Fantasy Life (3DS)

In many a fantasy role-playing game, your adventures fighting against evil with swords and sorcery will be broken up by times spent interacting with people in villages and towns. You’ll meet people who devote their life to carpentry, fishing, and cooking, but in a world of magic and monsters, surely even such humble professions would have to contend with fantastic complications. Fantasy Life for the 3DS lets you experience how such jobs can interact with such a setting in addition to taking up the blade if you wish, because in this particular world, a tailor can be just as likely to save the world as a paladin.

In the fantasy realm of Reveria, citizens are encouraged to take up a Life, this essentially just a job but with a few other perks like being granted the tutelage of a master of the trade. There are 12 unique lifestyles available to pick from for the player, although they do generally fit into one of three broad categories. A Life will either be focused on combat, crafting, or gathering, and usually the Lives that share a category will play a bit similarly. Gatherers, for example, include the Angler, Miner, and Woodcutter, Miner and Woodcutter both involving walking around your gathering point to feel out the best point to hit. Over in crafting, the Tailor, Carpenter, Blacksmith, Alchemist, and Cook all play minigames to create their associated items. Mercenary, Hunter, Magician, and Paladin can be said to fight a bit differently with some focused on range and others one close range battle, and Fantasy Life definitely gets a bit more creative with the ways a monster can oppose them than the ways a recipe could be complicated, but that doesn’t mean the less action-focused Lives are lacking in things to do. In fact, it’s fairly wise to take on as many Lives as possible, particularly the gathering classes and at least one combat one, because as you journey across the land, you’ll find many opportunities to improve your craft and work towards a more well-rounded character even if the game doesn’t necessitate doing so.

Each Life you sign-up for gives you a checklist of activities that will be tied to that job’s growth. At each benchmark of development, you’ll get new powers or abilities that help with the task, like automatically performing certain stages of the crafting minigame well or acquiring new powerful attacks. Luckily, the game will track if you do a task before you assume the Life or reach a certain level where it will display, but you can’t actually start doing things like mining until you get the right equipment. Having multiple professions will certainly make your adventure richer, as reaching a new area will inherently come with a great deal of new things to do. Whether its gathering new materials, putting those materials to work in crafting recipes, or defeating the local monsters, a life of many Lives will make exploration more rewarding and interesting, which helps in turn with making up for the sometimes simple reality of a job. Woodcutting can be slow as a focus but is a fine profession when you’re just hacking down the occasional interesting tree along your journey, and most tasks on your checklist aren’t too tedious to engage with. They ask you to find new things, combat classes are asked to face down tough monsters, and for the most part they have clear conditions for completion so you’re not hoping for random effects or outcomes unless you can tip those in your favor with good skill use or minigame play. Each individual Life can sometimes feel a little lean or slow to progress, but the combined picture gives you a lot more to do that helps keep you occupied between engaging with the main storyline.

In Fantasy Life, the land of Reveria is experiencing an unusual disruption. Dark jewels called Doomstones have begun to rain down from the sky, enraging nearby wildlife. This coincidentally coincides with your custom character coming to the town of Castele to start your first life, a fateful run-in with a talking butterfly going by the name of Butterfly leading to you being the king’s preferred person for dealing with the Doomstones. This plot will take you across the land and to other kingdoms, and as part of the plot you will need to engage in the occasional battle even if you otherwise preferred sneaking around danger, but the boss battles aren’t actually meant to obstruct you too much even if you devoted your Life to something danger averse like fishing. Story fights are more about fracturing a Doomstone that is sitting in place than facing the tough foes meant to provide the combat classes with some challenge, so you can truly clear the main story without diverting from your preferred life even if that inherently means you’re missing out on the more interesting breadth of activities by not balancing a few Lifes.

Each Life also involves a little plot of its own as an introduction, the game letting you skip them but some have fun characters or nice little tales. Admittedly, some are rather juvenile or slow because they’re caught up telling weak jokes meant for younger audiences. However, Fantasy Life can also be quite funny during the main story, partly because of the personality of your companion Butterfly. She is essentially your voice in all things, the player character silent but Butterfly not just doing the necessary talking but also having some unique characteristics that make her endearing. Generally positive and energetic, she can be a little feisty or silly too, although in this world full of people who are usually pretty willing to get along with each other, they are pretty quick to threaten Butterfly with things like putting her in a display case or plucking her wings even for minor slights. Fantasy Life is nearly a wholesome game even if sometimes a man you meet might drink away his sorrows or be accused of impropriety, the people of the land very happy to help your on your journey even if Butterfly might have a sassy back and forth with them. A decent little cast of characters helps flesh out the areas like the pirate port town or supposedly evil empire of the desert, and when you are out doing as you please, you can even eventually get major characters to join you as temporary allies in place of human players who could have otherwise joined you in a party of up to three players.

