Let’s face it, the “life sim” genre has become a crowded one these days, but when a beloved title comes back after over ten years away, you take notice. Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time may be a confusing and far too long title, but the slow start belies an addictive experience with numerous quality of life additions that many genre-stablemates could well learn from.
But it does start slow, make no bones about that. What Fantasy Life i does, is split the component parts of an RPG up into smaller, more manageable jobs, or “lives” as they are here. You’ll start slow and become a sword wielding mercenary, but what it is really doing is teaching you the ropes. Nothing is ever complex in The Girl Who Steals Time, and really, these “lives” are split into a few categories: Combat, Crafting, Gathering.
If you’ve ever played any of the innumerable games in the genre, you’ll be able to guess you’ll go fishing at some point. You can likely predict you’ll spend hours chopping wood and hammering away at mining outcrops (of a sort, anyway). These are all active engagements, but you never have to switch lives, it’s all automatic and contextual. Should you press the action button near an enemy, you’ll whip out a weapon. Go up to a tree, you’ll switch clothes to a woodcutter and be able to chop with the same button. It’s easy; it works, and it’s a player-first ideal that both leans into the more knowledgeable controller holder, but also makes it easy for less experienced people to get involved.
These mechanics all deepen as you play. Simply doing things will gain experience in each life and you can grab skill points to spell in large skill trees which make you better at each life, but also add skills. Before long you’ll be using special “attacks” on mining spots that annihilates the health bar of the outcrop in one swing, but not before you’ve used your unlocked “weak spot” checker to make sure your attack will be at the top of its game. It’s moreish and addictive, and you will want to make each of your lives level up to get the most out of things.
The crafting lives all have a mini game, but again they are easy to read and never truly punish you unless you’re trying to create something you just aren’t ready for. Even then it’ll often return materials to you. These little quick time-style events are simple yet fun, and even they can be improved so you can have characters accompanying you who are skilled as an alchemist, artist, blacksmith, tailor, cook, or carpenter that can skip you along and help you complete them quicker. If you want, you can even unlock skills that skip one star builds/meals/etc. Fantasy Life i doesn’t want to rush you, or force you to do much you don’t feel like doing.
It helps that the characters are chibi-cute, and before you even meet some of them they will start out life as Strangelings. The first you’ll encounter is a woman who has been turned into a chest of drawers. She can still speak, but you can return her to her human form, and now you have the first of your gang who’ll follow you round and cheer encouragement, or help you when it comes to carpentry. Each Strangeling has a form that clues you into what they are (an artist’s hat = an artist), so you can choose a party that will help your current quest. Do you want your pal the woodcutter to help you get trees down quicker, or do you want the miner who will non-stop repeat the same sloganeering at you until you wish there was some kind of way to permanently silence your “friend”.
If there’s one area that Fantasy Life i can grind your gears, it’s repetition. Not the constant gathering and collecting, because if you don’t like that why would you be playing this genre in the first place. I’m sure we’ve all played a game where we thought, “I wish the developer had recorded just one more line of dialogue for these people”, and The Girl Who Steals Time is rife with this. If Rem shouts “I KNOW!” at me one more time I can’t be held responsible. The music, while mostly excellent, also has very repetitious hooks: be prepared to have people ask “does that not annoy you?” frequently when playing.
The cast of characters overall, though, is delightful. The story revolves around you as an explorer. As your mentor Edward leads you to an island via boat, suddenly a giant dragon appears and wreaks havoc. Before long you are time travelling between locations, and while you may want to just do whatever you feel like, I’d heartily recommend hitting the main story up for a bit. If nothing else, it’s got some humour that’ll make you smile, even if some of the beats are really rather obvious, and it also unlocks important elements that will add overall longevity post credits.
There’s so much to Fantasy Life i, including an entire Animal Crossing-like island management system. Building houses, terraforming land, decorating: it’s all there, and it’s very addictive. You will need to engage in every activity to some degree, because you are ultimately pushing to a goal, whether that’s player-led or story based. Back at base camp you’ll be growing blue flowers to be able to bring Strangelings back to their former glory, while also aiming for a five star island. But even here, you can go into a build mode, tap L1, and the game will collect all the flowers for you without the need to go and collect them all manually.
There’s even a full-on Breath of the Wild style separate world called Ginormosia: a large continent that has shrines with puzzles (combat and mental) inside. You can lose hours here just riding around on your camel, levelling up; questing; selling vegetables you’ve farmed from your base to the Ginormosia residents. It all connects beautifully to a larger system that is incredibly easy to pick up, but supremely hard to put down. This is a lovely looking game, too. Even on Switch 2 the frame-rate is mostly solid (there are a few drops here and there, but not enough to worry about), and the textures look surprisingly great. There are a few moments you can tell it’s also been made for weaker hardware, but oddly these mostly appearing during the infrequent cut-scenes.
It’s also worth noting that there is local and online multiplayer present, and it’s pretty simple to get involved in and has a nice mix of ways to level quickly, and even helps you if you are looking for specific things within the game. So much of LEVEL-5’s title feels as though it has been designed with the mantra “player first”. This does make it more difficult to accept the repetitious voiceover, and the slow start, but none of these things are enough to put a dampener on such a lovely game, and certainly not when you’re obsessing over clearing out your dailies but collecting three mushrooms, some flowers, and an egg, anyway.
Fantasy Life i is a gorgeous, deeper than it first appears life sim that somehow marries having a mainline story that needs to be followed, with also being open for the player to explore at leisure. It’s a fine line when a game attempts both, and I’m not sure I’ve seen it done this while in quite some time. There are annoyances, and that slow start will have people questioning what they’ve gotten themselves in for, but get past that, and you’ve got an excellent experience that you will lose hours to in the blink of an eye.
