Nintendo released its mobile-social app Miitomo recently. I wasn’t going to check it out as I tend to find most mobile-social apps completely and utterly pointless drivel that only serves to make your brain dribble out of your ears, but the number of people I knew who were giving this a go inspired me to give it a chance — as did the fact it sounded a little like the “social questions” services such as Ask.fm, Formspring, Retrospring and the like that had been popular in the last few years.

So what is Miitomo? Well, after a slightly convoluted sign-up process, which requires you to create a Nintendo Account (which is not the same as a Nintendo Network ID, nor a Club Nintendo account, though the former can be used as a quick means of registering if you have a 3DS and/or Wii U) you’re given the opportunity to create a Mii to represent yourself. If you used a Nintendo Network ID to create your account, you can import this directly from your account; alternatively, you can create a new one if you prefer, either by getting the app to attempt an automatic creation process from a self-portrait, or manually through picking and choosing bits and pieces for the Mii’s face.

Miitomo goes a step further than Mii creation on Nintendo’s consoles, though, since you have the opportunity to set up a voice and personality for it. Personality largely dictates the variety of animations the Mii uses when it’s talking and how generally “expressive” it is, while the voice can be chosen from a number of different presets and then have its intonation, pitch and various other elements tweaked to your exact liking. The voice synthesis is actually very good indeed  — there’s the odd word it struggles with here and there (and it doesn’t understand the difference between words in all-caps and acronyms, meaning “IT” becomes “I.T.”) but for the most part its pronunciation is very good, even when you make it swear.

Unusually for a Nintendo product, there are no filters of any sort on the things you can make your Mii say. This is because Miitomo, as a social app, only allows you to communicate and share with your immediate and mutual friends from other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. There’s a bit of “second degree connection” in there too, because you can add people purely on the basis of having some mutual friends, and you can have discussions with people you aren’t friends with in comment threads belonging to someone who is your friend, but for the most part, your experience is curated in such a way that you should theoretically only come across content from people you know — and know what to expect from.

Using Miitomo largely revolves around answering questions. When you first start the app, your Mii will ask you a few basic questions to get you started, then once you’ve added some friends you can hear what they had to say in response to various questions by tapping on a speech bubble with their face in that pops up. Once you’ve heard their answer, you can give it a heart, post a comment on it or see what other people you know had to say in response to the same question — though if you hadn’t already heard their answers, you need to bribe them with sweets to get them to cough up the information.

Outside of this main social element, there’s also an element of self-expression through the costume store and pachinko-esque minigame, in which you can acquire clothing and accessories for your Mii. Once suitably attired, you can then take photographs of your Mii, posing them using a number of different animations and facial expressions, then putting them on top of a background (which can be a photo from your phone instead of a preset) and adding text and other special effects.

You’re rewarded in some way for everything you do. Answering and reading questions nets you coins, which can be spent in the shop or on the minigame to acquire new outfits. Missions provide you with simple things to do each day to keep you engaged, and reward you with money or game tickets for free attempts at the minigame. And you have both a “popularity” and “style” level which can be ranked up independently by interacting with other people and changing your outfit respectively.

The thing that struck me most about Miitomo is how friendly it all feels, even when your friends are posting foul-mouthed or lewd diatribes in response to seemingly innocuous questions. The fact that the Miis actually read everything you say out loud actually encourages you to consider what you’re posting before you send it — at least, I felt that way, anyway — and as a result, it feels a lot more like actually engaging with real people rather than anonymous usernames and avatars.

The fact that the only way you can interact with people is through the questions that Nintendo provide for you is somewhat limiting in comparison to the total freedom of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but in a sense this is actually a positive thing: it keeps Miitomo focused on actually socialising and sharing a bit of harmless fun with friends, rather than the politically-charged grandstanding both Twitter and Facebook inevitably descend into on a regular basis. There’s no links about how great/awful Donald Trump is; no indignant ill-informed op-eds about recent happenings; no cat pictures (although there is a question about cats); and no spam. Although heavily curated and somewhat restrictive in terms of what you’re actually able to say to one another — though I suspect this may evolve over time, perhaps even with user-submitted questions? — Miitomo feels like the essence of what social media is supposed to be about, rather than what it typically tends to be used for these days.

I don’t know whether I’ll bother using Miitomo for longer than a few days, but for the moment it’s a bit of harmless fun that provides an enjoyable, idle distraction when I don’t have anything better to do.