I got back into Fantasy Life again last week, and finally finished all 12 life tutorials. I then, at long last, started exploring the East Grassy Plains. I decided to start as a Hunter, because I liked the ranged combat option.
Frankly, it just seems like the easiest life to use for fighting. I can stay far away, but, unlike the Magician, I don't burn SP with every attack.
SP seems to be pretty vitally important, too, as I quickly learned when doing the Magician intro. I was trying to use up my SP dashing, which I didn't even know I could do for the first 10 lives I went through, and when I had to fight the boss Spooky of the Magician quest, I had to spend quite a lot of time waiting for my SP to regenerate.
I've gotten my Dash skill up to level 7 or 8 already, through just straight up grinding. Running in place and sitting. Running around town. Running across the East Grassy Plains. Since the skill can go up to 15 and each rank requires much more dashing to level it up, this is utter Hell for me.
Still, I completed all of the challenges for the Hunter life that I could do in the East Grassy Plains, ranked up to the third level (since doing the intro brought me to the second level), and switched to Mercenary.
Mercenary is a garbage life and I absolutely hate it. The attacks are so slow and so short-ranged that I have an extremely difficult time avoiding enemy attacks. Most of the life challenges I have access to involve killing carrot monsters (there's a challenge for killing 1, one for killing 5, and one for killing 10), and only two appear on the map that I can find. And at night, they are joined by a bigger carrot that caused my first death. It was embarrassing. Still, I'm going to try my best to do it, even though I'm not sure I need to or want to.
I think I need to max out each life, by doing all of their challenges, to unlock an option to equip life-restricted equipment as any life? That sound right? It also sounds incredibly boring. Oh, well, I guess!
Truth is, running around as a Hunter shooting and kiting enemies is a lot of fun, and so is chopping down trees and mining ore. Fishing is pretty bad. Mostly because I'm bad at it, and that's mostly because I don't understand the controls. Red arrows appear sometimes over my character, and I do not know what to do when that happens. I've tried pressing the control stick in the direction of the arrows, and against them. Both seem to have the same result, which is that sometimes the fish escapes and sometimes it doesn't.
I have the manual, so I should check to see if it explains anything a little better. I already looked up how to dodge enemy attacks, like how to do a dodge roll or sidestep or something, and the answer I found was that I can't do that. Or increase my max SP. Just improve skills to use SP more efficiently. How disappointing.
I have a sinking feeling that what awaits me in the rest of the game is going to be more of this: maybe 50% of the time, I'll have a good time and enjoy myself, and the other 50% will be miserable grinding and tedium.
I don't hate grinding in video games. I've spent the last two weeks putting probably close to 20 hours into Dragon Quest III on my smartphone doing nothing but farming stat-boosting seeds to max out my four-man party. I don't mind doing that at all. But the tedium of running around the maps in Fantasy Life is killer.
The problem, I think, is the amount of dead time. It's the biggest reason why I can't play Splatoon for more than a few matches at a time, and finally just gave up entirely on it (I never even bought the Octo Expansion, shame on me). For every three-minute match, there's over a minute of sitting and waiting to see the results and the waiting room before the next match. It's so infuriating! Just let me play the game! If I'm spending a third of my time or more just sitting in my chair stewing over my latest loss, I'm not gonna want to keep playing!
Same thing with Fantasy Life. If I have to spend a significant part of the game just walking place to place so I can kill the things I want to kill, I'm going to have a bad time.
Still. I'm planning on sticking with it, but it will probably continue to be at this glacial pace.
