FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time Review
Your Time Really Will get stolen
WARNING: THIS ARTICLE MAY CONTAIN DISCUSSIONS involving SPOILERS FROM Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. CONSIDER WHEN AND WHERE IT WOULD BE APPROPRIATE TO READ THIS PIECE.
Platforms
We Reviewed our copy of Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time on the PC.It is currently also available on Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
If you combine the most addictive gameplay mechanics from beloved hits like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, this is the game that would be the spawn of that union. Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a highly addictive role-playing game that will keep you enamored for at least a hundred hours. It sure did for me and I still can’t get enough of it. If job changes, item gathering, crafting, and music from legendary Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu are your cup of tea, then Fantasy Life i is going to rock your world.
Let’s quickly dispel any confusion right off the bat. This game is a sequel to a 2012 title developed by the company Level-5 called Fantasy Life for the Nintendo 3DS. No, there aren’t sequels with titles from B to H. Other than a couple of expansions and online games, Fantasy Life i is the publisher’s second full console game in the series. I originally thought this was a huge longstanding franchise with many games that I’ve missed based on the lettering of the title. These are the same developers who are known for the Dark Cloud games and later Professor Layton, and Ni no Kuni franchises. They know what makes a good role playing experience and this game shows that record.
A different Life for Every Path
There are 14 playable lifestyles in the game
While I still don’t really know what the i stands for in the title, I can tell you what your gaming life feels like in Fantasy Life. The core gameplay mechanic in this RPG revolves around 14 classes known as lifestyles. There are four combat lives, five item gathering classes, and five crafting jobs. You can swap between them interchangeably on a dime through the quick menu shortcuts, and they all operate about the same. For example, one button will evaluate the weak point of a resource that the tool uses to farm. This is also used for fishing, mining, and woodcutting to be able to save energy with each action for gathering those materials. Then there’s another button that handles quick strikes that doubles up as charged strikes when long pressed. This quick strike and charged strike mechanic is also recycled over to combat controls for those fighting lifestyles as well. This is a really simple game to control that can be played by players of all ages. I think that’s a strong appeal that makes this a terrific title for not only older fans of RPG’s, but parents looking for a game to play with their children.
A Little Bit of DNA From…
The similarities in gameplay styles to beloved titles like Animal Crossing and The Legend of Zelda are immediately noticeable as the game advances. The unique thing about Fantasy Life is that in some ways, it feels like it contains DNA of multiple games within one cartridge. While time travel is a key component of the title, Fantasy Life does a fantastic job of moderating and separating the different areas of time with their own homage to those titles. When players fast travel back to the current timeline on their dragon (more on that later), the core gameplay here is building a settlement from the ground up on a desolate island. It functions exactly like an Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon title would. You go into what is essentially a clubhouse run by anthropomorphic characters to invest and purchase permits in order to build properties and infrastructure to industrialize the deserted island. As your island grows in buildings, settlers or what are called Strangelings will populate the island until you have your own little economy. It’s basically Animal Crossing in everything but name.
Similar to Animal Crossing, you can design your village however you want
The Legend of Zelda’s style of play is abundantly clear the further a player explores the continent of Ginormosia. There are 15 regions that will need to be explored and unlocked by discovering towers and finding new companions to unlock through the shrines that inhabit those regions. Whether it’s climbing up a mountain, or riding a mount through a desert, Ginormosia definitely feels very familiar for those who spent countless hours exploring Breath of the Wild’s map. The shrines in Fantasy Life present puzzles that act as trials to acquire Strangelings upon completion. While they’re nowhere near as challenging as in Zelda, they fundamentally serve the same purpose as the trials reward players usually with a massive bonus to one of their lives.
You see, Fantasy Life has a weird monster collecting aspect to the game as well. It’s Pokemon in mentality, but something like Suikoden in nature as you’re essentially collecting CPU allies. Strangelings are potential villagers for your island that need to be saved and reverted back to their human forms. Like in Beauty and the Beast, these humans currently take on the form of objects like weapons, food, and other cute items. By collecting them and taking them to the Goddess Statue on your island, you can help them regain their true form by tributing flowers that grow on the island called Celestia’s Gift. The Strangelings will then become humans that can accompany the player or help them gain a massive boost to their crafting or gathering lives. Some Strangelings will help you cut down a tree together. Some will tag in while you mix a potion. Others will fight with you as your tank or mage while you progress your way up the coliseum rankings. It’s a highly addictive “Gotta Catch Them All” mentality that keeps you exploring not only Ginormosia, but the rest of the maps in the past.
