quotation marks. You get it; I don't regard it as a real game) there are exactly seven useful actions that you can perform. There is an eighth one -- pointing, which you do by tapping your stylus on a part of the touch screen that isn't on the baby's body -- but that does absolutely nothing, and you may as well ignore it. (That is, unless you are deliberately trying to make the baby cry... but let's not go there.)
The instructions that appear on the top screen say only, "Pat or tickle the baby to make it happy." They leave it up to you to figure out the rest. (I will give it to the game developers, I like how they said that, because that much is like real parenting; you don't get full instructions, and have to sort of figure it out as you go.) So let me explain to you how this works. The seven actions are as follows:
1) Pat or rub the baby's head. You do that by moving the stylus to the baby's scalp -- the forehead generally won't work.
2) Pat or rub the baby's face. This is fairly straightforward. Aim for the baby's facial features -- which, if you haven't altered the baby into some freak, should mostly be very low on the baby's head.
3) Touch or tickle the baby's tummy. Again, this is straightforward. Just be aware that if you hold the stylus on the stomach for too long, the baby will fart instead of changing its mood. It can only do that once during each session of playing peekaboo, though.
4) Tap the "Peekaboo" button, doing it briefly, so that the baby only hears, "boo!"
5) Tap and hold the Peekaboo button just long enough for the baby to hear, "Peeka-boo!"
6) Tap and hold the Peekaboo button for a couple seconds, so the baby hears, "Peeka...... boo!"
7) Do nothing at all.
Each of those seven actions will affect the baby in one of three ways. It can affect the baby positively, so the baby will either come closer to stopping the crying, or it will giggle. It can affect the baby negatively, so that it will moan, growl, or it will angrily voice a phrase that will get annoying really quickly, "Naaaa-na!" Or if the baby is already crying, it will cry harder for a moment. The actions can also have a neutral effect, which does nothing to affect the baby's mood. If the baby is already crying, this neutral action will just delay more screaming. If the baby is not crying, this will just make the baby start making some annoying baby vocalizations. (Believe me, even if you think they're cute at first, they get annoying really quickly. And I'll explain more on that later.) The one good thing a neutral action can do is get the baby's attention back if it starts ignoring you like this:
(I have to wonder, though -- if it's this much trouble to make a baby be happy when it doesn't even care that you're trying to help... is it really worth the effort?)
 |
| What is it even staring at? Actually, that goes for the baby and the cat. |
 |
| Yii. You get to see this sight a lot. It makes you glad you allowed babies in this game, doesn't it? |
 |
| Of course, most babies' eyes don't sink lower than their noses when they're sad... |
If the baby is happy, it will look like this:
And if you want to go to the trouble of making the baby very happy, it will start laughing -- which also gets annoying rather quickly -- and will look like this:
or even this, if you sustain that level of happiness for long enough:
If the "game" goes on for too long, then instead of becoming happy, the baby will become sleepy. You will see pink firework-like things appear, while the baby's eyelids flutter, its head lolls back and forth, and it starts to vocalize some other baby noises that get annoying more quickly than any other in the game except the ones that infants make. Anyways, it looks like this:
If the parents specifically called you and asked you to help the baby stop crying, then this "game" ends once the parents say, "Oh, it's time he/she had his/her bottle." That will happen regardless of whether the baby is now smiling or is still crying. (You're given a reward either way, which makes me wonder why you bother to make any effort in this "game" at all.) If you actually chose to play the game without being asked -- because of course you'll want to do that, he says sarcastically -- then the game goes on until you exit. No matter how many times you make the baby happy, sad, or sleepy, the baby will then stay in the last mood it was in when you left.
And there you go, that's your total interaction with a Tomodachi Life one- or two-year-old. But "gameplay" that basic isn't always easy, as I said. Sometimes the baby will get closer to crying because of the "do nothing" action, and I have seen several instances where a non-crying baby started crying before I even did anything. (And here I was actually going to help it out.) Or there are instances where a baby loves you saying "peeka-boo!" but hates you for saying "peeka..... boo!" Also, it's important to realize that what a child responds to positively changes periodically. So just because you found a baby liked it when you stroked its hair in the morning, don't be surprised when the baby starts screaming and convulsing in a desperate effort to get your hand off its head a few hours later.
(Fun fact: I once found out by accident that if a crying baby responds negatively to you touching its face, you can hold the point of your stylus on the baby's mouth, and for a certain amount of time -- sometimes for the space of one to three screams -- the baby will struggle to get free of your hand, but it will be completely silent. Yes, someone making Tomodachi Life thought that you would like to literally shut the baby up. And while I think that's a terrible parenting technique in real life that is liable to suffocate the baby, Mii babies have no lungs. Nobody gets hurt in this game. So I have no qualms about shutting the baby's mouth. It feels so satisfying.)
These same principles are a little harder to explain, but are even more applicable to the rocking "game" that you play when you are babysitting an infant. That game can be even more frustrating.
There is only one action to it this time around: rocking. But the ways that you can rock the baby fall in two spectrums, speed and "amplitude." The way you rock the baby is by actually rocking the 3DS you are holding in your real hands. You know, there's a gyroscopic motion sensor in there, so the system can tell when you're tilting or shaking it, etc.
You can rock the baby anywhere from so slow that the 3DS doesn't recognize any motion, all the way to so fast that you are starting to see the baby on the screen as two or three separate still images. Any faster than that, and the parents will get mad at you and say this:
You can also rock the baby so gently that, again, the 3DS doesn't detect any motion, all the way to... well, you kind of have to get a feel for it. If you rock the baby too hard, the parents will say the same thing as in the pictures above. Or if you rock the baby too hard a second time, the parent will say this:
At first I would wonder -- ok, I should be honest. The first time I had to rock a baby in this game, I started off sincerely trying to rock it to make it stop crying. The baby's screeching started to frustrate me a little, and so I found myself rocking a little harder and a little less cautiously as time went on, growing more impatient to make the crying stop. Before I even realized it was possible to happen, the parents got mad and told me I was shaking the baby too hard, and warned me that it might get hurt. Kind of angrily, I thought, "Mess up a job once, and you'll never be asked to do it again." So I rocked -- better put, I shook -- the baby as forcefully as I could, and I actually snarled at the screen, "Learn to take care of your own children, you dingus!"
They kicked me out of their house for doing that. Of course, for some reason the parents trusted me to rock their squalling infant again only a few seconds later. Some parents they are.
What I was saying, though, is that I used to wonder why the parents were so uptight about me allegedly shaking their baby too hard, when the hardest you could rock an infant was not all that much harder than the softest. I thought the baby was just fine. That was before I took a screenshot one day, at just the right moment, and saw that I was unwittingly doing this:
Which is to say, I was teaching babies to fly. And doing so without a license. In my defense, though, I also found out that those aren't my real arms! Ha, you tricky game. How could I be holding a Nintendo 3DS in my hands if my arms were part of the game? Silly!
But really, I did find out that those "arms" holding the baby are not only attached to nothing, they're also so two-dimensional, you can actually see the baby falling halfway through them once you start rocking harder. It's kind of creepy, really.
