Tomodachi, Same-Sex Relationships, and “Human Relations That Become Strange”

Tomodachi Collection: New Life is Nintendo’s take on the ever popular Sims franchise, where Mii characters can live together, marry, etc. And up until fairly recently, all of the relationships in Tomodachi were male and female. Last week, a glitch suddenly enabled same-sex marriages and courting– a feature that was patched out today.

To start off with, the feature was clearly a bug. Only male characters could marry each other, females couldn’t marry other females for example. And male characters that were in a relationship could become pregnant and bear children. With that in mind, the glitch was extremely popular and resulted in many users posting photos of their gay couples online. Kotaku has reported that online users in Japan have stated that “they planned on getting this game only after learning of this..feature.” 

Nintendo clearly viewed this “feature” as a bug, and in the latest patch notes you can see what they “fixed” quote “Human relations that become strange.” Not exactly the most tactful way of approaching same sex couples, and in fact many Tomodachi fans were hoping that the patch would allow female same sex relationships as well. This means, unfortunately, that users who are interesting in using Tomodachi and their same sex couplings will have to go without the patch in order to use the game. 

The patch does, however, include some imperative fixes for things like booting and saving the game, so users might have bid farewell to their same-sex characters for the time being. Nintendo has yet to publicly comment on the update or on whether same-sex couples were possible before this latest patch.