I’m still in denial that the Nintendo 3DS is old enough that I can feel this nostalgic about the days of StreetPass, SpotPass, and playing some of the generation’s best games while on th🦋e move. One of my favourites back then was Fantasy Life, Level-5’s life sim meets RPG.
Fantasy🍷 Life i: Th🉐e Girl Who Steals Time Is More Than Just Another Cozy Game
Level 5's latest masterpiece is far more than an 𒁏Animal Crossing o𝔉r Stardew Valley copycat.
We’ve waited over ten years for a sequel, but I can confidently assure you that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fantasy Life i: The G𝓀irl Who Steals Time was well worth the wait. It will draw ജyou in hook, line, and sinker, and before you know it, you’ll﷽ be spending endless hours living a new digital life or two. Or three. Or 14.
Living Your Best Life
Fantasy Life i looks fair👍ly simple at first glance; you level up your lives (read: jobs, such as Paladin, Miner, Tailor), you progress through the narrative, you save the day, and that’s your job done. Congratulations. But after you’ve unlocked your first life and you begin to explore, you realise just how much there truly is to do. Not only in terms of the worlds you can experience in your timey-wimey trip across the same island 1,000 years apart, and the sprawling dragon-shaped continent of Ginormosia, but in the different types of gameplay you can experience while doing so.
There are resources and enemies of varying levels spread across the land, with rare crowned versions to tack𝔍le when you’re feeling up to the challenge. You’ve got dungeons, you’ve got settlements to save and help flourish, you can rank up areas in the open world of Ginormosia, alongside shrines with puzzles and combat encounters to complete.
Crafting lives involves little minigames to successfully create your desired items, where you have to quickly press the correct tools to use within a time limit. You can also customise your character with different outfits and gear. Like I said, there’s a lot.
Even if you’re focusing on combat lives and slicing and dicing your way through enemies, there are fish to catch, ore to mine, and trees to cut down even in the darkest depths of dungeons. These various elements are so well interwoven that it becomes second nature to switch from꧋ hammering💖 beasties to hammering rocks.
All the while, you’ve got quests to complete: NPC quests, life quests, daily quests, town board quests. Take a breath, we’re not done. You can collect mounts, reꦓcipes, hunt down Leafes, and save strangelings too (people cursed into objects that you can help revert back to their human forms), after which you can add them to your party as buddies.
None of the quests are narrative heavy, wit🅘h most consisting of item requests or kill a certain number of a specific enemy quests. This means you’re free to take them or leave them as you please without feeling like you’re missing out and without any pressure to actually deliver, further emphasising the slow life RPG vibes that Levelඣ-5 is offering up.
Fantasy Life Crossing
If you think that’s more than enough to keep you busy, there’s more to come. You’ve got a base camp to customise, too. This is where Fantasy Life i channels its inner Animal Crossing. You have a house for yourself and can create more for the villagers you invite t♏o live alongside you. The entire island can be customised with bridges, slopes, and furnishings of your choosing as you slowly but surely turn this island of rubble into a cute little paradise, but without a pesky tanuki to bother you throughout.
Fantasܫy Life i also offers online multiplayer for up to four players, with two-player couch co-op on a more restricted basis (you’re not two proper characters, one of you plays as Trip, the mascot). This means you can do all you✱r adventuring with others, or you can even take a peek at how others are building their bases, too.
Even now, after playing for 50 hours, there are parts of the game I haven’t▨ delved into as comprehensively as others. I’m in no rush, though, since everything I do is so much fun. Fantasy Life i excels at offering a laidback adventure without feeling like you must chase down the storyline or all your objectives as quickly as possible.
While Fantasy Life i has a storyline, getting to the end never feels like the goal, and even when you do, you can continue playing afte🌜r completing it anyway. The lighthearted tone, as well as the wealth of what’s available, make it clear that the game wants you to kick back and relax and simply enjoy yourself. It’s like going to a buffet, you can have as much or as little as you like, and it’s not over just because you finish your first plate.
You🍌’d think the sheer volume of activities and each of the 14 different lives all having individua🗹l levels would make this an utter grindfest, but Fantasy Life i never feels like one. You progress at your own pace, so you can choose to forgo the main storyline to build the base of your dreams, or focus on gathering and crafting to create the best furnishings or outfits your heart desires.
Fantasy Life i is wonderful at paꩲying attention to all walks of life, so you’ll have level checks for every type of life to progress both the story and optional content. One town might require gathering, another might need combat. Towards the end of the campaign, you’re challenged to collect a bunch of ingredients that require you to have Angler, Miner, Farmer, Woodcutter, and a singular Combat life leveled to completion, after which you then need different crafting lives to make what you need.