And just recently, I found that you can also deliberately do things like this:
I also admit that I took vengeance on a few particularly annoying babies by getting them sleepy...
...and then violently shaking them awake...
...then lulling them back to sleep again, and repeating the process.
Even if you aren't deliberately trying to be mean, though, this can be so frustrating. Trying to find the perfect rhythm by combining the perfect rocking speed and power can be like trying to fine-tune a radio. Sometimes a baby wants feather-light rocking with intervals of rest in between, sometimes it wants a quick rock that would make a real baby feel vertigo, sometimes it wants this one ultra-specific rocking speed somewhere in the middle, and going the slightest bit too slow or just a tad bit too hard sends it into crying hysterics.
You know, real babies are not like that. For all of the things that set them off, for how unparalleled they are at high sensitivity to random things, and even considering that their primary method of communication is to cry, real babies don't normally act that way. The difference between making a baby happy or getting it to sleep is not determined by how long you hold a "peeka... boo!" or by how exceedingly precise your rhythm of rocking is. Real babies tend to have a lot of needs at the same time, and if you take care of one of the needs, and it knows it's being cared for, it calms down enough to ignore other needs and wants for a while. Besides that, real babies have stamina. Nobody can tell me definitively how long a baby is able to cry before it passes out, but in my experience, you wouldn't normally expect a baby to continue crying for much longer than an hour, unless the baby is deathly ill and you need to get it to a hospital. So, the art of comforting real babies may be more complex, but it's also more forgiving.
Now, I've already shown you what a crying infant and a sleepy infant looks like, so, really quickly, here's what a nearly-crying infant looks like:
And here is what a happy infant looks like:
But I must admit, I avoid getting an infant that happy. Why? It's not as though it can wet itself, right? Right.
No, my reason for avoiding that is because of something I briefly mentioned already: the infant's baby noises, the happy noises in particular, get on my nerves more quickly than any other in this game, even more than a toddler's. And the noises drive me absolutely insane. The full explanation of that comes later. Anyways, I would rather rock a baby too hard and have the parents take over, instead of having to hear a closed-throat, happy-ish sound of, "aaaah!" one more time. It's just... ok, I'll get to that in time.
The third babysitting "game" is nothing short of pointless, unless you happen to like a certain child and want to pretend you're spending time with it. Or, you can make it look like this if you don't like the child. What you do is go into the backyard, and this interaction takes place:
The baby can giggle if you spin it for long enough and it decides that spinning is ok. But as usual, I hate listening to that giggle. Maybe it's the fact that it still giggles like a one-year-old, or maybe it's just another reminder that this is the most depth you get to the child-raising experience. I'm not sure. But if you hate Mii babies as much as I do, you might find yourself wishing there was an option to release the baby while you spin it, sending it flying over the backyard fence and into the ocean.
...It wouldn't be hard, either. You'll probably notice how freaky it is that a four-year-old child can fit most of its torso between your thumbs and fingertips. This baby's entire body would probably weigh little more than a basketball.
So there you have it. I've just laid out the entire relationship you have with these babies. Aren't they ever so adorable?
On Camera... Action!: Mii Baby Behaviour
I've told you the simple summary of virtually all the things you will see these babies do in this game. But importantly, let me tell you what they don't do.
First, a question: Why do you feel that you like other video game characters? Mario's not real. Link's not real. But you probably feel like you know them and you like them. Why is that?
My best guess is that you feel like you have some kind of relationship to them, because they imitate human behaviour. The programming that makes up these characters gets them to remind you of real human behaviour, and exemplary human behaviour at that; guys like Mario and Link are heroes who face the enemies who represent evil, and they protect the people they care about, no matter what. By having you observe them act that way, and having you help them along in their quests, the games make you feel close to them.
And most fictional characters do some version of the same thing. You feel the humanity of these imaginary characters through narration in a book, camera shots in a movie, back story in a video game, or especially through dialogue, in any of the genres. Because of the things that you see, hear, and imagine, you get an impression of what kinds of people these are, and you get to see if you relate to them and if you like them.
The Miis of Tomodachi Life do this. It's a little bit shallow, but you do find out a little bit about them by their behaviours. You help to craft their personalities when they move to the island, by doing a simple personality assessment when you create new characters. You help them make friends, assess their needs, find out their likes and dislikes, and you even have very simple conversations sometimes.
 |
| Heh... I hadn't heard some of these punchlines before. Well done. |
So over time, you get a little bit of an idea that these guys are vaguely human, because they're showing human behaviour.
Now how many of those things do you see the Mii babies doing?
Not a single one.
The closest they get to telling you about likes and dislikes is when they respond positively or negatively in the babysitting games. But they do so with inarticulate noises and flailing. Guess what else responds to stimulus by making inarticulate noise and flailing? Just about any animal in the world.
The Mii babies get a little better by the time they are four years old, and I will often find that a baby who has done nothing but anger me up until that point suddenly grows on me a little. It's mainly because you can tell that they're talking -- sort of -- and are doing human things, like holding a shovel, building with blocks, or jumping on a trampoline.
But up to that point, these babies do nothing but stare vacantly, flail and squirm, perform the same meaningless actions repeatedly, or even do striking things like going stone-still to imitate an opossum. And they make noises that animals could imitate.
No, I mean that:
Its crying can be imitated by a goat or sheep.
Its laughter -- as well as its "sleepy noises" -- can be imitated by a howler monkey.
Its angry growling noise can be imitated by a fox or coyote.
And its vocalizations -- the things that sound like nonsense noises instead of words -- no joke, I know of small breeds of dogs that are capable of doing the same thing.
Is it too much to ask that the babies actually say something? I know that real babies have different points at which they start speaking -- really speaking, I mean, where they put words together and express ideas with them, rather than just saying sounds. They could be talking as early as the end of their second year, or as late as starting when they are four years old, and that would still not be totally unheard of. Most babies seem to start talking at about age 3.
Mii babies, though... *sigh.*
I don't know if any of you out there know the joy of listening to a three-year-old struggling to explain to you what is going on inside of his or her head, not realizing how little sense he or she is making. Or, even when you're listening to a child with developmental delays whose mind is as mature as a three-year-old's, it's funny. It's kind of endearing, too. Talking to four- or five-year-olds is even better, because it's the age where you start to have a better chance of having two-way communications with them. You start to understand what is going on in that young mind, and they start to understand what you are trying to say to them.
But Mii babies... they don't talk to you. Ever. In fact, up until the time that the baby leaves home -- so, even if the baby is now five years old, and preparing to become independent -- it will still say not a word to you, and will only assault you with baby noises.
Want to take a guess at what is being said in this picture here? This is the "spinning" "game" that you do when you babysit an older toddler. The baby makes this face if you hold still and don't do anything for a few seconds. So what do you think this baby is saying in this situation?
 |
| And may I just point out, this is the scariest baby ever born in this game, excluding the ones that I made as a joke. |
I mean, if this were a real four- or five-year-old, you might expect something like, "Hey!" or "No!" Or, most likely, the child would tell you exactly what's on its mind, like, "I wanna spin! I wanta spin, pwease!"
But no. You know what this four-year-old Mii baby is saying?
"Eeeuh! Daaauh!"
