Steam has a hit new life sim and it will brighten your day
As part of this job, I watch a whole lot of Nintendo Directs. Hundreds of games are beamed into my eyes every year and I try my best to retain as many of them as possible. As you can imagine, some fall through the cracks. That was the case with Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, which was first revealed on a Nintendo stream in 2023. Even after making an appearance in February's Nintendo Partner Direct, it still didn't stick in my mind. I'm not sure why. Maybe it got lost in a sea of recently announced life sims, like Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Tamagotchi Plaza. For whatever reason, I didn't expect it to make much of a splash.
As it turned out, I underestimated the power of Nintendo 3DS nostalgia. Fantasy Life i is out now and it's doing exceptionally well on Steam for a niche game. At the time of writing, it has reached a peak of over 47,000 concurrent players and 92% of its user reviews are positive. That only accounts for PC players too, not those jumping in on Nintendo Switch. The success got me curious enough to hop in and start my own life. I'm glad I did, because Fantasy Life i is a plesant little vacation that has made my days just a little brighter.
Developed by Level-5, Fantasy Life i is a brand new entry in a cult hit life sim series that started on the Nintendo 3DS in 2012. Since then, its only other installment was a mobile game that was discontinued in February 2023. That makes Fantasy Life i something of a long-awaited sequel for fans of the original. And those fans were clearly hungry for it.
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I can understand why as soon as I start playing. Described as a 'Slow-Life RPG,' Fantasy Life i is about an archeologist who is accidentally sent to a mysterious world where labor is valued. There's a big central story here that involves bone dragons, time travel, and the fate of the world, but that makes everything sound more stressful than it is. The real appeal? The fact that I simply get to live a quiet life.
Fantasy Life's closest equivalent is Rune Factory, as it mixes some light hack and slash combat in between more peaceful town management. The hook is that players can learn 14 different jobs, each of which has its own skill tree, progression system, and function. I start by getting a cook's license and am taught how to turn any food items I get into meals by way of a quick minigame. I level up, get access to more meals, and start filling out my skill tree to improve my cooking efficiency. I repeat those steps when I get my licenses to become a miner, woodcutter, angler, and more. I immediately get the appeal as I start obsessing over leveling up each job, completing set tasks to increase my license level.
What's so neat here is that Fantasy Life essentially allows players to become a town's entire supply chain. I cut the wood that I use to make swords that I then equip for my paladin job. I can plant my own vegetables by day, cook them by night, and then sell them around town. Lots of life sims allows players to do all of this, but Fantasy Life is clever to break them all out into specific job paths that each have their own RPG progression system. I feel more like a tradesman than a player pressing buttons.
That's only one layer of it, too. There's also a town building component where I can terraform a patch of land, build houses for villagers, and decorate my house. Then there's some dungeon crawling, as I can hop into an open-world desert at any time to hunt for materials and level up my classes. Drop a central story on top of that, filled with boss fights and time travel shenanigans, and you've got a fairly robust life sim that you could sink well over 100 hours into.
I just have one word of advice if you do decide to jump in: take it slow. When I started, I figured I'd simply mainline its narrative and start doing the life sim part afterwards. That's doable, but not exactly an ideal experience. Fantasy Life expects players to naturally level up their skills between story missions. I quickly found that late game enemies were kicking my butt because I hadn't been leveling up each of my combat classes. The more I did, the more skill nodes I could unlock that would boost my attack and defense. And leveling up my blacksmithing skills meant I could make stronger gear for myself. After misunderstanding that, I was left trying to grind everything up quickly, which meant doing a lot of repetitive minigames all at once rather than spreading them out. It's more difficult to embrace what's ultimately a series of grinds if you're doing them all at once.
I have a few gripes with Fantasy Life i that hold it back from being a game I plan to turn into a routine, namely its very limited multiplayer integration that makes it so players can't work through the story together. Even with that complaint, though, it's hard not to be charmed by it all. Fantasy Life i is a sweet little game for those who love doing little digital chores and feeling rewarded for every single one. Considering how dark the real world is, it's the exact kind of escape a lot of us probably need right now. Maybe that's why it's so popular.
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is out now on PC and Nintendo Switch.
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