Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

2025-11-16
The weirdest thing about Fantasy Life i is that it's good. Or maybe that it came out at all. It's probably a tie. Listen, I'm the biggest Level-5 apologist in the world--I mean I actually played through the entirety of Snack World--but for someone to say with a straight face that the studio has been anywhere near firing on all cylinders like they were back in the aughts would require a poorly ventilated room and a lot of paint thinner. Christ, releasing Dark Cloud 1, 2, Dragon Quest VIII, Rogue Galaxy, Jeanne d'Arc, and Professor Layton in 7 years back in 2000? An absolutely astounding output of weird cool shit, most of which no one is even attempting to produce the likes of anymore. And yet here we are 20 years since then and 10 years since the release of the excellent Fantasy Life and instead of shitting the bed they've made another honest to goodness Fantasy Life full of cozy charm, endless addicting crafting and building and leveling--full of Life. Fuck yeah, dude.

And that’s the funny thing, after all the years and all the delays since it was announced they basically just made Fantasy Life again. The main story is sending me to a new location. An island paradise? That's nice I guess but I don't care. I'm here to strip mine the land for new resources. Silver ore and sugar trees. In a half hour my bag is full to bursting with bright, bubbly, colorful icons for all the new found resources: glimmering gems, brightly colored fish, hewn logs, and rare ore. My industrial lad teleports himself promptly to the nearest bench where I engage in a chaotic crafting minigame, which lasts mere moments for my min-maxed, ADHD tuned reflexes. The minigames were ostensibly built for children but I am a man--no, a Master of this realm. Soon I have the next tier of gear that allows me to lay waste of everything that much faster. My newly colored armor discrimnates me as having climbed another tier in the ladder of success laid out by Level 5. The core loop is exactly as it was when I played the original in 2016 and I am delighted.

Certainly there's much that's changed, mostly for the better. First it looks amazing. The glow up from a tiny image on a decade-old handheld console to a giant 4K TV is enough to bring tears to my eyes as I gaze on Level-5's delightful new island paradise full of adorable chibi characters and returning monster favorites like Napdragon running around. Quality of Life improvements like fast travel and buddies, NPCs that help you chop trees and sew shirts--and spam barks, some of which like Bearhart's creepy ones will be stuck in my head for eternity--shave off hearty amounts of drudgery. Hugely important and totally welcome in a game that plays like a single player MMO with endless tasks to complete. Oh and don't forget the addition of an Outfit menu so you can always dress in your favorite outfit no matter what you're wearing for stat bonuses.

There are larger additions which while new actually feel like Level-5 pulling from other games and even their own past ones. There's a whole new town building system where you build houses and recruit people to live in them (Dark Cloud). You're given your own house to customize and fill with furniture and given daily tasks to check off like farm X and fish Y (Animal Crossing). Hell, there's even a semi-optional open world area, Ginormia, with towers to reveal the map, shrines with puzzles to complete, and not-Korok's to find buried in the ground (Breath of the Wild). This moreish game design philosophy of "just one more system" is one of my favorite parts of Level-5's ethos, it's why Dark Cloud 2 is one of my favorite games of all time and it's one of the many reasons Ni No Kuni 2 is far more interesting than its trad JRPG younger sibling. The best part is most of it is entirely optional. I didn't even place a single cuck chair in my little hovel and I stripmined the village land and set up a slum for my villagers just to check off some requirement for this or that, never to spend any time there ever again.

Complaints? The new farmer and artist lives are a bit anemic. The best part of the Life system in Fantasy Life has always been how interconnected everything is. The miner needs a new pickaxe made by the blacksmith who needs wood from the carpenter who needs logs from the woodcutter. Every task branches out into a series of tasks and decisions and optimizations and the fun is always in choosing where you want to spend your time, knowing no matter where you do spend it you'll be pushing something forward. The problem then is the farmer's output is basically for cooking, a profession that itself only provides buffs in a game that never needs that level of min-maxing to succeed. And Artists are even worse, totally disconnected from any other Life, spitting out decorations for the optional Animal Crossing village part of the game. That's not to say the minigames associated with them aren't fun--the farming Life has a totally unique one where you tend to your crops and occasionally have to face off against a giant boss pumpkin or onion or carrot--but when what you're doing is so isolated it does really feel like you're just grinding out a Life for the sake of grinding out a Life, and that's when Fantasy Life can lose its steam.

If there's one thing I'm glad of it's that the heart of Fantasy Life is still intact. They still have the weird, cute, way-too-long songs that play out when you get the penultimate rank in a Life. My favorite is still the Tailor song from the original but new English ones are hilarious in how literal and often cringe they are--special shout out to the Woodcutter one which out of nowhere goes all pop punk. And what more could you ask for but that a game stays true to its weird charming little core?

PS: The music rules. The old Nobuo Uematsu favs are here but with a sprinkling of some new excellent ones.