What a strange and wonderful game. It took me about four hours to pin down what Fantasy Life is, because by turns it’s Animal Crossing and then it’s a role-playing game, and then it’s something else. The form of the game shifts and shimmies during the opening hours as a constant stream of new ideas are introduced, and it’s only as they begin to settle that you begin to appreciate what an intoxicating blend it can be.
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals TimeDeveloper: Level-5Publisher: Level-5Platform: Played on Switch 2Availability: Out now on Nintendo Switch 1/2, PC (Steam), PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox Series S/X
Officially , Fantasy Life i is a life sim RPG, which broadly means – and you’ll know this if you’ve played Fantasy Life on 3DS of course – that you can play many roles within the game, many Lives, as they’re known. You can be a carpenter, a blacksmith, a mercenary, a paladin, an alchemist, a spellcaster, a tailor and so on. There are many Lives to choose from. But the crux of this is you don’t have to choose only one of them. If you want, you can be them all.
You can be out adventuring as a mercenary, wielding a big sword and wearing your mercenary kit, then switch instantly to being a woodcutter the moment you approach and interact with a choppable tree. It’s similar when approaching a workbench, as your carpentry Life takes over and woodworking skills kick in. The same is true of every Life skill you learn: once you’ve got them – and there’s a little tutorial to-and-fro involved in getting them (which you can skip if you know what you’re doing) – they will be available wherever you go, whenever you need them. It’s a surprisingly liberating system.
Why would you want so many Lives, though? Firstly because the game encourages you to have them, either through main quests or villager-given quests on the island, but also because being a woodcutter and being able to source your own wood for your carpentry Life makes sense, just as mining your own ore as a blacksmith makes sense too. But Fantasy Life i takes this a step further, in terms of motivating you, by also being a go-out-and-adventure kind of role-playing game, meaning you’re not always stuck in town, wandering around.