*Sigh.*
And somehow, as soon as you get the call from the parents telling you that their child is leaving home at the ripe old age of five, you find that the baby has magically gained the ability to speak your language fluently.
But for as long as you, the player, are involved with the child, all you get is, "daaauh!" Said in the exact same voice it has had since it was one year old.
So aside from making you wonder about the maturity level of the baby -- and yes, if you're like me, you'll still think of the four-year-old child as a baby because of how it acts -- this causes the child's mind to be a locked box. How am I supposed to develop feelings of affection for a child that I have no way of knowing? Or am I not supposed to have a strong connection to the children, and that's the point? Am I supposed to leave that relationship up to the parents?
In the Hands of Children: Parenting at its Finest
Right, speaking of parents.
Yes, one of the things I hate about the Mii babies in this game isn't something about the babies themselves; it's about their parents.
 |
| "Just think - only two more days until we can get rid of this kid! I wonder how much people would be willing to pay to buy this thing." - Anna the Merchant |
Aside from the fact that kids are physically incapable of having children, there is only one difference, actually: kids can only be in romantic relationships with other kids (don't get me started on that), and grown-ups can only be in romantic relationships with other grown-ups. Other than that, Miis of both kinds are functionally identical. The line can blur even further, too; there are two items in the game called "Age-o-matic Spray" and "Kid-o-matic Spray," which allow you to change a child into an adult, or vice versa. If you use one of those, the Mii's profile will show a "spray" icon beside the space that would normally show the character's age, which now reads "???", indicating that this isn't the character's natural state. But until such time that you restore the person to his or her original age with the opposite kind of spray, their new age class is basically who they are. (I haven't experimented with this yet, because I think it's too weird, but it might be possible to make an adult and a child be in a relationship together by using one of the age-changing sprays on one of the characters and letting their relationship progress until one of them confesses feelings for the other. 'Cause that's not creepy. *Update: Soon after I wrote this, I found out: that's exactly what happens. Creepy.)
Anyways, with that aside, there is no difference at all to the way that children and adults act in this game. And while that might sometimes mean that children utter phrases as mature as this,
most of the time it looks more like adults acting immature. It would be a lot of pictures for me to demonstrate this, so just listen, picture this in your mind, and tell me what kind of person I am describing.
What kind of a person thinks that randomly hopping and skipping around in a circle is a good social activity? What kind of person thinks that aimlessly rolling around on the floor counts as a good time? What kind of person would think that running around an empty room with outstretched arms, pretending to be an airplane, is a good form of bonding with friends? What kind of person gets minutes or hours of fascination from standing in an awkwardly hunched position and staring at the ceiling? Who would ask you to take time out of your schedule, while you are trying to get important things done, just to ask if you want to see a funny face they've been working on? And who is incapable of doing so much as sneezing without your help?!
Children. Children would be the type of people who have no higher function than that. Except... I wasn't talking about the kids. No, that was all applicable to the adults.
 |
| Noire is having fun with her father, Sir Frederick. |
And there are some things people seem to think adults should never do, like speaking with blunt honesty, but I think there are situations where we could all stand to be a little more childlike in that regard. I'm just saying that there is a difference between having childlike qualities and being immature.
I suppose I shouldn't expect all that much from a game that is basically a glorified ant farm, where you peer through glass at your residents and feed them sometimes, and said residents are totally dependent on you to sustain them with food and shelter.
But at least ants listen to their parenting instincts. And they're darn good at it, too.
Mii parents? Not so much.
It occurred to me one day, while I noticed a couple of parents trying to quiet their crying baby, that the parents in Tomodachi Life have only a child's level of understanding about how babies work and how to take care of them.
Between spending a full ten minutes brushing a one-year-old's teeth (do one-year-olds in this game even have teeth? And if so, why do parents keep bottle-feeding them until they turn three?), and yet feeding that one-year-old by throwing it a sandwich,
...you know, rather than helping the baby get food in its mouth... or thinking that this qualifies as some kind of game or learning activity:
 |
| "Follow this rhythm, baby: clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! crap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! Whee! Isn't clapping out the same incessant, undeviating rhythm of slowly clapping in a steady beat, and doing so until it hurts your hands so much FUN?!" |
...I kind of feel like I'm watching six-year-olds trying to help with their baby siblings. And I should know; I once was that six-year-old.
But it becomes really obvious when you leave the parents to their own devices when they try to get their baby to stop crying.
How do you quiet an infant?
 |
| "Peekaboo!" |
 |
| "Peekaboo!" |
 |
| "Peekaboo!" (Dad decides to randomly photobomb.) |
 |
| "Peekaboo! Now stop crying already; you've been crying continuously for THREE YEARS!" |
And I wonder... If you know real four-year-olds at all, you know that they still cry. A lot. So I wonder if the reason four-year-olds are programmed never to cry in this game is because the parents would be totally helpless once they realize that "peekaboo" doesn't normally work very well on a four-year-old child.
(By the way, watch the miracle of "life" "progressing!" It's "Peekaboo Through the Ages," everyone!)
(Also, yes, I did just learn how to make GIFs. It's more than just fun; it's also surprisingly useful.)
 |  |
To be fair, the parents seem to be aware of one other practice to make a baby stop crying, one that you'll see on probably every night of a baby's life until the game makes it impossible:
Note, though, that if you leave it up to the parents, it can take them between one and four hours to get their bratty baby to sleep at night. When I do it, however, it goes more like this:
If I'm putting in an honest effort, I can have these babies shut up in a matter of seconds. It would take me, at very most, two minutes -- and that's if the baby is an infant and is being especially finicky. I normally don't go to the trouble during the day, because the baby is going to cry somewhere on the spectrum between "several times" and "constantly" during the day, so it's typically not worth the effort. I'll only help the baby out if the parents ask me, or I get sick of being able to hear crying all across the island when it's late at night. (Yep, that's a thing that happens. It might momentarily make you regret buying this game.)
I get it now. This is what people mean with the phrase "children raising children," and this is one of the biggest reasons that people are worried about teens getting pregnant. You can clearly see the parallel between Tomodachi Life and reality:
Mii babies are in the hands of people who are also children, not just at heart, but in maturity and in mind. They're not being cared for by adults; these babies are under the care of other children who are merely bigger than them.
But I guess it makes sense, then, why they consider a child old enough to leave home at age five.
Ready to Leave the Nest: Ha, that's Funny
So I already mentioned this, how a Mii baby is considered to be old enough for independence at age 5. Never mind that only hours earlier you saw the baby doing things like this:
 |
| (This is no "cut and paste" editing trick; the game really makes her levitate across the sandbox, because she's too short to properly do the animation of sliding her shovel across the top of her pile of sand. This was the only way to animate a child this short performing that simple motion. It really brings to mind how tiny these kids still are. Also, I think she's eating sand over there. Her mom doesn't seem to mind.) |
The album that you get once a baby "grows up" proves what kind of maturity level this child has. Take a look, unless you're worried about spoilers.
In comparison to the adults, maybe it doesn't seem that much of a stretch to call these babies "grown." That's only relatively speaking, mind you. Though I suppose that in a world where nobody has to work full-time jobs, the economy functions by way of characters over Level 20 spontaneously generating gold coins when they really like a food or clothing article you give them, and nobody will starve to death even if you literally never feed them, there isn't much requirement for a lot of maturity.
