Author: Game Infliction

Seemingly born of a drunken night between Animal Crossing and The Legend of Zelda, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is the latest take on blending easygoing life simulation and deep dungeon-delving. With its dangerously bingeable RPG mechanics and seemingly endless supply of charm, this cozy adventure stole plenty of my own time almost without me even noticing. The characters and story are both wonderfully goofy and much more substantial than I’m used to seeing in this genre, the process of leveling up your various individual jobs is really easy to get lost in, and it absolutely nails the balance between slice-of-life cozy activities, village building, and its more action-packed tasks, so I never found myself bored by any of them. After more than 50 hours chopping trees and slaying bosses, this has quickly become one of my favorite games of the year.

Fantasy Life i starts out as a pretty straightforward life sim: You’re introduced to the Life system in the first few hours, which has you switching between jobs where you’ll mine for ore, catch fish, and do favors for townsfolk. But just as I started to think “ah, okay, I’ve seen this sort of thing before,” it threw a curveball into that formula in the form of a giant open-world map full of brightly colored monsters to battle and puzzles to solve. Then, just a few hours after that, it sent me to an island to build my own village, lulling me back into a false sense of understanding before once again pulling the rug out from under me by introducing roguelike dungeon-crawling mechanics. This process of familiarity followed by delightful surprise repeats itself again and again, to the point where I was never sure what the next hour would bring. Chopping trees to increase my Woodcutter skill and gather wood seems like a fairly straightforward affair… until you run into a giant, ominous tree boss that doesn’t want to be cut down. Even after the credits have come and gone, Fantasy Life i continues to introduce new things to chase, which is just nuts.

But what’s more shocking is just how well many of these disparate activities work. It’s usually a pretty big red flag when a game tries to cram this much in, as it risks spreading itself too thin and not doing any one of them particularly well – but by the time I found myself delving into procedurally generated dungeons filled with a mix of combat encounters and cozy activities reimagined as boss fights, like a fishing minigame against an extremely elusive mega-fish, I was in disbelief by how well Fantasy Life i pulled everything off. The more classic life sim stuff, like leveling up various career paths (cooking, blacksmithing, mining, etc.), doing errands for villagers in exchange for new furniture and money, and building up your own home to put all your stuff in are all on par with some of the best in the genre. At the same time, the combat, open-world exploration, and RPG pursuit of new gear and skills may be quite simplified and mostly stress-free compared to full-on action-adventure games, but they are still engaging and have been nicely tuned to match the otherwise low stakes sensibilities. Both halves work on their own, and it’s all unified by a universally laid back vibe.

Fantasy Life i also has a surprisingly full story involving time travel, dragons, magic, and the strange mysteries of a fantasy land called Reveria, where devoting yourself to one or more of the 14 jobs, called Lives, that have existed since time immemorial is a core part of the area’s ancient culture. It’s silly, over-the-top, and fairly predictable, but also much better written than I was expecting and had enough interesting moments to keep me invested throughout its fairly short runtime. The know-it-all archaeologist, Edward, is an entertaining companion to have at your side during the plot’s most important moments, and a smarmy-mouthed bird named Trip never wears out his welcome with sassy banter as your sidekick. The third act does drag a bit and ends in just about the most cliche way imaginable, but it’s still more substantial and mostly successful in a genre where story is typically the last priority (if it’s even a focus at all), so it was a nice change to see it leaned into here.

Though you’ll spend some of your time saving the world in the main story, much more of your attention will be paid to the day-to-day business of leveling up your skills and helping out the residents of Reveria. Like any good life sim, once you start the grind it’s quite difficult to put down, as you leap from one profession to the other, unlocking new abilities, materials, and schematics as you go. For example, you might be asked to craft a bow to complete a quest and discover you need to harvest a new type of wood to do so, but you can’t do that until you craft a new ax, which requires some other ingredients altogether. This then leads you on a series of quests where you’re gathering materials and crafting one upgrade after another, leveling up your abilities along the way to make the going easier, until by the time you’ve crafted the bow you originally set out to make, you’ve now got about 20 other things on your checklist to pursue. The actual mechanics of doing all these cozy chores is nothing we haven’t seen in plenty of other life sims – you’ll catch bugs, reel in fish with a rod, and play a crafting minigame when it’s time to put it all together. But it’s all still oddly hypnotizing, like how I can never seem to pull myself away from the mundane day-to-day of The Sims.

