Love grinding? Love doing the same tasks over and over again to see the shiny stat counter go up? Love doing that across multiple separate skills that play off one another? Well, I do. But I was rather studded when I realised how much I was enjoying developer LEVEL-5’s life and base-building simulation title ‘FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time’ compared to the original Nintendo 3DS game. Over the last week or so, I’ve been hacking away at forests, emptying seas of all marine life, threading the needle for new pantaloons (I’m a real Louis Vuitton), and more in the developer’s long-awaited sequel to their acclaimed 3DS RPG title.
In The Girl Who Steals Time, players play as an intrepid greenhorn explorer who follows alongside an archaeologist hellbent on new discovery on an island far far away from charted waters. Using the fossils of an ancient dragon, the duo and their motley crew of plushie-looking creatures and a bird that goes by the name Trip soon come across their sought-after island but not after being attacked by an evil-looking dragon with missiles coming out of its chest. Defying all sense of dragon anatomy, it proceeds to blow up your ship with a bit of fury and sends you and your crew flying.
All hope is lost, but the bones of that dragon begin to snap back together, reviving the boney dragon! This giant creature of calcium and collegan saves you but not before warping through a portal and into a realm completely unlike what you were sailing into. Almost like you’ve gone back in time…
My memories of ‘FANTASY LIFE’ on the 3DS are fuzzy at best, but as I mentioned it never really ended up clicking with me. Not that I don’t jive with the genre (at the time, ‘Rune Factory 3’ was (and still is) my beloved), but looking back at some older footage of that game I suppose I just didn’t find its progression systems to be satisfactory. Not the case here, however! FANTASY LIFE i proceeded to consume the last week of my life as I engaged with the games various “Lives”. See, true to its name, honing a skill means having a Life (and yes, they make a “no life” joke in the script) and to progress the game’s story and unlock features across the game’s three overworld maps you’re going to have to grind out the ten plus Lives available to you.
You, Trip, and the dragon (now dubbed “Skelegon”) have quite a bit of a mystery to work out now. See, those three overworld maps I mentioned are all connected through narrative and gameplay mechanics:
- The Present map is the player’s base of operations, where they will build their village over the ruins of a kingdom lost to time. Behind your base lies a giant chasm that you’ll need to explore to advance the game’s story.
- The Past map is a series of islands that definitely do not resemble the Present map in any way, no sir. Here, a bustling kingdom lives on and this is where the player will take on a new Life whenever they so please, hone their skills, and primarily interact with the main quest actors.
- The Ginomorsia map is a giant uninhabited map that I only liken to Monster Hunter’s
GrindingGuiding Lands. Here, players uncover portions of the map by finding “Googlia” towers and, based on the sections of the map, rank up said sections to accommodate their specific grinding needs.
It’s a lot to cover, but bouncing between these three maps (or rather, time periods) flows a lot better than you’d think. The Past and Ginomorsia are where the player chooses their skills and take on new quests for Dosh (monies) and other valuable resources. The latter moreso as this is where the player has more freedom and resource opportunities than in the Past map. As I mentioned, each zone in Ginomorsia is controlled by Ranks (think Genshin Impact’s world level stuffs) and those ranks can be increased by simply mining, fighting, and discovering new locations. Being a game where Life levels matter in progression, and considering how easy it can be to feel stuck with the rate of levelling up, Ginomorsia is super helpful in this regard.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself—I haven’t even covered the Lives you can take on.
So, you have your combat, crafting, and harvesting Lives. Combat Lives consist of Paladins, Hunters, and Mages. The Crafting Lives consist of Tailors, Blacksmithing, Cooking, and the like while harvesting would be Mining, Farming, and Woodcutting. I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but all these are what you’ll be learning and working on as you advance in the game’s story. Each Life has a master you must report to in the beginning to learn the basics and over the course of the Life’s career to increase your rank related to said Life. Increasing a Life’s rank and level are required to take on higher level resources and foes that stand in the way of you and your inventory—and as you level up, you can spec skill points to increase stats and unlock special abilities.
But besides the specialty differences, they aren’t all that different from one another. At most, combat differs a bunch as one class is melee focused and the others are ranged, but Crafting Lives have players create items via a short quick-time event (“QTE”) minigame where you need to tap, mash, and hold the A button on the right workstation. Harvesting Lives are as simple as walking up to the resource you want to gather and mashing the A button—ideally right at the “sweet spot” which allows you to deal more damage to the resource. Here, your goal is to harvest the ore or tree or fish before your stamina bar runs out. If it does, it simply means you’ve gotta look elsewhere for the time being.
Now you can have companions by your side who will help you out with certain tasks. See, as part of the overarching mystery of this long-lost island, there appears to be “Strangelings” littered about, or people who have been turned into furniture and the like. By finding Strangelings and bringing them back to the Present time, you can revert them back to their human form and have them tag along to take advantage of their specific Life. And by adding more people to your village, you can slowly remove all the debris that litters the map so you can build your village to your heart’s content.