And I suppose I should be grateful that you don't have to raise a child to age 18 while it is still under the charge of its parents; if the baby still aged at the same rate as it does growing to age 5, then it would take about two and a half weeks for you to get rid of a baby. (Sorry, in that case I should probably refer to it as a "child" instead of "baby.") And I do have to keep in mind that a lot of people who play this game are children under the age of 18, and thus it would be really weird asking a six-year-old to play a life simulation game where they have to raise teenagers. I guess it is for the better; I think that I, and probably a lot of players, would turn off the game and not pick it up again if we had to be responsible to care for a child that we dislike, for more than half a month, with no chance to get rid of it until it is grown. (Just imagine how the parents of teenagers feel.)
Still...
If you let the child move into an apartment, it's there permanently, unless you decide someday to delete the character. The child gets to keep living the same life it always has, and the same life its parents lived before: Total dependence on the player, no real responsibilities, just looking for ways to play and have friends and be happy, in some limited way. The child never needs to feel far from home; it can still visit its parents' house, becomes an automatic friend with its siblings if it has any, and if you really want to you can place the child in an apartment directly between the parents' apartments. There will be little to no progress in that child's life -- kind of like everyone else's lives in Tomodachi Life -- but hey, at least you get to keep it close to home.
Of course, you'll probably want to do that only if you actually like the kid. That, or if you're afraid that a couple might divorce; I've heard something to the effect that a couple will not divorce while they have a child. I don't know if that still applies after the baby "leaves the nest," but as a precaution, there were a couple of times that I let an annoying kid stay on the island just to keep the parents together. I exiled those kids to the apartment building's top floor, away from everyone else. (And that makes me sound like the witch from the fairy tale of Rapunzel.)
Your other option is a little more exciting, feels a little more productive, and is a great way to get rid of kids you are perfectly fine with never seeing again. That's right, you can let the kids become travelers.
In summary of how that works: The parents ask you if you want their five-year-old to travel the world, and if you decide to go that route, the kid puts on traveler's clothes and becomes classified as a traveler. It will wait at the dock on the coast of your island for as long as it needs to, until a boat comes by. The way you receive boats is by StreetPassing another person who has Tomodachi Life and actually turned on the StreetPass function. Once the child leaves on a boat, it will appear in someone else's game as a visitor to the island.
If that player connects to the Internet and gives your traveler permission, your traveler will send a letter home to his or her family, which the parents on your island will receive and then share with you. And somehow or other, the child can visit home sometimes. I actually haven't figured out how that works, seeing how only two of the 17 children I've sent out ever visited home.
Then at the start of a new day -- remember, in this game that means 5:00 AM -- the traveler will leave the host island it visits and wait on the dock for another boat to take it someplace new. And the journey will continue in like manner.
That sounds nice, right?
"Sounds" nice. That's the key word there.
Welcome Home, Travelers! ...That's the Name of this Island, "Home Island"
I finally received a couple of travelers a few weeks ago, and so now I have a bit of a better idea about how this all works. I didn't get to have the full experience of it, because I received both of these travelers at some time after 8:00 PM, which is considered "night time" in Tomodachi Life. If you receive a traveler before nightfall at 6:00 PM, you will be able to see those travelers wandering around the island, interacting with your islanders, and I'm told there's an animation where you can see the traveler talking to them with a speech bubble filled with pictures that represent stories of his or her adventures. But frustratingly enough, travelers are scheduled like infants, in that they only stick around for whatever fraction of a day you have before 5:00 AM. So I never got to see that.
What I did see, though, was mildly heart-breaking. And, as is usually the case with kids in this game, it made me at least a little bit angry.
I saw the travelers arrive on the dock, where they promptly ran away while other boats were finishing trading goods with other islands, and taking my own travelers on their way away from my island. Great. Thanks for... letting me know how you're doing, kids.
After some searching, I found the two travelers in these positions, respectively.
 |
| Apparently they felt more comfortable going to places that rhyme with their names, so José went to the café... |
 |
| ...and Gavin sat by the fountain. ...And this little piggy cried, "Wee wee wee wee!" all the way home. Hickory-dickory dock, or something. |
They just sat there, interacting with nobody, until I approached them, and they asked if they could set up tents at the campground near the dock. I said, "Sure," and they immediately disappeared. I found them sitting in their spontaneously generated tents, and... I immediately heaved a sigh that was fogging up with tears.
This is Gavin. Look at what happened once I called on him, by apparently ringing a... doorbell... that was attached to his tent...?
 |
"Ding-dong!" |
 |
| (Umm, yeah, you told me already.) |
 |  |
Gavin. What. What in the rayos del diablo del mundo entero were you planning on doing if I hadn't sought you out?!?! Were you just going to let yourself die of starvation instead of asking anybody for help?!?! Heck, why didn't you say anything when you asked me about setting up a tent?! And why did you seem so healthy and happy back then, anyways?!
*Sigh.* Here, have some of this spaghetti I have stockpiled.
Immediately after I fed him, he told me:
"-- you know, because instead of asking for help, I would have rather laid down here, slowly dying..." And then he said this:
 |  |
Gavin. What.
What... in las naranjas del arbol desagradecido por Lucifero were you just thinking?!?!?! You mean to tell me that while you were moping around on the ground, looking just as pathetic and helpless as the toddlers I've had to play peekaboo with, trying to ignore how hungry you were, you happened to have an entire meatloaf in your possession, and you didn't pause to think, "Oh yeah, maybe I should eat this?!" You were going to let yourself be wracked by the torment of extreme hunger and ignore the food that you had with you this entire time?!?! Is that what your parents taught y-
...Right. I suppose it is. *Sigh.* 3 Play Coins, you say? Fine, I try to give charitable donations. I'll take your meat loaf. Eat some more stuff while you're at it; I have plenty. I buy it from getting free hamster suits harvested from people's dreams, then giving them the suits they dreamed about, so that they give me gold coins that I can then sell for $200 each to the pawn shop that really shouldn't still be in business. I'll forget how irresponsible you've been if you just take care of yourself.
And I won't condemn him too deeply, either. I have severe clinical depression and only recently started taking medication for it, something I probably should have looked into 10 years ago. Anyways, at the most severe of its symptoms, I sometimes find myself in the situation of that little five-year-old traveler baby: overwhelmed with despair and lacking the strength to make myself stand up, let alone ask for help. But that said, a person who is suffering like that should never be trusted to go alone on a journey and fend for oneself. I have to make sure I have someone who will reach out to me -- not that I usually do -- just in case my depression defeats me for a while, and I need someone to check occasionally that I'm still living. Sending a child out to travel the world when that child is prone to have episodes like these 20% of the time it visits an island... that just seems irresponsible.
I next went to check on the only other traveler that I've ever received, Jose, who arrived at the same time as Gavin. Calling on him went like this:
 |
| "Well, it's dangerous to have a cold alone. Take this!" - TAB III |
Not so bad, I guess. But once I took care of Jose's needs, I went back outside of his tent, and the screen kept focused on him in his tent. Curious, I paused and watched for a minute. And it showed me this:
...
