While I never really understood the point of it, the Miiverse always offered some humor in the creativity offered by the creators. Otherwise, the Mii’s were primarily used for small ancillary roles in games like Mario Kart, Smash Bros, and more. MiiTopia looks to add some value to the Mii’s by making them the focal point in their quest. Can the Miiverse succeed in its first major gaming role, or will it fall flat like past Mii titles?

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MiiTopia is an RPG adventure that allows the user to create the cast of characters for the story. Depending on how you want to approach this, MiiTopia can either be incredibly hilarious title or one that is too childish. Starting out, I took the approach to create the most random cast of characters. Aside from creating myself as the main protagonist, I choose Timmy Turner’s dad as the Dark Lord, Mario as my cleric, Iron Man as my knight, Spongebob as my chef class, and Steve Urkel for the role of The Great Sage because why not create a more random cast of characters to create some laughs. Needless to say, it adds to the humor if you read the character’s dialogue in their actual voices from their respective shows; but I digress. While the characters I chose were a random lot, it worked out for the best as the game gives the characters generic personalities; which could be a letdown if you were looking to create a more serious cast of characters. Nevertheless, upon starting the game you can understand the tone of the story based off the first minutes of the game.

The plot follows the Dark Lord who has stolen the faces of the people in the MiiTopia. Your character, and your cast of characters must journey across the world to return the faces to the victims of the Dark Lord. Across the way, you must help the various characters who are in need of your help. As I stated above, the real enjoyment from the story comes from the random cast of characters that you select to journey with. The plot is extremely shallow, and the side quests that appear do little to create any more interest.

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While MiiTopia looks to create an RPG style game, it fails to provide any real RPG aspects even for casual fans. Following the turn based style gameplay, players control their character in combat while your party members will control their own actions. While you lack any control over your allies, they are rather intelligent; but it doesn’t require much intelligence to be successful in combat. Very little strategy is required to succeed in MiiTopia, even with the games more difficult enemies. With the added ability to let the game control the battles for me, I literally just let the game do all of the battles for me; and I never lost once, or had a member of my team fall in combat.

When it comes to traversing the map, the game auto-scrolls without giving you any control besides selecting which region of the map to explore; and reading the annoying banter between your team members. After fully traversing the region, your squad will stay at an inn where they will restore their help. You can select if members of your squad share rooms, which ends up building a better relationship between members adding new perks, or staying in separate rooms. Players can purchase new items for their inventory such as armor, weapons, and various other tools to help you along the way; but there’s a catch. Players have no way of picking which items to buy for their characters, rather you can select what the party members themselves want to buy. What makes things worse is that characters could say they want to purchase incredible armor or weapons, only to come back with a banana; yes it’s as infuriating as it sounds.

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While MiiTopia doesn’t look bad, the limited exploration of the actual maps gives you little appreciation for the actual look of the game. If the game allowed for more exploration abilities, we would easily give the graphics department a better score. The OST is rather enjoyable to listen to as it encompasses the sound you’d expect from a Miiverse game being upbeat, and somewhat catchy.

While MiiTopia offers humorous moments, it fails to offer any sort of RPG elements for a game that tries to be a turnbased RPG. Lacking the ability to explore and customize your team’s armor really makes MiiTopia feel less enjoyable. If you play the game with the intent of trying to play as an actual RPG, the game will lose its luster in a very short amount of time. If you play with the intent of trying to create funny moments with your characters, you’ll get a bit more enjoyment out of it; but not too much.  

THE BREAKDOWN

PRO’S

• Game offers quite a bit of humor with the ability to select the characters in the story
• Accessible for all players
• Graphics and sounds are good….

CON’S

• … but with the limited ability to explore, you get very little chance to actually appreciate the world.
• Overly easy for an RPG
• Lacks essential features that are vital for an RPG.
• Half way through the game, it makes you change your class; losing all of your progress made through the first parts of the game.

*Complementary copy of the game was provided by the developer for review purposes.