This encourages you to explore other lives rather than devote yourself to only one, but it does mean that your h༒and is forced into possibly playing roles you don’t want to. At the very least, you have to be a jack of nearly every trade, even if you prefer to master only one.
I don’t thiꦬnk there’s a right or wrong way to play Fantasy Life i, and that’s why it never attempts to firmly steer you in one direction or another. The choice is yours. You might 🐻never fully complete the storyline and simply focus on building up your own base, or maybe you don’t care about the base at all, and the completionist in you wants to hit max level on every life possible.
A New Lease Of Life For An Old Series
Fantasy Life i is the perfect example of a sequel done right. It takes the original’s core RPG and life sim gameplay and elevates it to a whole new level by expanding on its own formula while improving upon and adapting familiar mechanics to make everythi♈ng feel far more intuitive and enjoyable.
One of the biggest improvements is being able to change lives on the fly. You just approach an ore and the game will switch🐽 you to Miner immediately (providinꦏg you have it unlocked), while withdrawing a weapon will switch you to your last combat life. It’s exactly the kind of quality of life update a game like this needed, and makes playing for hours on end very, very tempting.
Unlocking lives feels far less of a chore, too. Thankfully, you can still skip introductory quests to avoid the back and forth of running all over the place just to access the life you want, but overall, it feels far more streamlined here, allowing you to unlock the full roster with relative ease. The inventory appears 🍎to be limitl♐ess now as well, which is a godsend when you’re trying to level multiple gathering and crafting lives all at once, while also keeping all your potions and items for your combat jobs too.
Exploration becomes a delight now that you can climb at will, scaling the side of mountains rather than having to find the perfect path up,ꦜ while swimming means you can simply take a shortcut across the sea if you want to reach the next bit of land without going around the long way.
Each life has its own skill tree, too, ridding you of those excruciating decisions of what skil🍎ls to invest in across all lives. Fantasy Life i removes a lot of the tedium found in the original and has reworked systems to allow players to explore and adapt what they’re doing more freely. It’s Fantasy Life, but smoother.
I don’t want to get too sidetracked singing the praises ෴of all the ways in which Fantasy Life i succeeds as a sequel, as this isn’t a game just to appease the fans of the original. In fact, you don’t need to have played the 3DS title at all to fall head over heels for it.
Story Of My Life
The only way in which Fantasy Life i doesn’t shine is in the storyline. It’s very predictable and repetitive. It’s not bad, but certainly nothing special, which fe⭕els like a missed opportunity given the time-travelling element that would have lent itself well to a more intriguing premise.
After finding a ꦰmysterious island, your even more mysterious dragon fossil springs to life to help you as you find yourself under attack and thrown into the past. There, you learn that the land was once a thriving community, and it’s up to you to solve the mystery and save it from returning to ruin. On paper, it sounds great, but played out, it’s a bit lacklustre and you can guess what will happen a mile away.
The ori🔥ginal Fantasy Life also focused more on gameplay than on a strong narrative. By comparison, Fantasy Life i does rai𒆙se the bar somewhat in story quality, it just feels like a missed opportunity that it didn’t raise it even further.
However, it’s not as much of a drawback as you may th🧸ink. Do you think Animal Crossing has an in-depth narrative? No, because it doesn’t need one. While Fantasy Life i does⭕ feature RPG elements, so you may expect a meatier RPG story, it doesn’t detract from how moreishly good the gameplay can be. When you’re getting sidetracked living your best life, grinding out levels and resources and exploring dungeons, you won’t even remember what you’re meant to be doing for the storyline anyway. Edward who?
The only real bu🧸gbear I had when playing is that the camera doesn’t pan as much as you’d hope, which makes scouring the landscape to look ꦆfor towers and shrines a little more annoying.
Level-5 has come back swinging with Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, improving on the original in every way and offering a smorgasbord of gameplay ideas without ever feeling like it’s trying too much at once. It balances this level of depth with a lai🔜d-back, cosy approach that makes it all too easy to enjoy for hours on end.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Fantasy Li🅺fe i: The Girl Who Steals Time
Played on PC.
- Top Critic Avg: 87/100 Critics Rec: 100%
- Released
- May 21, 2025
- ESRB
- E For Everyone // Mild Fantays Violence 🉐
- Developer(s)
- Level 5
- Publisher(s)
- Level 5
- An appetising blend of life sim and RPG elements.
- An incredible amount of gameplay depth.
- Improves on the original game in every way.
- A more in-depth narrative would have elevated this to near-perfection.
- Camera angles can be annoying.
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