Fantasy Life i: The Girl who Steals Time : LuminaChannel's Review.
The Anime RPG sub-genre tends to be linear but well crafted RPGS, or open world live services with multiplayer, but bogged down with monetization, and time gating that prevents you from playing on your own schedule.
Fans of RPGs with a cuter, anime art style usually settle for one of the two. However, this sequel to the 3ds cult classic original dares to defy this trend and make something fans have wanted for over a decade. This game has so much to cover I CAN'T make a short review.
Fantasy Life i introduces the Open World rpg experience by inviting you to play 14 different Lives at your own pace. Lives are job classes that fit into 3 major categories: Gathering, Crafting and Combat. The game presents challenges utilizing these 3 core Life types to open up the games varied systems. Combined, they all come together in a loop contributing to bigger systems. Giving a feeling of always having something new to work on and preventing burnout from its simplicity.
Combat Lives aren't complicated. There are no cooldowns on items and skills so most fights involve spamming your strongest attack nonstop. Strategy will be mostly be about timing your attacks and item use and universal dodge. This makes the game a great introduction to Action RPGs.
Gathering Lives involve a simple minigame of finding the weak spot and efficiently using your SP and party members to gather different resources. It's primarily a stat check, but as you play you'll figure out how to optimize your gathering as the best rewards come from successfully timing the finale with your strongest action.
Crafting Lives use a minigame where the faster you clear the task, the better the result of the item. Each minigame involves different combinations of Tap, Hold, Rapid Tap, and Rotating to successfully craft. Your base stats influence how quickly each round fills the meter. For Furniture and Art, this can result in a TOP indicator increasing its sell price, and gear can result in bonus stat lines!
The main story will mostly involve combat, gathering resources, and upgrading the lives to make items and equipment. The additional systems attached to these core lives make the game feel grand in scale and add depth to these 3 core systems.
The 4 major gameplay modes are Ginormosia (The Open World), Town Building, Island Questing, and The Treasure Groves.
Town Building involves recruiting strangelings, people who will join your island and seek residence once saved. In single player they can join as your party members or use their life skills for you. Allowing you to successfully craft, fight, and gather more difficult targets. Each party member has unique support effects as you gain affinity with them. You'll have plenty of reason to raise them all for the hardest challenges in the game.
Island Questing is the main story world. A good foundation of progress is made here. Through tour guide challenges and quests, you can earn a ton of recipes that will enrich your Town Building and Crafting. The islands are most similar to the original structure of the first 3ds game. From boss gathering targets to combat life bosses, this area gives you everything you need to prepare you for the content new to Fantasy Life!
Ginormosia is the most impressive addition. This open world area is filled with spawning challenges as you build up exp to rank up the world. By doing so you collect rarer drops that will get you some strong gear for your lives. Taking strong inspo from Breath of the Wild, shrine challenges spread through the world will help you unlock a solid set of town residents.
Treasure Grove is where the rarest items can be found and ideal for focused resource gathering. The dungeons level up the deeper you go, with challenges that stat check all 3 Life Types. Since NPCs can only utilize a single life, it's here that multiplayer becomes the go-to option to succeed.
There's a lot of game here. All of the lives contribute to your progression through all 4 major game types, and multiplayer makes the experience even better.
This summary doesn't even cover advanced mechanics, like the ability to "age" your crafted weapons in Treasure Groves and gain a 3rd hidden stat. . All of these progression elements are paced evenly throughout the game. Preventing players from being overwhelmed, yet still avoiding the "Fun starts at endgame" trap that so many live service games fall into.
The game isn't without faults though. Monster aggro is very spotty at times and I've lost it in a boss arena, causing bosses to regain HP. Multiplayer locks you out of accepting new quests and certain interactions. Combat can feel a bit TOO simple for anyone experienced with action RPGs, but this is a matter of preference, less experienced players and cozy gamers will be better served with this simplicity.
Overall. This game should not be missed if you like RPGs and cute aesthetics. Its a rare combination for a game to be cute yet solid in its mechanics and gameplay. The game achieves depth through multiple simple systems coming together, its a game that can be played at your own pace and still be enjoyable. Which is refreshing compared to online service games where it only gets fun "at the endgame". I highly recommend this game!
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