FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time

The title lives up to its name cause this game really STOLE MY TIME! Fantasy life vet and 40 year old virgin here: It's better than ever. It’s like Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing smashed together. The fact that this game had more content on day one than Animal Crossing has had in over five years is amazing. I love it so much that I bought it for Steam and Switch. And as soon as my wife’s boyfriend stops making love to my wife I will buy him a copy too. Fantasy Life on the 3DS was an underrated masterpiece, and I'm so glad it's now getting the attention it deserves! So much depth of gameplay, and so much replay value. It's refreshing to have a game fully fleshed out at launch. The story is delightfully silly and doesn't take itself too seriously. I gotta say though it’s so bizarre seeing Fantasy Life become this big popular thing in recent years, I'm so happy l could cry. The original game was my respite in a dark place as a kid, and back then, I didn't have any big online communities to connect with (except miiverse, which was a very small community). It felt like I had stumbled upon a precious treasure only I knew about, my little corner of the world that was made for me and me alone. I went from jokes about being one of the five Fantasy Life fans to the new installment being this big gaming event, and while the game still isn't as big as other things, I just feel so elated that people are talking about and enjoying something that was so important to me for so long. I know this review is sappy, but I just can't express how much this game and this series means to me! I hope this game spreads its love and passion far and wide! All the charm is there from the original. This is the kind of game that when I am done after 11 hours I could only think about what I'm doing tomorrow! Totally brought 1993 back!! What I love the most is that it respects your time without being mindless. You can run everywhere with no limit, there's fast travel, and every task can be done at your leisure. I chose to focus on the fishing life for example. Even if I don't catch the fish I still get xp, meaning that just by trying I will be able to level up and it gets easier. That said, the fishing mini game still takes just enough skill that it doesn't get boring. If I get bored of doing the same tasks, I can swap to a different "life" and do something else WITHOUT losing my progress or having to reset my skill points. It's very refreshing and welcomed in a time when games are plagued by limited events, battle passes, and seasons. I also love how the game constantly gives you new things to work for. Whether it's catch a legendary fish, aquire new furniture and decor for your home base, or craft a new set of armor, there’s so much here to keep you moving without becoming a grindfest. Fantasy Life is truly just simple fun and I haven't felt that in a long time. I typically buy a game, play for a few hours and get bored with it. This on the other hand can easily keep me coming back over and over again. This game not only values your time to an insane degree, it rewards you for just existing. The sheer scope of things available to you hits all the best parts of my ADHD brain in the best way, and it's well worth its price tag. Paid for itself in the first two hours! It’s very dialogue heavy, so be wary of that but you do NOT have to continuously follow the storyline if you don’t want to (the storyline missions are mainly dialogue with some action sprinkled here and there). You can deviate from the storyline and explore, fight, search for treasure, level up, etc. but I would suggest doing the storyline for at least a few hours to unlock different areas to increase exploration opportunities. The graphics are adorable, the dialogue is funny and cute, I’m loving the new characters, and, I can’t say this enough, NOT A SINGLE GLITCH! The last few years have been plagued by new games being released as broken, unfinished messes so this is a breath of fresh air and I couldn’t be happier! This game is closer to Rune Factory for combat (it does have some depth to it), but it's not as harsh as Rune Factory. You level up pretty quickly, you have a bunch of NPC companions that help you in combat and there's a ranged classes to play if you don't want to be head first into it. You can definitely skip most of the combat if you so desire and focus just on gathering and crafting. There might be story events and challenges where you need your combat classes levelled up, but the game has ridiculous amounts of catch up XP when you're below a monster (or even gathering node's level) and kill it. You do have NPC buddies to help you with it though. It’s extremely task orientated. Once you unlock the open world area and the terraforming bot, the game gives you an absolute mountain of tasks to do across all three worlds in the game. The present has decorating/base building tasks, the past has the key story beats, gathering nodes and combat and Ginormosia has tasks for days, ranking up each zone and gathering/combat that can scale to your level. Each job class has their own tasks needed for ranking up in addition to XP too, along with collecting Strangelings for your base during exploration. You'll easily get 300+ hours out of this game if you go completionist on it. I’d say about the only real gripe I have right now is how much the game holds your hand in the early stages, but I get it. This game offers a lot more to do off the bat than the old one. If you can get past the jarring time jumps repeatedly early on, the game is really just everything the first had to offer but with so much more. Oh, and I do wish I could turn the screen farther down to see in front of me more, but it’s not a huge deal. I also can’t overstate just how AMAZING it looks. The style works so well here. While I dearly love the charm the 3ds version has, this almost makes me never want to look back. If you’re remotely interested I highly recommend giving it a try. 10/10