That said, the grind in Fantasy Life i is pretty intense, and I did find myself occasionally annoyed by just how many trees I was expected to chop down and vegetables I was asked to farm in order to make what I needed for the next mission or upgrade. It can be especially irksome when it comes time to craft, since every crafting Life has an identical minigame where you spam one button. But Fantasy Life i walks this line pretty deftly, with options like the ability to skip the crafting minigames as you progress in each discipline, or allowing you to purchase raw materials that you’d rather not spend the time harvesting ad nauseum. This ultimately lets you avoid the more monotonous parts of the grind, setting your attention on hunting down the rare materials that can only be acquired from special resource nodes hidden in the world or by killing rare creatures.

You’re also given a small patch of land and asked to fill it with homes for both you and the friends you make along the way, decorating and upgrading the homestead as you go. If you’ve played Animal Crossing, then you’ll feel immediately familiar with this part of the formula as it follows the script written by its peers almost to the letter. You’ll craft furniture to customize your home, give fellow villagers gifts to improve your friendship and get goodies in return, and decorate the town to get a better ranking and unlock new things to add to your little community, like an art museum for residents to peruse. This aspect is a lot more shallow than something like New Horizons – residents don’t have much unique dialogue, there aren’t different weather or seasonal patterns, and there’s far less to do when managing the quite compact area you’re allowed to settle. But it’s definitely still serviceable and a nice way to spend your time in between hard shifts at the smithing forge and adventuring out in the world. Plus, you need a place to store all the loot and ornate furniture it likely took you a dozen or more hours to collect.

Of course, Animal Crossing doesn’t then also have simple combat, a large open-world area, and even a roguelike mode to grind to your heart’s content. Fantasy Life i leans into the action-adventure RPG side of things harder than I’ve seen in other hybrid life sims, with four of the 14 Lives devoted just to combat. There’s the Paladin, a classic sword-and-board class; the Mercenary, which trades the shield for an even bigger sword; the Hunter, a ranged bow class; and the obligatory magic-based class, the Magician – all of which are chock full of compelling abilities to unlock that make your battles easier.

It’s also pretty neat how the adventuring components feed right back into the life sim mechanics, encouraging you to return back to town and craft a new sword or staff to improve your combat efficacy as you slay beasts and complete quests to advance these careers. There’s not a whole lot to fighting beyond dodging, blocking, and spamming the same attacks, plus it’s always extremely easy to the point where I never really felt imperiled, but it’s still nice to take a breather from collecting fruit and watering plants to slap around a giant red dragon for awhile.

The open areas you’re let loose to explore are brimming with resources to collect, enemies to fight, and the rare, extremely light puzzle to solve. They are very effective as a more adventurous outlet after hours of crafting and chatting with townsfolk. You’ll scale mountains to reach a rare mineral you saw glinting in the distance, chase down mimics filled with loot, and find little shrines that unlock companion characters when you complete their minigame, like a game of Simon Says or a winning a timed boss battle. These companions will join your homestead and accompany you on your adventures, and are a really awesome addition to both adventuring and leveling up your life sim skills. You can have up to three tag along with you at a time, too, each of whom specializes in a Life and will aid you in practicing it. For example, a Woodcutting companion will help you chop down trees, and a Tailor companion will help you craft new clothes. There are a ton to discover (I found over thirty in my time playing) and picking favorites that are best-suited to help out with whatever you’re doing is really satisfying. Unfortunately, they also do that thing where they repeat the same one or two voice lines every couple of seconds, so that aid came at the price of me losing my sanity and shouting “please shut up” the longer I played.

There’s also a very dope roguelike mode that cleverly reimagines what a procedurally generated dungeon can be in a game where most of your skills are gardening, fishing, and other disciplines that would seemingly be useless in a fight. But these are no ordinary dungeons, as each node on the map has a different Life-related objective to be completed before you can move on to the next zone. One room might require you to gather each vegetable, while another may challenge you to fish every sea creature out of the waters before you can advance – and the whole map must be cleared within a time limit, so you’ve gotta pick your battles when choosing what to collect and what to pass up on. While these levels are much more linear than the open-world map, they also give you a more predictable way to grind for XP and resources, and are an infinitely repeatable option once you’ve investigated every other nook and cranny.

Like many life sims, Fantasy Life i also has multiplayer that’s unfortunately treated mostly as an afterthought. You can have friends or strangers visit your settlement to show off what you’ve built, but they aren’t able to do a whole lot except look around, which makes the whole thing a bit pointless. They can also accompany you to one of the maps to assist with cozy activities or help you take down bosses in the open world, but for whatever reason these sessions are timed; they force you to end the activity after 30 minutes, regroup, and launch again, which is just really odd. Probably the best use of multiplayer is in the roguelike dungeons, where a group of four can clear out the map pretty quickly, and you are given better rewards based on how many players are with you. It’s really nice to be able to adventure with friends, but in a game that nails most of what it attempts, this aspect definitely feels a bit barebones.

