Capsule Review: Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
An action RPG built on rotating between interconnected combat, gathering, and crafting grinds.
An action RPG where the gimmick is that you play all parts of an MMORPG-like economy. There are four combat classes, four gathering glasses, and six crafting classes each with their own progression and you can play any and all of them. You also accumulate AI-controlled “buddies” of each class who can help and to some extent cover for kinds of gameplay you may be less interested in, but no individual type of gameplay is especially deep: the core appeal of the game is being able to rotate between them in a complex-but-not-overwhelming set of interconnected systems where advancing in each one helps you advance in all the others.
The game is beautiful, the soundtrack is solid, and the world is visually enticing. But the story, characters, and worldbuilding are extremely thin. This is the game’s most prominent flaw, as it’s present from the beginning and the story is forced on you despite not really having anything worth caring about. The game is only enjoyable if you engage with the systems and approach it as a mechanical experience, but you are still obliged to sit through cutscenes and so forth until you finish the story, which you have to do to unlock all the mechanics.
Gameplay is split among a few fairly-distinct modes:
- The story takes place in a typical action RPG world where you visit a series of islands, towns, and dungeons. In addition to the story quests and class progression, NPCs have a number of uninteresting side quests that tap into the various classes (kill X of Y, fetch X of Y, craft an X).
- “Ginormosia” is a large non-linear open-world area that seems partly inspired by Breath of the Wild. There are a bunch of combat/gathering/puzzle challenge shrines, semi-random combat/gathering challenge events, and a handful of villages with short chains of uninteresting side quests. Each region can also be leveled up by fighting, gathering, and completing challenges in it, which increases the level of its enemies and nodes, improves its rewards, and unlocks rarer challenges and drops (some of which can’t be found anywhere else).
- “Treasure Groves” are procedural dungeons presenting combat or gathering challenges. They can be explored thoroughly for more experience and resources or just rushed through, and they each culminate in a combat or gathering boss, some of which are extremely rare and give rewards that can’t be found elsewhere.
- “Base Camp” is a town-builder clearly inspired by Animal Crossing: New Horizons. You can arrange and decorate an island area and your own house, create housing for the buddies, place created artworks in a gallery, and do a bit of farming. Interacting with the buddies here can reward many different crafting recipes that can’t be acquired any other way. It’s pretty shallow, though, and there isn’t actually much to do here.
- “Snoozaland” is a roguelike mode that was patched in some time after launch as a sort of free expansion. It remixes established game mechanics alongside new ones by starting you at level one with no gear and giving you twenty minutes to complete combat and gathering challenges to get experiences, equipment, and other resources and finally challenge a combat or gathering boss. Success allows you to spend points based on what you collected along the way to get unique recipes and cosmetics for back in the main game.
For much of the game, you can bounce between the modes as desired. I really appreciate this, as it means that when you get tired of one you can just swap to another for fresher gameplay but everything still feeds together and helps you advance (though naturally Snoozaland is more separate than the other modes). Most resources can be found in at least two modes, but some late-game resources can only be found in one and even then tend to be behind rare or time-gated events. The last few achievements and a lot of potential post-game goals thus basically require reading guides even to know what tedious die-rolling grinding you’re going to have to do.
Those frustrations aside, this is a robustly constructed system of interconnected progress treadmills, complex enough to obscure its ultimate pointlessness and feel satisfying in a way somewhat similar to incremental games without being so unwieldy as to ever become overwhelming. Once I got through the story, I still found it great as a sort of second-screen game in which I could relaxedly make gradual deliberate progress against medium-term goals, though those goals were increasingly meaningless (such as maxing out all my buddies and equipment despite having already overcome all the game’s challenges).
I do wish there were more meat to the world, to make occupying it more enjoyable and the story more satisfying; I think that would have made this a five-star game for me. As it is, even though it may be my most-played single-player game ever, and it’s really good at scratching its particular itch, much of the time I spent with it felt like compulsive snacking and I felt bad if I played it for too long instead of doing more constructive or novel things.
I Stopped Playing When: I haven’t stopped so much as tapered off. I got the final achievement at about 185 hours, and as of this writing have continued to about 333 hours. I expect to still pop in every once in a while for second-screen grinding.
Four Stars: Great. Not only did I finish the game, I probably played through the whole thing again and/or completed any optional objectives. It's an easy recommendation for any genre fan.