(TLDR) They sacrificed the games story telling and progression for the sake of sales gimmicks. Play the original it's the best, hopefully they make a remaster or remake of it. I was really hyped for this game, I loved the original, it had so much content and so many things you could do to keep increasing your power, you could easily stay just one combat class the whole game without ever needing to change lives. I love how they implemented the life changing system in this game and made it very easy to switch classes and be able to upgrade all the lives while playing the game. Biggest gripe I have is that this game just doesn't have nearly as much content as the original even the dlc didn't add anything. The story felt like it was over right as it finally started to get good, the story of the first game was so amazing and had lots of progression through the world and lots of different people you meet. This game has the main cast of characters and that's really it besides small cut scenes with side ones that you only see once. Once I beat the game I was expecting a fantastic post game to make up for the missing content of the main story but there was nothing, just here's a big Zelda island, here's an animal crossing island, here's a rouguelike dungeon to go down to increase power of tools. Like once I beat the game there was no motivation to keep going at all, because I have seen everything and that Zelda island has nothing on it but the shines and a big castle with an extra boss. The original game after beating the story had so much, there were characters stories that you could keep interacting with and so so so much exploration, there were areas you could only access with maximum life levels in wood cutting and mining, and then even harder bosses that were impossible to beat if you didn't make your own gear. It left so much to do and explore and motivation to progress because I wonder what I get for killing this or I wonder what's behind this area, oh look by doing these things I can get the main/best girls as my followers. I loved the first game and this one was just such a let down for the sake of adding gimmicks, I have no motivation to do anything with the animal crossing island because the people don't do anything on it just walk around maybe punch a tree and just give default 5 lines of dialogue. I wish they focused more on the story and the progression rather than just trying to market to everyone with these sales gimmicks of saying they have everything I hope they release another dlc that adds more post game content and story rather then another rouguelike dungeon that gives you cosmetics and furniture.

The hype around this game has faded, and a clear-eyed look leaves nothing but disappointment. It still scratches that old 3DS itch, but the new systems drag it straight into bad mobile game territory. I kept waiting for a pop-up to flash mid-session and offer a starter pack. This is a singleplayer title that plays like a mobilegame, but without the mobile part. I regret paying full price for it.

This ain't a "slow life RPG." It borrows that moniker from the first Fantasy Life but completely misses what that even means. Instead, you're a generic Zelda-style protag in a pretty mid plot about time travel, ancient evils, alternate timelines, chosen-one destinies, etc. And its constantly interrupting itself to introduce the next feature, cutscene, unlockable, collectable or mobile game mechanic, which it has a ton of. It has some of the same charm, style and mechanics of the first game but its all been repurposed to create what's essentially the perfect endless mobile game experience. It might be charming enough to get you to come back in short bursts, but its too much. It never slows you down to just chill, take in the world, and actually role play the fantasy life. The maps are all tight and shallow like its made for mobile. Even it's customization is shallow with most of the interesting looking clothes and items being locked behind post-game gacha mechanics, which only highlights that mobile game issue. Guess I know what the i stands for now: Fantasy Life (Mob)i(le)

Its not bad but it really does not feel right for me. I dunno, I feel like I've got a decent tolerance to the "anime" stuff in anime (you know what I mean) but this game is genuinely the first time I have played something and felt like im not in the target age demographic. I'm sure it gets less painful the further in you get, the start has a lot of story, but man, the story is not good and the character writing feels like a budget kids show. Every time someone speaks to me, I want to turn the game off. The gameplay and music are pretty nice but I just found the game so hard to want to return to.

Big grindset mindset. Classic RNG pain, too. Play this game if you share this dumb illness.

你们这群纯粹因为觉得游戏玩法太肝自己玩不下去就给差评的是不是有点太神人了？

150小时全成就达成，全收集的话长路漫漫……主要靠群里姐妹带大的（不是 缝的动森+怪猎+塞尔达+肉鸽dlc……喜欢肝的一定不要错过……联机环境很好，谢谢所有只会发表情聊天的国际友人们，你们拿着研磨好的真暗黑龙武器默默地打怪的样子真的很帅！

Do you want to play an MMO without all of the absolute garbage and pain and suffering and resentment that comes from playing an MMO? Try Fantasy Life

The game is really good. The only issue is the memory leak which makes game sessions shorter because the frame rate ends up dropping to a point where you have to reset your computer to continue your game. I personally have to do it every 2 hours. Apparently has been an issue for over a year and still not fixed. Not sure if the devs are actually working on it. If you're able to go past that issue, the game is an amazing rpg that blends both combat and crafting/gathering.