Look, it's not that I think it's bad that this traveler (and Gavin too, for that matter) brought a teddy bear with him. I mean, I still have my childhood stuffed animals nearby. Sometimes on really bad days I even pick one up, give it a hug, and remember how comforting that always felt when I was little. And it makes me feel better. I even had a stuffed Sonic the Hedgehog with me during this previous year at university, where I was away from home again. I mean, that was in large part because he's shaped just right to be a pillow that supports my lower jaw properly... but still. I don't think having a teddy bear or stuffed animal of some kind is necessarily wrong.
What made me uneasy was how I saw this child interact with his teddy bear. You can't really see it from still images, even if I show you a lot of them, so I'll describe it instead. And be aware, the same applied to Gavin; he had his teddy bear with him too. So, these travelers held their teddy bears in their arms and slowly rocked their teddy bears back and forth. They set their teddy bears on their laps and smiled at them. They pet their teddy bears' heads, nuzzled their teddy bears against their faces, kissed their teddy bears, talked quietly to their teddy bears, and when the travelers eventually went to sleep, gave their teddy bears their own miniature sleeping bags beside their own sleeping bags...
This is not the kind of behaviour that indicates a child is mature enough to embark on a solo journey across oceans. Even if boat pilots are always good people who never harm travelers, and even if Miis can go hungry but can't actually starve to death, which means that children can live on in this game even when island hosts are being neglectful, and even if there is no real danger to the travelers... look at these kids.
Real five-year-olds are the type of people who want you to see that a pile of sticks is a magically protected castle that you can live in comfortably, and who are fascinated that cutting paper with scissors turns the paper into new shapes, and who often need help to tie their own shoes, and who fall asleep on top of the colouring books that you give them when they want something to do. They're not the sort of people that you want trying to run their own lives, keep themselves motivated, and be required to play "house" in real life. They're not at all ready for that kind of responsibility.
(By the way, I know that there are real children in the world who have to do these things at age five -- but I think we can agree that it's a tragedy when that happens. Something goes missing from a person who has had to act grown up from too early a time, and that "something" can be hard to restore in an adult.)
It almost makes me regret sending out any of my island's children as travelers. Especially considering how neglectful I have found that some of the host islands are.
Welcome Home, Travelers! ...Because You Lived Here Before, So it's Home
I've only received letters from the first three travelers that I've sent out, and only had visits from the first two. Zoram was the second baby born in my game, the second traveler I sent out, and he was and still is by far the brattiest and most annoying baby I've had in the game. Apparently different babies can have different dispositions; Zoram cried more often and more easily than any other child I've had since, was often near impossible to calm down, and he is the only baby I've seen cry all through the night, past 5:00 AM, and for so long that I saw the game transition the scene from his father sitting on his bed in his pajamas and rocking the little monstrosity, to a scene where he dressed in his clothes and sitting in the living room and was still trying to make the baby stop crying. When the baby finally passed out -- from sheer exhaustion, I'm guessing -- at 6:00 AM, his dad went back to bed. (Or, not really "back" to bed, since that was the first sleep he got that night.) The baby's mom wasn't even in the house at the time; she was sleeping in the apartments, and I don't blame her. If I had to live with a kid like Zoram, I think the best strategy would be to take turns staying up all night with him while the other parent gets a full night of rest. Little brat.
(*For the record, if you were wondering why I was awake to see this all happen, just know that I was very sick, and aside from how often I went running to the bathroom, I also had terrible insomnia the night that I witnessed this. And it was not at all helped by a certain inconsiderate neighbour who lived above my apartment -- my real-life apartment, that is. He's also something of a little brat, thinking that it's appropriate to sing loudly and stomp his feet until 4:30 AM. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that neighbour's name is Zoram; it would be fitting.)
...My impression of Zoram wasn't helped by the fact that he started to look more and more like a Muppet when he got older.
I deported him with no regrets.
When he came to visit home, my first thought was not, "Welcome back!" It was, "Oh... umm... ok." And my second thought was looking at this:
and thinking, "Heh. Pink hair. It's... kind of ugly."
I let Zoram stay for as little time as possible, but in that time I noticed that in addition to having pink hair, he had also risen to Happiness Level 3.
Only a few days later, I was greeted with this news:
And this time, I was more enthusiastic. Now that Michael was done being an annoying, ugly, bald baby who never smiled, I kind of liked him a bit. So it was good to see him!
I just wasn't so happy to see that he was still stuck at Happiness Level 1, and he was so hungry that when I offered him some food, he did this:
Well, if I had spent days away from home, and the people who were supposed to be helping me had paid no attention to me at all (hence why Michael's Happiness Level hadn't changed since leaving home), I might want to start eating a table too.
(To be totally honest, though, I never gnawed on a table during that one time last year when I was starving and homeless. But I have been known to chew on and swallow blades of grass in times of desperate need.)
This actually disappointed me. The care of one single island owner had allowed one child to advance two levels. Having received travelers myself, I now know how easy that is: just give the child all of the items that the game suggests to you. There aren't many; you can give the child some food, a bath set so he or she can take a bath, hair-colour spray, cold or stomach medicine (if needed), a music box to listen to, and a friendly pat on the head. If you give the child all of those things, it's easy for that traveler to level up twice.
And then the complete lack of care on the part of another island owner had caused a child to remain no better than he was before. Is that responsible? Send the kids away and just hope that they get taken care of by strangers who may not have that high of a commitment to helping strangers? And since I know that at least some of the players of this game are kids... I'm sending out imaginary kids to be taken care of by real kids who don't know how to take care of themselves?
It gets worse, too. Michael has been stuck on that one island for such a long time -- I'm talking about months -- that I received a letter a few days ago, telling me that he was visiting StreetPass Relay Point Island. That's the limbo-like place that Mii travelers go if they've been trapped on someone's island for too long. If I understand correctly, basically his information was scooped up into Nintendo's internet database, and he'll be sent somewhere else sooner or later. It's kind of weird to think, but this is something like having a welfare system inside of a welfare system.
 |  |
 |  |
 |
| *Sigh.* I don't have the heart to tell them what it all means. |
Travelers: Exiles or Ghosts?
Then on the other hand, I haven't heard a word out of the other travelers I've sent out. I mean, other than the eight of them who are still standing on the dock to this day and haven't traveled at all because no boats have come by. That's a thing that both your own travelers and visiting travelers do. It's been a month since I was last able to StreetPass someone else who plays Tomodachi Life, so Gavin and Jose, the visitors I mentioned, are still waiting for a boat. This, in spite of how the day they arrived, they told me they needed to wake up bright and early so they could catch the boat that was coming in the morning. Umm, kids? You have absolutely no control over that. Even I have no control over that. The boat comes when it comes.
