So Nintendo did the thing today. Miitomo launched in Japan this morning, which is its actual honest-to-god first smartphone app, not a companion tool for a console game, not a strategy guide, an actual standalone thing you download onto your phone and use instead of a 3DS. I've been half expecting this for years and I still wasn't sure Nintendo would ever pull the trigger.
If you haven't seen the previews: it's not a game, really. You make a Mii (that same blobby avatar system from Wii Sports and every Nintendo console since), and the app asks it weird little personal questions, "what's your favorite smell" type stuff, and then it shares your answers with your friends' Miis, who react to them in this bizarre little apartment-diorama chat window. People are calling it a cross between Tomodachi Life and a messaging app and honestly that's about right. There's no real win condition. You just keep feeding it answers and it keeps generating tiny scenes.
It's Japan-only for now, which means the rest of us are stuck watching screenshots and translated impressions until the global rollout, which Nintendo has already said is coming by the end of the month. I could sideload a Japanese App Store account and go poke at it early, I've done that before for other region-locked stuff, but honestly the account-switching dance on iOS is annoying enough that I'm just going to wait the two weeks like a normal person this time.
What I find genuinely interesting isn't the app itself, it's that this is tied to the new My Nintendo rewards program, which is basically Nintendo's replacement for Club Nintendo (RIP, I miss you, my stockpile of unused platinum points). You earn points by using Miitomo and presumably spend them on discounts and digital stuff later. That's the real strategy here I think: not "make money on a free Mii chat app," but "get tens of millions of phones onto a Nintendo account before the NX even ships." Iwata talked about this exact plan back when he announced the DeNA partnership, and it's wild to actually watch it happen in real time instead of reading about it in a press release.
I'll admit my expectations for Nintendo-does-mobile have been low ever since the DeNA deal was announced last year. Not because DeNA is bad at what they do, but because Nintendo has spent two decades being weirdly stubborn about keeping its characters locked to its own hardware, and a Mii avatar chat toy feels like the most cautious possible first step. No Mario. No Zelda. Nothing that risks cannibalizing 3DS or Wii U sales. It's Nintendo dipping one toe in the pool while wearing a life vest.
Separate note, because I can't write a tech post this week without mentioning it even in passing: the AlphaGo match wrapped up a couple days ago and I'm still thinking about game four, where Lee Sedol found that one move around move 78 that made the machine visibly stumble for the only time in five games. Everyone's writing the "AI beat humanity" angle and sure, fine, that's the headline. But the thing that actually stuck with me was watching commentators describe an AI making a mistake it couldn't recover from, because a person did something unexpected. That's the one game out of five, and I keep coming back to it more than the other four combined. Maybe that says something about me.
Anyway. Miitomo. I'll report back once I can actually download the thing without faking a Tokyo address. My guess, and I could be wrong, is that it's a novelty most people play with for two weeks and then forget, the way everyone forgot about Flappy Bird knockoffs about six months after they peaked. But the account infrastructure underneath it is going to matter a lot longer than the app itself does.