Nintendo might have wrapped up development for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream last year

Every so often with Nintendo releases, there is seemingly little downtime between announcement and release. We saw this with Metroid Prime Remastered, which shadow dropped during a Nintendo Direct, but we’ve also seen it with a number of smaller scale games that wind up hitting shelves three or four months after their initial announcement. Maybe the reason is that Nintendo has certain games completed and simply waits for the best time to release them. That might just be the case with Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a German classification rating is to be believed.

With the game now out in the wild, people have started looking for more information about its development. Naturally, this pointed them towards ratings boards, which sometimes hold insight into when projects began. As Jon Cartwright of Good Vibes Gaming notes, the USK rating for Living the Dream lists an inspection date of May 20th, 2025. Typically, inspections for ratings don’t happen unless the game is nearing completion, so it’s likely Nintendo had mostly wrapped up Tomodachi Life last year.

 

Around a year completion for Tomodachi

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— Jon Cartwright (@jon.gvg.io) April 19, 2026 at 5:15 AM

 

This tracks as in the past, USK ratings for Nintendo have shown similar trends. The aforementioned Metroid Prime Remastered reportedly sat around for 561 days while Fire Emblem Engage waited 515. While I’m not sure how I would feel about having my work sequestered away for another day, Nintendo does seem to have better insight into marketing trends than most companies. Perhaps Tomodachi Life just had to get in line.

 

Check out more Tomodachi Life content

 

10 Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream tracks added to Nintendo Music

 

Celebrate Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream’s release with icons over on Switch Online

 

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream developers did ‘so many retakes’ to get farts sounding just right

 

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