Side quests also exist out across Reveria, often simple checklist tasks as well but leaning more readily into repetition than Life works. A character might want a certain amount of enemies defeated, a certain amount of items, or a certain quality of craftwork, and while these do reward you with money and other items, they aren’t as compelling because of their lesser importance and simpler ideas. As said, the combat classes do end up evolving the most, mostly because late game monsters you encounter can have more unusual attacks or tricks, although all actions out in the world of Reveria are limited somewhat by your SP. While crafting is a self-contained minigame, actions out in the world like mining and fighting involve spending SP that regenerates slowly but limits how quickly you can act. This adds some tension to battle but also can lead to a lot of standing around waiting for it to rejuvenate for other tasks, although spend some time as an apothecary and you can have SP recovery and healing items in abundance. At the same time, the advanced tools gained from the crafting classes don’t feel necessary for the plot or even some of the tougher combat situations, Fantasy Life always seeming like it doesn’t want to demand you play specific Lives even if that means the synergy that could have been gained from trying them all isn’t always that strong as a result.

Fantasy Life does take place in a cute low-pressure world that will no doubt give some people a lot to do even if it isn’t strictly necessary to do so. The music, while often good, can definitely be worn thin from how often you hear certain tracks, especially the cutscene heavy story leaning on the same background track for most of its scenes. Famous composer of the Final Fantasy series Nobuo Uematsu provides the music here, it sometimes a bit too playful and silly and others spot on in providing lovely accompaniment. Snowy Summit’s theme is light, beautiful, and a little haunting, the seaside town of Port Puerto has a nice accordion song to fit the relaxed vibes, and the song that usually plays near the end of a chapter’s climax is a lovely upbeat accompaniment seemingly called Happy Life. However, the beach area is oddly imposing and a bit sillyy with its track and the most common battle music is a weird ragtime number that transitions into squeaky toy sounds. It is a game with a lot of repetition in its design that could have done with assuring the most repeated moments had less goofy music that could wear on you, but the soundtrack definitely has its moments here and there, especially when its part of the plot.

THE VERDICT: Fantasy Life wants to give you the opportunity to live the Life you want in its cute and inviting world and the gameplay loop it provides can be rewarding. Gradually progressing your jobs while out across Reveria and encountering new things on your checklist provides a nice simple sense of growth and the game doesn’t really get too demanding with what needs to be done, although that also leads to individual Lives and tasks being a touch simple. The plot can have its fun moments thanks to your delightful companion Butterfly even if at other times it drags on with weak humor, but Fantasy Life is chock full of a lot of little things to do that often balance out despite some of the tedious elements.

And so, I give Fantasy Life for Nintendo 3DS…

An OKAY rating. No one Life in Fantasy Life is going to be as good as it would have been if the game had focused on that Life most of all. The combat is the most diverse but still mostly about SP management as you run around enemies who usually aren’t too difficult unless they have a lot of life, but it’s also not necessarily bad since you are still managing something in that encounter. The crafting minigames require attention if not always skill, and the gathering just gives you a nice extra task to do to flesh out the locations you find yourself in. Everything you’re meant to do for your jobs is pretty simple on its surface but feeds into your character’s growth, and while they could have certainly benefited from being more interconnected, Fantasy Life is certainly better by being a jack of all trades because that is funnily enough the quickest way to master them. At the same time, a master here isn’t exactly doing anything too complex or extravagant, but spreading the love across the Lives also alleviates the repetition and the plot also gives you something to go out and engage with. While something like a character who keeps swapping the first letters of words around gets old since it isn’t done with much care, other people you meet can be a bit more fun to interact with to make up for it. Fantasy Life never really hits incredible highs or obnoxious lows because it feels like it’s always aiming for a nice comfortable place in the middle, your work not too demanding but still having some layers to it as you progress up the ranks. The plot can be cutscene heavy but you get enough moments along the way that make it worth paying attention to. The music even feels like it sometimes can whip out something great to listen to or a track you wish wouldn’t play so often.  It is, in a way, trying to cater to the different types of people who would play, appealing broadly so this can be a game where you can do something like invest solely in the blacksmith life or try to balance all 12 and go for every little thing possible.

Fantasy Life splitting its focus is what likely meant it couldn’t ever make anything as involved as it should be, but it compensated properly and gives players a breadth of options to make up for the depth not always being there. It constructs its main checklists to encourage activities rather than demand repetition in the way side quests seem to, but much like your hero at the start, it feels like Fantasy Life had a lot of room to grow and it can benefit from splitting its attention. It may not be the best game featuring fantasy combat, cooking, mining, and so on, but it features all of them well enough to be a nice way to spend your time as you always feel like you can be doing something a bit productive.