This keeps the player from simply mashing away and forces them to spend some time throwing some test hits out. (LEVEL-5)
Completing the game’s main story requires that you invest time in all of the available Life paths. Combat is, of course, a driver and it’s easy to pick up. You’ve got your basic attack combo with a strong special, dodging, and blocking if you’ve got a shield equipped. If you can raise your shield in time, you can fully block an attack and the same goes for dodge rolls. Enemies that are about to drop a large area-of-effect attack are presented with bright, flashing red circles and a text box warning players to get out of the way. The combat works well, is incredibly chaotic as enemies will rush players in doves, and bosses come in a wide variety of types with a decent amount of different attack types (if they’re not busy spamming their most powerful ones). Items you concoct and buy can also be used in combat as well, such as fireworks and status boosters.
Unfortunately, combat does have one fairly annoying issue: enemies will disengage from the player after they leave a set distance from their spawn point and/or they’ve been pushed to a higher plane. In FANTASY LIFE i, the worlds are all plateau-like in their design and sometimes enemies will find themselves pushed out of the fighting zone outside of your control. When this happens, they’ll no longer take damage and will refill their health bars as they return back to their spawn point. It’s happened to me a fair bit and nothing is more annoying than watching your hard work flush away against tanky foes. And hey, while I’m here, the camera likes to fight you sometimes—which would annoy me more, but a patch is on the way to improve that, so we’ll see what comes of it.
As for the other Life paths, it’s as simple as mashing A and doing QTEs. As someone who loves skill farming (and really, a good grind) FANTASY LIFE i was cathartic for me. I always had something to do and if I ever felt like I hit a wall in progression, I simply changed to another Life and continued hacking away. Buddies you find also level up alongside you no matter what you’re doing (and vice versa) meaning that you could always go and work on your highest-levelled skill to bring other characters up to speed. The grind in this game is never regressive in a sense—you’re always as good as your last Life and that makes levelling up very satisfying.
But I don’t know if this is exactly a “slow-life” game on par with the likes of ‘Starsand Island‘ or ‘Dragon Quest Builders’. Since the world and progression only ever really move by your accord, there’s no reason not to be busy. Likewise, there’s never really a reason to be on the Present besides ranking it up for cheaper Strangeling conversions and to collect Celestia’s Gifts every day (yes, these are timed). A stronger coop function or even a “wander in whenever you so please” system would encourage me to stick around my abode and take things easier.
FANTASY LIFE i is a beautiful game. There are some polish issues here and there, but the visual style is outstanding thanks to a colour palette, bright lighting, and high-resolution models that more prominently feature LEVEL-5’s distinct cutesy art style. The music evokes those Saturday-morning cartoon vibes and becomes frantic when it so wants to be, and it makes for a lovely if not surprising listen as it avoids some of the more trendy harmonies when it comes to combat and overworld sounds. Sorry, kazoo haters, FANTASY LIFE i loves spitting into that tiny instrument. But if I had one complaint, it’s that the soundbites are the most ill-fitting sequences of sound I have ever heard in a game, particularly the English ones. If I have to hear Trip say “Gotcha!” one more time…
The game’s story also advances in a proper manner, and I never felt that story beats stuck around for longer than they needed to. If I had a complaint, it’s that story quests almost never quite gave the player room to breathe in the sense that the next objective was almost always urgent. Adding to my slow-life complaint earlier, I wasn’t always sure when I should sit down and grind my Lives out when someone was in danger or went missing. Not that FANTASY LIFE i was particularly serious all the time (hard to be when you break the fourth wall a lot and when stakes involve putting someone to sleep forever by forcing them onto an extremely comfy bed) but the only times I ever had an assurance that I had to go do something else rather than pursue the critical path was when I hit a literal wall.
As for the story itself, it’s cute. The characters are silly, hopeful beings. Rem is adorable and her older brother is an overprotective baby, the Life masters have their individual quirks and little stories that add to the island atmosphere, so on and so forth. Some dark topics are approached with grace, so to those overprotective parents: yes, The Girl Who Steals Time is a perfectly fine and fun game for kids.
FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a lot of fun! There’s plenty of things to do and they all play into one-another quite well. It’s not a slow-life game by any stretch of the mean, but it is a grindy one and any grindy game that manages to actually pull me back in post review obligations deserves nothing more than a hearty recommendation from me. ■
FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Beautiful visuals and fun music.
- Grinding the many Life paths is a lot of fun.
- Various mechanics play off one-another in a proper manner, ensuring natural gameplay shakeups driven by the player.
- A solid amount of enemy variety.
CONS
- Coop is fairly underwhelming.
- Combat issues.
