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.