I'll say, as a minor note, that this in itself is kind of frustrating. I have 12 kids standing on the dock right now -- which is more than you can see on the screen -- 10 of my island's own, two coming from other islands. The last four don't appear on-screen and there is no way at all to interact with them until some other travelers leave on boats, and the line-up shuffles forwards. That might take a while; many of them have been standing on the dock for over three weeks. Why not have them wander around and actually do something?! They may as well be doing something, right? I mean, the two visitors, they claim that they made so many friends that they're going to miss the residents of my island, and say things like this:
 |  |
 |  |
WHAT?! I seem to remember you came to my island, spoke with nobody, only talked to me because I deliberately searched for you, you went to your tent, spoke to nobody, and have been waiting on the dock ever since that night. How do you expect me to believe that you even met these people, let alone developed close bonds with them?
Tomodachi Life, why not let these travelers actually go around meeting people while they wait for a boat? Islanders can move instantaneously if they want to. Someone could be sleeping on a bench in the park, and if I ring the doorbell to that Mii's apartment, that Mii appears in a fraction of a second. Look at this:
So with that being as it is, do we really need travelers constantly to wait on the dock just in case a boat shows up? I mean, couldn't we make it so that we tell a boat pilot, "Just a moment; we have extra cargo for you," and seconds later the traveler can run down to the port and depart?
After all, that would make it less nonsensical for my island's residents to say things like this:
 |  |
 |  |
How would you know?!?! First of all, we have only received two travelers. Second, you have never met!
But we could change that, couldn't we? Or are we just going to let all of those children stand on the dock as though they're dead to the world?
...Well... ok.
Some Odds and Ends: I'm Almost Done Here
In light of the fact that this is going on for pages and pages, (and I'm surprised you've read this far, even if you had to do it in more than one sitting,) I'll just lump together the other things I said I was going to mention. I'm almost emptied of all my rants about Tomodachi Life babies. Let the list conclude with these:
- Concerning five-year-olds in general, but especially in the case of travelers, your editing options are frustrating. Just like when the baby was born, you are mercifully given the chance to edit the baby's physical features. Ah, and notice how this time I say physical features and not just facial features? Yes, this is the one and only time that you'll get a chance to edit everything that can be edited for a traveler. About the only things you can't edit for a traveler are its gender and whether or not this is a child or grown-up; all travelers are children.
But my problem here is that you only get one chance to look things over, decide that things are ok, and send out your baby. Child, I mean. It's not fully a baby anymore. So you might think that a child looks ok, and then moments after sending the child off realize that you made a mistake... and that you can't alter it. With Michael, I realized too late that I wanted to edit his nose. It's weirdly tiny. With Kennedy, I assumed he looked fine, until he got to the dock and I realized...
Kennedy is the one at the end, by the way.
...he's puny for his age! With no exaggeration, I think he is still proportioned the same way he was as a two-year-old! But how would I have known that when the only sense of scale I had was comparing him to his parents? I never had the chance, when he was a baby, to select how big he would become. He "grew up," and he looked normal enough, which made me forget that both of Kennedy's parents are shorter than average, his mom especially. So it didn't occur to me how much of a difference there would be between him and other kids. But now... now he... *sigh.*
Somehow I doubt that, Kennedy. And I'm sorry that I do.
Then there was Gerome, and I was lucky that I decided to keep him as a resident, because if he were a traveler I would never have had a chance to fix his problem. You couldn't tell at first sight, but all of his facial features were too low. They stayed in the same position they were in when he was a baby, even though his facial shape changed. I noticed something about him looked odd, but didn't find out what it was until I gave him a mask, and this is what he looked like.
I got to edit him, but there are many kids that I don't realize I should edit until it's too late. Oh, and pro tip for players of this game: be sure to check the child's voice before you send him or her out as a traveler. For some reason, sometimes the game gives them really unfitting voices, even sometimes assigning them adult voices. And you only get one chance to check on these things and correct your mistakes.
You want me to put some eye holes in that mask? ...Oh, wait...
- As I started to mention earlier, a lot of the baby's movements and actions feel just... off. Like the running four-year-old who sprints around aimlessly and at random, that does sort of mimic real children's behaviour. But I don't know of a real child who is able to spontaneously turn 180 degrees -- or even 90 degrees -- in the amount of time that equals one frame of animation. When a real baby turns its neck, it doesn't do so on a perfectly straight axis, like I mentioned. But a Mii baby does while the baby gets a piggy-back. A real crying baby isn't liable to break her own neck when she starts crying, because she leaned backwards too far. Just... to summarize it all, there is a difference between mechanical motion and biological motion. For instance, you might make a robot have a ball-and-socket joint in what would be its shoulder, and you might make the parts out of factory-made spheres, giving it smooth and even motion. But human bone is not perfectly spherical, and there is a certain "human" quality to the imperfection of our motion. Or for another instance, if you made a simulation of a child running, steering it with a control stick, you might get one thing. But if you let a real child run around in random patterns, you'll end up with something more "organically organized," something that follows a certain kind of pattern that resists straight lines and perfect circles. Especially when you consider that small children and babies are still in the process of learning basic motor control.
My point is, child motions in this game aren't just gross to me; they're also insincere.
- Watching a child gets annoying really quickly. Since this is a video game, and a simple one at that, then of course you're going to see animations running on repeat. For adult characters, that's not so bad. If you see one of them doing yoga and the animation runs on repeat, then you get the idea that the character is just really, really relaxed and in tune with his or her self. Or the repeating animation might turn it into a few characters having an absolutely awesome rave party with their maracas.
You might even see what looks like two Miis having a long conversation, where they go back and forth, pause, laugh, gesture, change posture, have facial expressions... in spite of the fact that you don't hear the exact words, you know that some exchange is taking place there, and letting that animation repeat itself makes it feel more meaningful.
But compare that to the babies.
Babies do not have hobbies. They can't even interact with any objects in this game until they are three years old. Babies can't use words, and in this game, their vocalizations are confined to about five different noises that they can make, which change depending on its age group. Babies are only able to do a few of the extremely simple things that babies do, and do them over and over again.
You know, it's not that bad watching real babies do what babies do. Truth be told, it's... wonderful, sometimes. Real babies are experiencing this life for the first time, and they can be positively mesmerized by the simplest things, like a first experience of feeling snowflakes on its skin, or seeing a rainbow, or touching a kitten's fur, or grasping an object and learning what it is. They are fascinated by these tiny experiences, and the wonder shows in their eyes. Then over time, they start to progress, and you see not as much wonder with things, but more and more happiness at the recognition of things, and bigger and more complex experiences. So even if you watch a real baby bouncing up and down for an hour at a time, or gurgling out some nonsense noises, or crawling around and picking up yet again the same object you want the baby to leave alone, so he doesn't put it in his mouth, something about it feels good. That baby is progressing. Slowly, maybe, but the repetition is inviting progress and change.
These Mii babies are nothing like that. Like I said earlier that I was going to get back to, I don't find the crawling the only frustrating thing to watch, because in a way, it gets worse when you watch the baby learning to stand up for the first time. The first few times that you see a baby doing this, one of the parents will crouch down beside the baby, and with wide eyes and great excitement watch their little child take this monumental step by learning to stand on two feet. The parent will rapidly clap for the baby, to which the baby smiles enthusiastically before falling down. The first couple of times you see that, it's kind of cute.