The Epic Games Store is giving away a beloved indie title and the most recent Borderlands game as part of its weekly rollout of free PC games.

It’s an especially notable addition to Epic’s long-running free game promotion, which sees the company dropping a variety of titles for all Epic Games Store users at no additional cost every week. This week, PC users can add Playdead’s breakout video game, Limbo, and Gearbox’s Dungeons & Dragons-inspired Borderlands spinoff, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, to their libraries.

Both titles are available to nab from now to next Thursday, June 5, at 8am PT / 11am ET, at which point they’ll no longer be free to own. Even if you don’t find yourself playing games on PC very often, you might as well sign into an Epic Games Store account and claim both games for the future just in case.

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a Borderlands side story that launched for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and S in early 2022. While previous entries in the series see players team up to loot and shoot across twisted sci-fi settings, this spinoff drops fans into a fantasy setting with a few gameplay shakeups, such as new weapon types and fleshed-out character customization, to keep things interesting. Thanks in part to a surprisingly star-studded cast that includes Andy Samberg, Wanda Sykes, Will Arnett, and more, we felt Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands was a fitting addition to the Borderlands universe, giving it an 8/10 in our review.

Limbo, meanwhile, is a much more scaled-down adventure that sees players controlling a small child as they trudge through an unforgiving, colorless world. It’s a short story that HowLongToBeat says takes just over three hours to complete, but it’s been more than enough to leave an impression on gamers for nearly 15 years. We gave it a 9/10 in our original review.

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands and Limbo follow last week’s free Epic Games Store titles, which included Deliver At All Costs, Gigapocalypse, and Sifu. When this week’s titles are removed, another batch of free games will be announced. For more, you can read up on why Gearbox was happy enough with its 2022 video game to call it the beginning of a whole new franchise. You can also check out where Limbo landed on our list of the top 25 Xbox 360 games of all time.

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

The final stop for our IGN First trip to FromSoftware was the sound room where Lead Composer Shoi Miyazawa crafts the wonderful soundtracks that fill The Lands Between and Limveld with notes of hope, melancholy, and strife. Here’s our interview touching upon what goes into creating a FromSoft soundtrack, what specifically were the notes from the director given with regards to Nightreign’s music, and Miyazawa’s own personal influences.

IGN: So I just wanted start off by asking you about how you fell into the world of composing music for video games. Are you a big fan?

Shoi Miyazawa – Lead Sound Designer on Elden Ring Nightreign:

I was a fan of the Armored Core games. So when Hoshino-san approached me about recruitment at FromSoftware, I was very interested. I’m a big fan of the Armored Core music. Also, I like some other titles from my childhood such as Ganbare Goemon and Secret of Mana. So I’m always putting research and trying to find inspiration from these titles as well. The Castlevania series, as well, was a big musical inspiration.

Along those same lines, do you have any favorite composers that have also maybe inspired your work? Not just video games, just in general.

I’ve always been a fan of King Crimson and Marilyn Manson. I like these kinds of different sorts of vibes within music.

Switching gears to Elden Ring and Nightreign, what’s the process for composing for something like Elden Ring? Are you given concept art for a boss or a location and then use that inspiration for the sound? Or are you given specific notes of the feel or mood that the director is looking for?

There are several approaches we can take such as that you mentioned. Sometimes the director will give a quick description of the mood or the location he wants. Sometimes it’s from the existing concept art of the game. And sometimes it’s a simple text-based order such as a description of a boss’s backstory or the arena that they fight in or something like this.

Has working on the soundtrack for Nightreign been any different from the experience of working on the soundtrack for the main base game?

Of course it is an Elden Ring spin-off, so we wanted it to transfer or carry over certain elements from Elden Ring and the sort vibes it gives off. I had many direct talks with the director himself discussing the aspects of Elden Ring and how we should approach Nightreign. And I think while he wanted this to be quite distinct from the Souls titles, he also wanted it to be catchy in its own way as well. So this sort of catchiness and offering something that was distinct from Elden Ring was quite important in our work.

Can you describe maybe some of the notes that you might have been given from the director with regards to the sound and tone of this soundtrack? Were there any recurring themes that you wanted to hit?

Yeah. So seeing as night was an important theme of Nightreign, we wanted this feeling of being out of place, this feeling of loneliness, this sense that comes with the darkness or the sort of loneliness of nighttime. These were elements that we wanted to incorporate into the music.

