Nintendo's Star Fox & GameChat features make me want a Miiverse back more than ever

Nintendo is going to let me chat with friends as Fox McCloud, but not the Miis running around on my Tomodachi Life island? Come on now.

I’ll admit Nintendo Switch 2’s GameChat social feature is cooler than I thought it would be. It’s the things that Nintendo is doing with it that have really made it impressive. Having your friends’ faces floating over their drivers in Mario Kart World was neat. Being able to share gameplay with my friends was neat. And now, June 2026’s Star Fox is going to let me take on the digital faces of my favorite characters and talk through them? Dope. My only question is this: Where the heck was that feature for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream? Why can I not make a Mii, at least for GameChat? The improvements and additions Nintendo has been making to GameChat are really fun-looking, but boy howdy do they also make me long for the return of a Miiverse ecosystem.

What is Miiverse & why would it matter to GameChat?

Anyone who ever spent any amount of time on a Nintendo system since the Wii or DS should know full well what a Mii is. It’s an embodiment of you, the player. It’s the little avatar that you made with your profile and then shared in the DS Street Pass feature or Wii’s Miiverse app. The Miiverse app itself was sort of like a simple social media system. We could share writing or drawings with our friends and post them from the account featuring our little self-made character.

Through things like Tomodachi Life, Miitopia, and the myriad of Street Pass-related features on the DS ecosystem, Nintendo made Miis matter. We could still even race as our Mii avatars through the entirety of Mario Kart 8, which through Amiibo, allowed us to wear costumes of our favorite characters - my favorite way to race.

Miis were built to be a social extension of the Nintendo online experience. Since the launch of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, they’re getting a fresh wave of love. So why aren’t they part of Nintendo’s wave of new social features? Why is there no GameChat experience for Miis or Tomodachi Life? It really feels like a missed opportunity, and I think that part of it is Nintendo being careful with Tomodachi Life. Nintendo turned off content sharing for Living the Dream, arguably to keep our more - ahem - explicit creativity contained. But GameChat has options for reporting offensive content, as well as restricting who can use GameChat and with whom they can use it. Why not trust that the safeguards would be used?

When I watched the Star Fox reveal as they showed off the social features that will come with the game on Switch 2, I got giddy. “Children will love this,” I thought. If I were a toddler or pre-teen, I absolutely would have argued with my friends over who gets to be Fox or Falco on the GameChat (current day me will happily take Peppy Hare), but gosh, how fun. What a silly and fun feature made to be another layer of whimsy amongst friends. And then my next thought: “I wish I could use GameChat like this with any of my Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream characters.”

I have some absolute freaks on my Living the Dream island. I also have some neatly-designed characters, and a few embodiments of famous people and/or my friends. But the point is I have some ridiculous options I’d love to wear over my face in GameChat. Mama Yaga? Gorb the Flea? Larry Chipmunk? Mr. Chinnedy? Gah! And I know other players have some great characters, too. I’ve seen them all over the place. Don’t you wish you could put on one your creations and have silly conversations with your friends like they’re doing with the new Star Fox? I sure do, and I’m not alone. And an excellent point has been made in that conversation, too: Star Fox and Mii faces would be so good for the camera shy on GameChat.

Tie a ribbon on it with Miiverse 2

Nintendo is making such interesting moves on its social features. GameChat is far more than just a Discord clone, and I thoroughly enjoy how it’s being used to offer features that appeal so much to community and social experiences. The more I look at it, the more I want the Star Fox GameChat reveal to be a standard. Give us more fun ways to use these social features. And I think part of the way you tie that down is with a new Miiverse. Miis have given us a fun way to express ourselves with friends in the Nintendo ecosystem for more than a decade. And Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream shows us that Nintendo’s Mii tools are the best they’ve ever been. I don’t know when it happens, but I believe it needs to happen. Miis and the Miiverse need to make a return amid Nintendo’s push into social play and the features that make it increasingly fun.

Shacknews staff does not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) in their content. Shacknews strictly prohibits the use of its content for AI training or to generate text, including text in the style or format used for this publication. Shacknews reserves all rights to this work.