But throughout the rest of the day, the baby will continue trying that "standing up trick." The parents don't have all day to watch the baby, so they will get back to doing other things, paying only occasional glances at the baby to check that things are still alright. (Keep in mind as well, this one day represents a full year in the baby's life. So there is absolutely no way that parents will watch their baby constantly for a full year.) The baby will continue doing what it did before: slowly and awkwardly rise to its feet... balance for a second... then fall over. It will rise to its feet once again, clap its knobs-for-hands together in applause for itself, and then promptly fall over again. And that process will repeat for as long as you allow it.
Notice this baby standing up? Good; neither do we.
...Kid, it's not that impressive anymore. At least, it's not impressive enough that you need to give yourself a round of applause every time you barely manage to balance your overlarge head above your centre of gravity for just long enough to keep from instantly toppling over sideways and banging your forehead on the ground. Your parents thought it was novel at first, but now it's just redundant. Whee.
Mii babies just... kind of continually wallow in the same state, before instantaneously progressing to a new level when the new day arrives. And like I said about the lack of pregnancy in Tomodachi Life, this makes it feel kind of like the Miis and you, the player, didn't really earn it.
- Also on the note of repetition, something about how quickly things become repetitive takes away from the immersion a little. In real life, if you had, say, nine children in your lifetime, you might start to see a lot of similarities in each of the children that you raise. But guess what? You would also see a lot of differences! Babies, just like all people, are individuals. I admit that I said earlier that these babies start off having no strengths and barely a mind in their brains. But they won't stay that way. Real babies start to show individual characteristics and strengths and personalities much earlier than Mii babies do.
When a Mii baby is born, in addition to being able to edit a baby's facial features, you do get to edit the baby's personality -- again, by answering the disguised question, "What kind of personality do you think he'll/she'll have?" You can answer, "Just like Dad!" "Just like Mom!" "Who knows?" or "Hmm..." These mean, respectively, "Make the baby have the exact same personality traits and personality type of its father," "Make the baby have the exact same personality traits and personality type of its mother," "Let the game decide randomly," or, "Let me edit that myself."
But it doesn't matter what you choose, really. A Mii's personality is determined by just five factors: how slowly or quickly he or she moves, how politely or directly he or she speaks, how flat or varied his or her expressions are, how serious or relaxed his or her attitudes are towards things, and how quirky or normal that person is as a whole. Adjusting those few factors works surprisingly well for analyzing the personalities of the grown Miis, but makes next to no difference to the babies.
A baby can't speak at all, let alone politely or directly; a baby has no expressions, save the universal baby expressions of shrieking with laughter or screaming like a banshee; it can't be serious or relaxed, because it has no attention span at all; and babies are babies, none of them really being quirky, because all babies are quirky by nature. The only personality trait that I can tell has any bearing at all on how the baby turns out is its movement speed. And again, that doesn't make much a difference at all, unless you want to watch how quickly the four-year-old baby runs through the house at random while its parents ignore it, or you want to see how quickly it swings its blocks around at age three and just stupidly bangs them together, or how quickly it claps while applauding itself for getting onto its feet for the briefest moment. And since I know that I don't want to spend a lot of time watching that, I notice virtually no difference there either.
Who would have thought that you are only five
questions away from being at one with yourself?
In short, Mii babies are all just slight speed variations of the exact same baby. Maybe it's under a different face, but the Mii baby you're raising is basically the same as all the others. (Some do cry more than others, because statistically speaking, that's going to happen sometimes. So maybe these other factors do change that? I can't really tell, though.)
The identical voice makes it the worst. It's not just annoying that you have to hear the same "buh-BUH!" twelve times in a row while you're playing peekaboo with a crop of one-year-olds, or hearing, "naaaaa-nah!" one-third of the time when you do something that a baby doesn't like, or hearing the same "aaaaah!" of pleasure or burbling noise from an infant time after time after time. That is annoying in itself, but it becomes much more frustrating because every baby that ever will be born into this game has the exact same voice. While I can grant that there isn't a lot of variation between the voices of real infants -- and some parents will assure you that there is still a difference even then -- there should start to develop some variations of voices once the child gets older. To some degree, you can distinguish between the voices of toddlers in real life, and even more so once the children are old enough to talk.
So you can imagine that I don't enjoy listening to the same voice as I spend my days babysitting clones. It's much harder to pretend that they're real that way.
Yeah, now that I have all of that out of me, here's the point I'm really driving at. Finally got here!
The real reason, or at least the root of all the reasons that I hate babies in Tomodachi Life comes down to these four simple words:
"They are not real."
 |
| "Stop hitting yourself!" ...No, seriously. Stop it. And no, I'm not doing that; I don't have the power to make a baby punch itself in the head. Weird baby. |
And real babies have one advantage that video games and all forms of virtual reality simulation up to this point all fail at. It might sound creepy when you say this out of context, but one of the things that is special about real babies is that you can touch them. They have physical form. Feeling a baby wrap its tiny hand around your finger, and knowing that they acknowledge your presence, is special. Listening to and feeling a baby's slow breaths but rapid heartbeat after it has fallen asleep in your arms when you were rocking it, is special. Feeling a baby's feet kicking against your leg while you help it learn to bounce up and down, that's special.
I'm sure I could go look up a citation of this if people really wanted me to, or you can just trust me when I say that even the scientists have found all kinds of benefits to physical, mental, and emotional health that result from physical touch in various kinds of relationships. For a baby who doesn't know words yet, touch is one of the most important aspects of its language (only second to crying), so a baby needs to receive a lot of it in order to feel loved or secure. For someone taking care of a baby, receiving the same from a baby in return... as I said, something about that feels special.
Times like that make it worth the trouble of getting drizzled with baby slobber, or having vomit cascade all over you without warning, or changing diapers and wishing you had been born with no sense of smell. And I say that from experience. It's worth dealing with the unpleasant parts of taking care of a baby just to be able to go through the best parts of it.
And really, the best parts of taking care of children are not even the things I mentioned. I mean, if you just wanted to be able to take care of a small life form who depends on you for its needs, you could just get a pet. A dog would probably be more than happy to be your friend and cuddle with you, at the price of some food. But there's something more in the kind of relationship you can have with a baby.
This part I have to say on assumption and not experience, but I've been told that a baby or any child will mean so much more to you if he or she is your own. I'll trust the parents who have told me that.
I can tell you, though, that from the kids that I "borrow" in various capacities in my life, I often find one of the rarest and most elusive of things that people want to obtain in this life: joy.
In a really brief explanation, let me explain something. You might think of "joy" as the same thing as "happiness," but it isn't exactly identical. Most people in the world try to fill their desire for happiness with simple pleasures. But joy is higher than that; its resonates more deeply inside of you, feels more "right," and unlike most things, joy is enduring. It stays with you, and it inspires you and encourages you to be a little nobler throughout your life.
So let me tell you, real babies are a joy. In caring for them and loving them, you can feel joy in knowing that a living, breathing human being is happier and healthier because of you. Someone who will probably grow up to be a great contributor to the world someday is blessed by your care. It's a joy to see such a young and impressionable person like that learning and progressing and growing as a person.
...That makes me sound old, doesn't it? *Sigh.*
Charity Never Faileth
Ooh, the title has dual meaning! Heh heh.