Among the many projects that you’ve worked on so far at FromSoftware, which has been your favorite, and which has been the most challenging as well?

Of course I have lots of fond memories of working on titles at From and it’s really hard to lock in on a particular title. But there are a couple that have stuck with me, a couple of pieces in particular. One of them being when we composed Consort Radahn for Elden Ring. What I like to do is I actually like to compose in a sort of dark room, in a dimly lit room. So I had this feeling while I was composing that track of there always being somebody there in the shadows and looking over my shoulder. So this kind of came through in the piece for Consort Radahn.

Another one would be the track Takes Me Anywhere from disc three of the bonus soundtrack from Armored Core VI. I know this is a bit different from the fantasy music that we’ve made with our games, but for me, as I said, Armored Core was a series I was particularly fond of. And as I entered the company, From just happened to kind of put that series on hiatus for a little bit. So I had something, had some ideas going there, but AC IV was a long-awaited game. It was a long time coming. And Takes Me Anywhere was one of the original tracks we produced for that bonus all-encompassing disc set. So it was something that brought back memory of those days and it was a track, it was a piece that I actually had in my mind since coming to From and since I started working a little bit on those titles but didn’t quite get to fully develop into those games. So it reminds me a lot of those days and everything we went through with Armored Core. And so hopefully people will give that a listen as well.

There are several composers that are credited with working on Elden Ring. Can you talk a little bit about how collaborative of an effort it is to compose music on games like Elden Ring and Nightreign? Do you each work completely separately or do you work closely together despite being responsible for different pieces?

Generally when we compose music at From, it’s one composer to one track. That’s the general approach we take. But of course we can get advice and sort of exchange ideas with the other members of the sound team. But ultimately on the credits, you’ll see the person credited to that track is the one who took it through to completion. But Nightreign was a little bit of an exception here. So we have multiple composers working on a single track in some instances.

One of the bosses that we got to check out today as part of our visit was Libra: Creature of Night. And I was wondering if you had any kind of insights or stories as to what went into the creation of that track.

Actually with Libra, it was one of the rare cases where a particular musical direction or ideas was given within the character brief. So that was one that stood out to me. We had these themes of trying to bring something as the appearance and as the boss fight itself suggests, some themes of an exotic nature or these impressions of madness or like a demonic nature to the boss. And again, introducing this duality that you find both before and during the boss fight, considering elements of victory and defeat, that trade-off, that risk and reward. We try to create a harsh contrast with a lot of our bosses, but in particular we wanted to take it to extremes for Libra.

The contrast between day and night during boss fights is very striking, and it’s apparent in the music as well. Could you tell us a little bit about how you approached composing these pieces?

So of course we have this day and night cycle and this three day structure to Nightreign. So as we mentioned earlier, we wanted the player to feel like there’s this imposing sense of danger. Enemies and bosses are getting stronger as the night approaches. We wanted this feeling of being more and more out of place, more and more out of your depth. These are things that we try to, feelings we try to convey through the music of Nightreign.

Is there any particular song or anything that you’re really excited players to experience for the first time when they play that you worked on?

So one thing that compares to the music we did for Elden Ring and the DLC was really focusing on the individuality of each of these boss fights that players are going to be encountering numerous times. So we wanted to really push the limits of the music as well for each of these fights. And sometimes it was a case of can we really push it this far? And I think in the end we did end up really expanding those limits and really pushing the boundaries of the music at From in our fantasy titles. So that’s one area that I hope players look forward to.

Going back to your own personal tastes, do you have a favorite musical instrument or something that you like to incorporate into your compositions?

It’s not an instrument, but actually when I first started dabbling in music, it was with a personal computer and it was with DTM software. So that was my first real contact with making music and especially professionally. So as a creator, software like this allows me to really concentrate on the finer elements and really fine tune these pieces down to every last note and pitch. So I think this is something that I’d like the player to understand or hopefully notice when they listen to these pieces. Because I really do get way too into it, probably too much that is healthy for work.

One of the things that I’ve been asking everyone that I’ve been talking to at FromSoftware has been what your favorite game is. We know we talked a little bit about video games from the music side, but do you have any games that really stand out as just your favorite game of all time?

One of the games I remember fondly is Myst. Adventure games like this, they usually have this quite, maybe only some readers or viewers will remember, but these kind of pre-rendered scenes that kind of transition one from the other. But you’re going through the world and you’re solving the puzzles on this adventure. This really stuck with me as a player. So yes, I think Myst would be a good example.

Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit