Miitomo preview: What's Nintendo's first iOS and Android app all about?

After years of agonising - fuelled by legions of doomsayers predicting that phone and tablet gaming would see it lose its grip on the handheld games market - Nintendo finally announced last year that it would set about turning its unparalleled back-catalogue and roster of iconic characters into a portfolio of mobile games. Which, naturally, was the source of some excitement.

Imagine the joy that getting stuck into early Super Mario Bros or Zelda games on a tablet might bring? The first fruit of that initiative (in collaboration with Japanese mobile publisher DeNA), though, is a pretty odd beast.

It's called Miitomo and isn't really a game at all - but rather a light and uplifting take on social networking, which does at least manage to preserve that quirky Nintendo individuality.

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As the name suggests, Miitomo centres on Nintendo's Mii avatar system. And it has a quirky raison d'etre, as explained by a spokesman for Nintendo - it's "an app that lets you discover things that you might not have known about your friends".

If you had to select a reference point for it, you would opt for Tomodachi Life, which it superficially resembles given that it revolves around interaction between people's Miis. But it provides a more intimate and personal experience than Tomodachi Life - in keeping with its presence on mobile platforms and ability to integrate with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

HOW DOES MIITOMO WORK?

Having downloaded Miitomo (it's free on both iOS and Android), your first point of contact is a variant on the familiar Mii Maker, which seems a bit looser and more flexible than its predecessors. When you get it to capture your facial features and translate them into a Mii, it comes up with a surprising number of variations, so you can create huge swathes of them and pick your favourite. Then edit that extensively.

The next task is to select the personality that your Mii will have, via a radial chart with several axes representing different traits. It's all very visual and intuitive and at the end of the process, you're given a detailed breakdown of your Mii's personality. Apparently, ours was an "easy-going schemer". Once you've nailed your Mii's appearance and personality (both of which can easily be altered subsequently), you can get stuck into discovering what Miitomo has to offer.

This mainly consists of a set of conversations initiated by your Mii, which asks you about some pretty frothy stuff like favourite foods, type of music and so on, any of which you can refrain from answering. Your favourite food might be offensive to some after all.

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Once you get involved, rewards soon start pouring in, mostly simply as a result of answering questions. These rewards come mainly in the form of Miitomo coins, which can be cashed in for items of clothing and full outfits in the Miitomo store.

There is Nintendo merch everywhere too, such as Mario and Pikmin hats, and after about 15 minutes, we could afford one of the more elaborate outfits - a cartoonish astronaut get-up. A Twitter button in the shop shows which outfits are currently trending on Twitter, providing the first indication of Miitomo's integration with that social network, plus Facebook and Instagram.

MIITOMO SEEMS TO USE INTERESTING TECH

Little glimpses of an underlying engine that is more sophisticated than you might imagine keep cropping up. For instance, your Miitomo lives in a room, and every so often, a Mii from your friends list comes to visit. Building up a group of friends is at the very heart of Miitomo - frankly, it constitutes a pointless exercise unless you can find some willing accomplices.

You can't converse with friends in real-time - Nintendo has pointedly stated that Miitomo isn't meant to be yet another chat-engine. But, visiting Miis will ask you questions and reveal things about themselves, and you can look at their answers to questions and add comments or Likes - which again bring rewards. Conversations between Miis are enhanced by a measure of visual interaction - the Miis will look at each other and adopt appropriate facial expressions.

And whenever you answer questions, Miitomo attempts to interpret your responses, acting them out with facial expressions and animations. This may not be something you notice all the time, but adds to a general feeling of greater sophistication than is apparent from the app's simple visuals.

Levelling up falls into three criteria - social, style and popularity - adding an RPG-like element, and there is, at least, one game-like pursuit, called Miitomo Drop, in which you drop your Mii onto a pachinko-style board, and if it rebounds to hit icons, you're rewarded with clothes and outfits. You need special tokens to play Miitomo Drop, which are again available as rewards for interacting and levelling up.

Perhaps the most fun aspect of Miitomo, though, is Miifoto, which lets you build up fun tableaux with your Mii. It has a library of backdrops from iconic locations like New York, Kyoto (where Nintendo is based) and Venice Beach, or you can drop your Mii into anything from your phone's camera-roll. Plus you can mess around with your Mii's facial expression, resize it, animate it and add all manner of adornments like Roy Lichtenstein-style comic-book speech bubbles. Anything you make in Miifoto can be posted to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.

IS IT ANY GOOD?

Miitomo is cute and fun, and really comes into its own if you have a ready-made circle of Nintendo-loving friends. It's the sort of thing you would dip into for 10 or 15 minutes a day, particularly if that day has been a bit challenging, and you're feeling in need of an uplift.

But it does rather feel as though it's preaching to the converted. And it will disappoint anyone who was hoping to get their hands on some classic vintage Nintendo gaming on their mobiles.

Still, it's the first of five Nintendo/deNA mobile apps scheduled to appear over the next year, and it demonstrates that Nintendo can retain its distinctiveness and quirkiness as it begins to embrace the mobile world.