Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a “Slow Life RPG” in which you live out 14 different lives in… hold on, record scratch and/or Gru’s Plan fourth panel – let me run that premise by myself again. I have to live 14 different lives? How is that “slow”? I have a hard enough time keeping up with one life in the amateurishly designed role-playing game we call reality, with its saddening shortage of rideable dragons.
Ah, but of course developers Level-5 are merely being cute with their framing. By “lives” they really mean classes or character jobs. In this blend of open world boglin basher and island town-builder, you will switch lives like you’re, well, exactly like you’re putting on different coats and hats, going by the trailer. Those 14 lives are split between three self-explanatory categories: under Gathering Lives we find farming and fishing, while Crafting Lives include blacksmithing, alchemy and such, and Combat Lives are all about ending them.
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The game launches this week, as detailed on Steam. We haven’t covered it before, and I’m not aware that anybody currently employed at the Treehouse has played the previous instalment on 3DS. I do, however, have many fond memories of Level-5’s older RPGs – Dark Cloud and Chronicle, Ni no Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch, and let’s not forget Dragon Quest VIII. Still the Dragon Quest to beat, for my onions. Professor Layton? I’m afraid I don’t know him. Did they consult with him on Jeanne D’Arc?
In any case, Fantasy Life i seems as bright and burgeoning and basically happy to exist as any of those games – so chipper and sparkling that I’m willing to forgo murdering the studio leadership for putting that lowercase “i” in the title.
The premise is that you’re part of an archaeological expedition who discover bits of fossilised dragon on an island. In the process, you also find a portal to the distant past that allows you to unravel the mystery of the island’s downfall.
Over the course of the game, you will alternate between roaming the monster-addled continents of yore and terraforming the island in the present, adding houses and decorations and terrain fixtures such as rivers. It’s an Animal Crossing game with its foot stuck in Dragon Quest Heroes. There is talk of saving the world, but it sounds like that comes a very distant second to choosing the wallpaper.
Look out for the game on 21st May. Given the multiple Lives framing, the obvious thing it’s missing is an introspective spiral akin to the tawdry soap opera that is The Alters, in which one man clones himself in order to operate a huge rolling spacebase. If I actually had 14 different lives at my disposal, I guarantee you there would be a pecking order with the Cook at the top of it.
