Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
Review
A Cozy, Time Hopping Adventure
by Camrin Santchi
reviewed on PC
Get a Life
When Level 5 released Fantasy Life for the 3DS in 2014, this reviewer immediately fell in love. Fantasy Life was a very simple and cozy RPG with a core mechanic centred around Lives, a class system that unlike most RPGs had only a few centre around Combat styles that each use a separate weapon type and skills, while others focused on either Harvesting materials or Crafting with them. The original game had a very simple story, and encounters within said story were typically built around the idea that not everyone would choose the same Lives, so some players found the mainline story to be without much challenge, while mastering some of the Lives were very time consuming by contrast.
So with the release of Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, Level 5 had an opportunity to expand on what was already a fun concept that mixed Slice of Life and RPG elements.
Mysteries of the Past
Fantasy Life i begins with your created character on a ship alongside an archaelogy team, being led on a search for a mysterious new island by a massive dragon skeleton. As the group gets closer, an armored dragon attempts to destroy the ship, the dragon skeleton springs to life and the main character is flung about in the ensuing chaos onto a strange land. Fantasy Life i keeps it in doubt at first, but it doesn't take long for players to realize that they had been flung into the distant past. This portion of the game acts as a brief tutorial for the Life mechanics and helps players get introduced to the world they find themselves in, which is later expanded more and more, into three distinct different areas of the game.
Three Games In One?
The Past of the game plays most identically to the original Fantasy Life with a world to explore, monsters to slay, materials to harvest, and items to craft. By accomplishing specific goals for each Life players can be ranked up, unlocking new recipes, abilities, and more. Unlocking more areas by progressing the main story will allow players to continue to expand their repertoire by finding new materials and monsters.
The Present has some elements of building up a settlement, and it reminds this reviewer a lot of some of the gameplay portions of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Players can modify the Present day state of the island and make it their own, populating it with characters that can also join in your adventures and provide aid in combat, harvesting, and crafting. There's also the Depths, a mysterious labyrinthian cave below the surface with a connection to the main story's progression.
Ginormosia is the final portion of the game's main three worlds, a large continent whose map is revealed by finding eye towers, and is populated with rare materials and monsters that cannot be found elsewhere- as well as sapient, talking monsters in small settlements compared to the larger cities of the Past that are primarily populated by humans. After the introduction to Ginormosia players are capable of returning at almost any time to explore to their heart's content.
Quality of Life
There are quite a few changes in Fantasy Life i that make the game even more enjoyable to play than the original on the 3DS, but one of the most important to this reviewer is that the player is easily able to switch between Lives. Anytime outside of combat the player can change to a Life that they have already unlocked, and certain actions will cause an automatic switching of a Life - entering combat will switch the player to their most recent combat oriented Life, attempting to chop a tree down will switch you to Woodcutter, etc. One minor problem with the original game was having to go all the way back to the Guild Office in order to swap Lives, so the process is incredibly streamlined in comparison.
Another big change with Fantasy Life i is fast travel - it is unlocked fairly early on and allows players to traverse between the three different maps with ease, and when attempting to switch to a Crafting Life the game will ask if the player wants to be warped to a location with a crafting bench, again providing a very extensive change that makes things easier for the players. Any crafting bench can be used to access the menus for any Crafting Life, so even if you head to a Carpenter's Bench you can craft Alchemy items, just as an example.
Repetitive Gameplay
If there is anything to be said about Fantasy Life i that is negative it would be that the game suffers from a lot of repetition. All Harvesting mini-games play the same way by finding a sweet spot to target and ensuring that you lower the 'health bar' of the item you are harvesting before you run out of Stamina. The same is true for Crafting minigames, they all involve a time limit and three stations in front of your character that must be used in the order decided at random by the game. This isn't inherently a bad thing, and makes it easy to pick up any of the Lives since there isn't much of a learning curve, but it can make portions of the game drag on if you have a long list of recipes you want to work through all at once or need to harvest a lot of materials.
The story of Fantasy Life i also suffers from this repetition, with your character's archaeologist ally rushing forward into the mysterious Depths only to be trapped, so your character has to find a way to free them, usually by traveling to a different area and getting assistance from a new character.
Fantasy Life i does also have some minor real time based events - the Present Island repopulates with rare materials daily, bosses respawn after a few real world minutes, and the Farming Life is centered around waiting for your crops to grow before you can harvest them, but there's so much to do that this is hardly an issue for the most part!
It's a Simple Fantasy Life
In all Fantasy Life i is an incredibly solid game that has a ton of charm to it. The gameplay is simple but addicting, and the quality of life features that were added compared to the 2014 game make The Girl Who Steals Time a very enjoyable experience. The story beats can feel a little repetitive at times, as can the mini-games all bearing out similarly to each other, and real time based events can be a bit of a pain. But all of that aside, Fantasy Life i is a game that this reviewer would gladly recommend to anyone that prefers a more cozy vibe to their fantasy genre.
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9.7
fun score
Pros
Many Quality of Life Features, Charming Aesthetics, Simple Gameplay
Cons
A Bit Repetitive, In Story and Mini-Games, Time Based Events
