Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Timeis the last thing I expected to sneak atop my current Game of the Year list.Level 5has crashed the party with a sickeningly delightful gem that will sink its claws into you and refuse to let go. It’s a compelling combo ofStardew Valley,Animal Crossing, and myriad other JRPGs, all while putting its own unexpected spin on things.
Cosy games of this ilk are usually moreish, encouraging players to settle into a nice routine of farming crops, chatting up villagers, and diving into dungeons in search of treasure. This routine is a little different in Fantasy Life, however, and much like the 3DS original, it’s awfully ambitious in everything it tries to do. There are so many systems embedded into this game, and I’m stunned by how many of them are not just competent, but incredibly engaging.
In Fantasy Life, you are just a normal fellow who happens to be in the right place at the right time, swallowed up by a kingdom-spanning tile in which you must help royalty to thwart what will be revealed to be a dangerous threat that can travel through time. While the narrative will inevitably take a backseat and isn’t really the focus here, I was still shocked by how lovingly charming its writing and characters managed to be. Every line of dialogue is worth investing in, while even the plainest of NPCs often have something fun to say.
you’re able to also eventually recruit unique characters to populate your curated town, each of which has a unique class and personality of their own to discover.
This game revolves around, as you might have guessed already, living a fantastical little life. In this case, ‘life’ refers to the jobs you may take on, which offer new outfits to don and abilities to level up and progress. You can be an artist, a cook, a blacksmith, a mercenary, or even an alchemist. There are roughly a dozen in total and all complement each other as they tie into the wider gameplay experience. It almost feels like classicFinal Fantasyin that way, as certain tasks and quests will need you to switch to a certain class or mix and match them.
Fantasy Life makes it easier to switch between them as well - for the most part, anyway - with the player switching to the correct tool depending on the contextual action being made. You’ll be free to go from farming crops to cutting wood to fighting enemies in moments, and it never feels irksome. It’s because of this ease of use that hours melt away while playing, and you’re constantly wanting to do justone more thingbefore calling it a day.
On the surface, however, given how ubiquitous cosy games have become in recent years, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fantasy Life ends up in company it doesn’t belong to. It’s obvious that Level 5 has taken ample inspiration from Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, especially in how you build your own village, which updates in real time, and the various activities that are constantly filtering into a spiderweb of overarching systems.
After 20 hours of play, I’m yet to hit a progression wall in which I want to walk away, because there is so much to do. I would even argue this is where the cosy genre could be taken if it further incorporated elements of other genres. This feels like Final Fantasy meets Stardew Valley in all the best ways.
Fantasy Life Could Be The Future Of Cosy Games
When you first start Fantasy Life, its scale is unusually deceptive. At first, I thought the game would remain confined to a singular island where you could find a selection of NPCs and some guilds associated with lives. You would occasionally venture to instanced dungeons, but this aside, the world would be as constrained as its adorable aesthetic. I was very wrong. There are not only additional islands, but you will also travel into the present day, in which you will build your own island akin to Animal Crossing with islanders to befriend, buildings to place, and so much more, depending on how far you want to take it.
Then you have Ginormisia, an open world made up of several different biomes with towers to activate, dungeons to explore, and challenges to tackle in a similar manner toBreath of the Wild. There is nothing particularly original here, but it imitates and innovates on things we know so well that it’s hard not to appreciate them.
I’d be stuck here for thousands of words breaking down everything I love about Fantasy Life so far, but if you’re worried that it’s just another cosy game that doesn’t do anything new, I assure you it does. In fact, it might be the best thing I’ve played this year.