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Growler (left) and Rem
I can go on and on about the many different gameplay mechanics that are mixed into Fantasy Life, but the main storyline of the game is a rather generic tale. You play as an assistant on an excavation to an island that goes haywire when dragons pull you away from your group. You and your talking blue bird pal are the only ones in the party to wake up in what we learn is the past. After meeting the ruling siblings of the kingdom and getting permits for each lifestyle, you’ll travel back and forth in time to compare notes with your quirky archaeologist boss, Edward, in order to unlock the mystery behind the continent of Reveria. The main supporting character and the titular heroine is Rem and her baby dragon Growler. She’ll go on adventures with you to progress the story until it becomes clear what her greater role is within the world.
I can’t say any plot twist really caught me by surprise. Like Animal Crossing, you don’t really play these types of games for the story. Even though this is an RPG and the story actually does evolve and becomes somewhat intriguing later in the game, the opening hours are extremely slow to get off and running. I got extremely distracted with the vast amount of tasks and activities to do in the world that I went days without moving forward with the storyline.
There’s a completionist aspect to the game that affects what you choose to do next. While the game doesn’t force you to do the crafting side quests, it also doesn’t force you not to explore and progress in level further than where you left the story. There were days where I felt extremely compelled to gather materials in order to craft the next level of equipment I would need to submit a quest for completion. I sometimes even forgot what was going on currently with the world that I was exploring simply because I was so focused on gathering and crafting.
While Fantasy Life isn’t an open world game, it is a sandbox experience that is driven purely by how you decide to utilize your classes. Every single class has their own skill tree that relies on EXP gained through using that lifestyle to progress. These skills involve unlocked heavier attacks, less SP consumption, and special maneuvers that assist with higher level gameplay. While the skill tree is basically the same for every life, managing the skill experience to grow the tree takes a bit of planning. I do like that nothing is too overly complex with Fantasy Life and that anyone can pick it up and learn the system relatively quickly.
A Colorful World
Level-5 has crafted yet another colorful and imaginative environment for gamers to explore and drop hours of their lives into. The characters are bright and charming, the world of Reveria is large without feeling like dead space, and the gameplay mechanics are as addicting as they can get. It's strange, but what amounts to doing chores in real life is extremely satisfying to accomplish in a game. The world here won’t wow you, but the beautifully crafted soundtrack from Nobuo Uematsu will make every minute you spend in it feel like a fantasy. No, I didn’t feel like a blacksmith, nor did I feel like an authentic farmer when playing through this game. There are other games like Story of Seasons that do a better job of simulating the actual workings of these lifestyles than Fantasy Life does.
Gotta Catch Em All There are a grand total of 49 Strangelings to collect and add to your island.
Instead, what Fantasy Life makes me feel is that I’m having a good time in a fantasy world. It’s really good vibes all around. While there is an overarching antagonist that you’ll have to defeat to save the world, I never once felt stressed over the ordeal. It really was a surprisingly relaxed adventure that once again is akin to how I felt playing Animal Crossing: New Horizon during the Covid-19 lockdowns. It’s just a good solo adventure that you technically could share with a second person as there is multi-player capabilities here. Co-op isn’t MMO-style, but it does once again act similarly to how Animal Crossing handles their island visiting mechanics. A co-op session will allow an extra hand to farm materials or conquer a dungeon to make playthroughs faster. I didn’t personally play with this, but I do like the ability to have a second player jump in at any time without affecting the story or anything going on in terms of statistics from the single player experience.
Time Stealer
If you couldn’t tell, I’m a pretty big fan of this game. As someone who grew up pouring hundreds of hours into Harvest Moon games, followed by Rune Factory, Stardew Valley, and then Animal Crossing, this was a perfect encapsulation of what made me love those titles. I finished the main storyline in a little under 70 hours, but if you really wanted to you could likely shave 10 hours off that. On the flip side to this, I easily could have finished after 100+ hours if I continued trying to complete everything prior to the final boss fight. At some point I just made the decision to complete the final quest, but the post-game does provide some material to continue on killing your precious time. I know the game’s title has meaning within the context of the story, but I can’t help but look at the irony of the title as it is so relevant to how the game works in real life. The Girl Who Steals Time really did steal a huge chunk of my time and it was such a good time.
Alex
Caught in between the conundrum of his fascination with retro and the future, Alex has a very unique taste in technology. Never one to follow trends like his millennial peers yet constantly desiring to get ahead of the curve, he sees technology like he does his other love: comic books. Always looking for the best value or a hidden gem, his collector mindset reflects on some of his favorite gadgets: the Moto X (2015), HTC U11 and the Google Pixelbook. If there’s a good tech deal out there, Alex is on the hunt!