...Maybe I shouldn't have said that and let you figure that out on your own. Well, since I've spoiled it, I'll spell it out, what this whole section is about.
The first of those many, "I'll get back to that" things I said throughout this post, was about a question that I asked at the beginning of this blog post: If I hate Mii babies in Tomodachi Life so much, then why not turn the option for babies off? Or better yet, why not stop playing the game altogether?
And here I will answer you. Or, I will let her answer you:
This smiling little bumblebee is named Charity. (Ah, see where one of the meanings of the title is- umm, never mind. You don't need me to explain. I'll be over here if you need me.) If you remember from earlier what the Mii representing me looks like, then you'll probably notice that she is also one of the children born to my Mii and his spouse. She is the second of four children to be born to that family so far, and she was the fifth child to be born in my game.
I suggested the name Charity to the parents, since they would never come up with a name like that. (The game has a certain list of randomly generated baby names if you let the parents choose the name, but they'll accept whatever you suggest and say that it's perfect. Hence why I could name one of my "joke babies" "DungMuppet," or we ended up with a baby that I let grow up with the name "Xxexxaxxix." As if I need to say this again, Miis aren't exactly the brightest.) They decided they liked that name, and thus Charity she was.
There is a story unto itself about that name and why it is significant to me. Suffice it that I say, I've thought for a very long time now that if I ever have a daughter, I'll name her Charity -- or at least let that be her middle name, if that's too much for a first name. So... yeah, I put a lot on the line by naming this fictional child after someone I'd been envisioning as a potential real person.
(If you want to read someone else's blog post about a similar experience, one where he has a somewhat kinder but still realistic opinion of Tomodachi Life babies, click here.)
And from the beginning, Charity delightfully surprised me. Right from the moment that I saw her naturally smiling face, I knew it would be alright to leave her as she was. I didn't alter her appearance or personality, though I did answer the parents' question of, "How does she look?" with "Hmm..." just so I could make sure she had hair. She did, and she looked good with it. Already I had a slightly more positive opinion of this imaginary baby.
Next, that first night, she went straight to sleep. She became the first of only two or three babies that I have never had to do the "rocking" mini-game with, to make her stop crying as an infant. I... don't think she cried at all as an infant. While that's a literally impossible occurrence with a real baby, it looked like Charity was one of the exceptional few in Tomodachi Life who spent her first "year" (day) of life without crying. And Charity was starting to to gain favour in my eyes.
Since I've said that it's statistically possible that some babies will just cry more often than others, even if they are programmed to cry equally (I'm pretty sure they're not), then you can assume it's equally probable that some babies will cry less than others. And Charity turned out to be one of those children. Though she still cried annoyingly and got to her worst when she was a two-year-old, she cried far less frequently than the other babies I'd had in the game up to that point, and in the times that I did help to stop her cries, I didn't get this:
as much as I got this.
 |  |
 |  |
...Really...! This little set of pixels and programming functions, meant to resemble something close to human, actually stirred positive emotion in me.
With the way that Charity cried less than the other kids seemed to, I was fascinated to see what children in this game get up to when they aren't screaming their lungs out. I had realized, as early as the first baby in the game, that parents will actually take their child to different places around the island if they can get the brat to stop screeching. But that was a rare event. It was with Charity that I started to see what more of those things looked like.
 |  |
I even found out that if you give a travel ticket to a Mii who is a parent raising a child, that the child goes with the parents on whatever trip they end up on.
 |  |
 |
| This is still a weirdly proportioned, screaming, virtual reality pseudo-baby, just like all the others. So why does he make me happy? |
I let both of those kids stay on the island, where they seem fairly happy to spend time with their family and with others. It actually brings a smile to my face sometimes, seeing this imaginary family continuing on with its imaginary life.
It's life simulation. I still stand by what I said in the beginning: I'm not that big a fan of life simulation games. I would much rather live real life, even if there aren't bright animations and friendly background music tracks everywhere that I go, and even if I sometimes have to deal with morons who enjoy harassing strangers for no good reason. In spite of that, reality is still a better experience as a whole, and more rewarding in the end. I don't even play Tomodachi Life so often anymore, now that I'm not having so many sick days like I was in the month of April, and now that I'm back home in Canada, so I get to hang out with friends like this:
But sometimes I do still turn on Tomodachi Life, and recently I turned on the option again that will allow babies to be born in the game once more. Babies #32 through #34 are supposed to be arriving sometime this week. Yay.
Why do I do this to myself?
Consider this:
"And charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail -- but charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever." (Moroni 7:45-47, if you're curious.)
To condense that and put that in modern English: Charity, or pure, unconditional love towards everyone universally, is the kind of virtue that inspires kindness, humility, benevolence, a love of the truth, patience, faith, hope, and fortitude. (Yeah, it's not merely a romantic, "I love you" kind of thing. It is much, much more.) You ought to learn this kind of unconditional love, because everything eventually fails, except for this.
And if you remember, I said that joy is enduring and that it comes in a specific way. Well, there you go -- joy is the natural consequence of charity.
If taking care of some annoying, screaming little animations that sort of imitate babies can make me feel that kind of love once in a while, and it can help me train myself into being more patient and kind... then even the Mii babies of Tomodachi Life have their place, and they are sometimes worth my time.
I will be laying this game to rest for a while, though; as I mentioned all the way back in the introduction of this thing, I'm heading off to camp soon, where I'm going to be spending time with a few hundred real kids this summer (some of those kids are even baby goats. Get it? "Kids?" Heh heh). And as it happens, all of them will be among the ages that you never see Tomodachi Life children -- from ages six to eighteen (the campers are six to sixteen; the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds will just be among the other staff that I'm working with). This is kind of what I've been waiting for over the past few months... this may have even subconsciously influenced my decision to get Tomodachi Life in the first place. What I mean is, maybe I missed hanging out with and taking care of kids, missed it so much that I found a substitute for it until I could do that again in reality.
Let's just hope that I don't feel the same compulsion to find a substitute while I'm waiting for a day that I have my own kids, right? ...Or, maybe you don't care...
Anyways.
As a certain suitcase by the name of Stuffwell once said:
 |
| Picture by JS-GameGhost @ Deviantart |
- TAB III
Cool website
ReplyDeleteI know I'm years late, but I love all the effort you put into this post. I agree with a lot of it and I'm surprised more people haven't commented. I just started replaying Tomodachi Life for nostalgic purposes and the mii babies were driving me bonkers, but reading this (especially the sweet ending) made me appreciate them a little more. Well done. ^u^
ReplyDeleteHey, thank you! I typically don't mind if a comment is on a years-old post, so it's ok. And honestly, I appreciate it a lot when people take the time to comment and say they liked something. So thank you for that! I'm glad to know that at least one thing I've written has done some good.
DeleteI hope those Mii babies will bring some smiles, rather than driving you insane. (They're good at that.)
This has really helped me out. I'm only on baby #2 on my island, and they're already 1000 times louder and more aggravating than my real life child was, when he was an infant. Looks like there won't be many travelers coming from my island, since I don't think I have many streetpass chances nearby, but I will be having more babies, in spite of the annoyance. Thank you!
ReplyDelete