The die hard Nintendo fans will love it, similar to how they love Animal Crossing and to a much lesser extent Nintendogs, but playing this game makes it pretty clear that Nintendo has problems coming up with a new IP.
The reason I purchased Tomodachi Life was because of the buy one get one free sale. I bought Zelda, Yoshi, and Kirby. Decided to have Tomodachi Life as my other free game since I wasn't interested in Mario Golf or Mario Party, I already owned the others, and it's a new game so if I don't like it I can sell it off and get $20-$30 for it still.
Tomodachi Life is similar to Animal Crossing in which you have to help out the islanders. All of the islanders are created by the player, whether creating the Miis in game from Tomodachi Life or creating them in the Mii Maker and then importing them to Tomodachi Life. If you create the Miis through Tomodachi Life, they're only usable on that game and cannot be imported back over to Mii Maker, so you might want to make them on Mii Maker then import them over. If you want to have more going on, you should make or import as many Miis as possible. One kind of cool thing about the game is when you input the first and last name of the characters, the game pronounces it how it's spelled, but there's a speaker beside it that allows you to edit how the name actually sounds, and after sometimes an excessive amount of tweaking you'll end up getting the pronunciation of the name correct. Kind of cool because it's the first video game I've played that's done that. There's other games that say the names and allow you to choose preset names that may sound similar, like MLB The Show and other sports games, but never played one that lets you edit the way the name is pronounced.
When you start playing, the first thing you'll notice when putting any time in this game is it's got the s ame sort of theme as many of these types of Nintendo games do. Nintendo like cheap development costs with an MSRP that is probably not going to drop until the end of the gen. While it's similar to Animal Crossing where you have to help the islanders, you end up unlocking between 10-20 different locations throughout the game, excluding all of the islanders rooms. You don't move around or walk to these locations, you can't do anything at a majority of these locations either. You use the touch screen to exit from one location or another, if it's a shop/pawn shop, you can purchase items, some spots you can't do anything but watch the islanders and hit back because nothing is going to happen, or certain locations that have special events that can be played only once at very specific time frames(between 10:00pm and 11:00pm for example,) and these are short Wario Ware like mini games. You can also play a short Wario Ware like game or matching game sometimes when the islanders ask you to play with them and then you get a prize which you can't do anything but sell or give to an islander as a gift.
So in short, other than going back and forth between rooms of the players, giving them food, giving them gifts, changing their clothes, teaching them new phrases or sayings, and doing what they ask, there's almost no content to this game. I kind of expected this from the get go, and this is why out of the games that I purchased, I'd play this one first before the used market value drops like a rock.
