Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time review – Not quite Animal Crossing

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If you’ve missed the buzz about a new Fantasy Life game, an April Fool’s Day trailer might have caught your eye. It featured Tim Crook exploring a customizable island where you can construct villager homes and add decorations as desired. Indeed, that was Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but let me clarify: Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a unique game in its own right, offering the same charming appeal as Animal Crossing does.

To clarify: Fantasy Life isn’t simply a copy of Animal Crossing. Although it shares some social elements that you might appreciate in Nintendo’s life simulation game, it stands out as a unique title. Instead of being a casual simulator, it leans more towards an RPG experience. You’ll need to develop skills across various “lives,” such as tree cutting, carpentry, mining, blacksmithing, tailoring, and many others. Additionally, you’ll need to master combat skills in roles like Paladin, Hunter, Magician, or Mercenary.

Each person’s experience has unique progression paths, skill sets, and rewards for mastery. However, these separate experiences can seem disconnected at first because they are developed independently. This means that one experience might progress significantly faster than the others due to its limited starting options, such as the Cook and Alchemist lives which have few initial recipes to create, making them challenging to advance. On the other hand, Carpentry and Tailoring have a larger variety of available recipes to utilize right away.

If you delve into The Depths – an extremely deep cave dungeon – you could discover scarce and pricey mineral and wood resources, yet be unable to gather them due to your low character levels. I attempted to chop down a Level 15 Grand Oak Tree, and it took me much longer than anticipated to reach the required level – and this tree is located in one of the game’s initial zones. Gathering resources becomes more straightforward if you have party members who excel in the life you require, such as having a Farmer for farming-related tasks.

In your group are individuals who were once changed into objects, known as Strangelings. To restore them back to their human form, you need to offer flowers called Celestia’s Gifts to a Goddess Statue. You can acquire more flowers by enhancing the beauty of your island and constructing dwellings for its inhabitants. Once reverted, these Strangelings will remain on your island and be eager to join you in exploring dark caves and traversing the vast continent of Ginormosia.

In essence, Ginormosia seems vast enough to potentially overwhelm the original Nintendo Switch. Unlike other parts of the game, it offers an expansive open-world setting complete with towers that reveal the map and shrines filled with puzzles and challenges akin to those found in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. These shrines host new Strangelings you can recruit for your party and island. To progress, you’ll need labor on the island to clear land and unlock new paths within The Depths. As time passes, everything ties together nicely, with each activity granting experience that enables you to craft additional furniture, weapons, and armor, which in turn allows for further exploration and discovery.

In simpler terms, the issue with Fantasy Life 1 is that it fails to engage my thoughts when I’m not playing it, unlike Animal Crossing which keeps me intrigued about what new things I might discover every morning. However, as soon as I pick up the controller for Fantasy Life 1 again, time seems to fly by quickly; an hour can turn into two, then five without me realizing it. Even though I don’t play this game frequently, my average session usually lasts over three hours because there’s always something interesting to do. Once you get tired of the somewhat repetitive crafting and gathering mini-games, you can dive into a dungeon or explore an open world instead.

While “The Girl Who Steals Time” in Fantasy Life I may not match up to the grandeur of Animal Crossing or the intricacy of dedicated farming and life simulation games, it stands out due to its wide variety of engaging activities that are easy to get hooked on. It might not dethrone Animal Crossing or The Sims in your affection, but Fantasy Life I offers a charming RPG journey that satisfies your social sim cravings.

If you’re seeking a game to fulfill your casual social simulation needs, Fantasy Life could very well be the title you end up investing the majority of your playtime into in 2025. Additionally, it would make an excellent choice for a game to enjoy at the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2.

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2025-06-05 15:46