This week on Fully Ramblomatic, Yahtzee reviewed Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time.
Transcript[]
A life sim set in a fantasy world called "Fantasy Life"? Boy, that's gotta be a new frontrunner for Most On-The-Nose Title, right after Space Quest and Blood and Press Buttons to Win. "Oh, good point, Yahtz. I suppose we better massively overcomplicate things. There! Now it's called "Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time"." Well, that's what happens when you don't put a fence around your herb garden, I suppose. Fantasy Life i: The Girl from Ipanema was recommended to me by a weeb of my acquaintance, who said, "Hey, I know you always talk shit about games that try to be everything at once. Well, here's a game that actually pulls it off! It's Animal Crossing, but also Stardew Valley and Breath of the Wild, with a little dusting of Miitopia for taste", to which I replied, "That's not everything; that's four things." And then he realized the error of his life, and everyone stood up and clapped.
The game opens with our protagonist, custom-crafted in a visual style with a pretty terminal case of Nintendo Mii Syndrome, or "Mii-xomatosis", sailing the S.S. Inevitable Prologue Shipwreck to a distant land with a very "the Professor Layton we have at home" sort of dude and a small crew of Gonks. Then the usual stuff happens: you know, a giant nightmare dragon appears, the dragon fossil we're transporting comes to life and fights it, we ride it through a magic portal into the past, blahdy blahdy blah. Things only get interesting again when we wake up on an island beach with a faceful of crab urine, and then have to report to the king of the island to apologize for crashing our skeleton dragon into it and exchange insurance information.
At more or less this point, we are told we need to choose a character class. "Do you want to be a knight, a mercenary, or a wizard?" Ah, the classic triumvirate. I think today, I-- "Or a hunter, a miner, a lumberjack, or a fisherman?" Wh-- "Or a carpenter, a tailor, a blacksmith, an alchemist, a chef, an artist, or a farmer?" I'm sorry, I'm confused; I thought I was building an RPG character, but I seem to have wandered into a career guidance counselor's office. The game presents this like we're choosing what single role in society we wish to fill for the rest of our life, and casually mentions, "Hey, probably no harm in trying out a couple of the others as well, but don't sweat it!" No, the game is lying to you; do sweat it! You have to sweat it. What you need to be doing at this point is enrolling in every single fucking career, because if you don't start putting levels into lumberjacking now, then sometime later, you're gonna be exploring a dungeon, and there'll be a fuck-off great Level 25 pine tree blocking one of the tunnels, sitting there mocking your dainty, uncallused palms.
Fortunately, while each career has an opening story quest to introduce the skills involved, you have the option of skipping those after the first, and instead just getting a quick crash course on how to stand next to a tree and press the "Hit with Axe" button. You need all the job skills, because, spoiler alert, the final challenge of the story campaign is to construct a world-saving MacGuffin device made from metal, stone, cloth, and fish, which has to be tailored, blacksmithed, carpentered, artistically beautified, and then fed a tasty meal.
But as for the actual gameplay involved in executing all these different skills, you'll be relieved to hear that none of them stray too far from the core skill of pressing the X button a lot. Basically all the crafting jobs are the same: you go around a table, pressing X over one of three workstations to satisfy a row of icons within a time limit. It's like trying to get an orgy going with three extremely difficult to please people. Okay, you don't actually need to learn every skill, because if you explore the sandbox Breath of the Wild dimension that's kept separate to everything else and complete the challenge rooms that are not Breath of the Wild shrines, stop calling them that, there's a chance you'll rescue a lumberjack to add to your village, and while they're in your party, they can take care of any trees you're finding particularly frightening and aggressive. Assuming you level them up enough, but the whole party shares any experience you get, so I guess watching you murder dire wolves and sew together new undergarments inspires them to hold their axe better.
So basically, there are three different worlds in play: the past, where you pursue the plot and crawl dungeons, the aforementioned Breath of the Wild side-hustle dimension where you fill out the map, hunt secrets, and grind your skills, and the present, where you build and decorate a little farm/Animal Crossing village full of rescued laborers and pretend they're your friends. Now, as is so often the case, if you focus on any single element of Fantasy Life i: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it's not gonna hold up; the combat's about as complex as Hungry Hungry Hippos. I was maining as a wizard, and breezed all the way through past the final boss with no difficulty, because half the enemy didn't even have ranged attacks, and the other half seemed perplexed by the very concept of me getting out of the way.
You go through Breath of the Wild Land with some kind of crippling neck injury that means you can't look up, which is a definite handicap for someoone trying to explore hilly terrain; I had to climb every hill to see if there was a puzzle shrine there, or just another five hundred of that one flower that's only useful for crafting printer toner for the temporary office worker class. And even if it is a puzzle shrine, it's probably gonna be one of those fucking Simon memory challenges that hold you up like a fucking highway patrolman who got yelled at by his wife this morning. In the Animal Crossing village bit, all you can build is a tiny cult compound full of identically-sized huts, and all the villagers mill around doing fuck-all but whine about tiny, pointless fetch quest items they want, and won't even let you wear their T-shirts.
But much as Deus Ex 1's shooting, stealth, and RPG mechanics were all shitty in isolation, it was the interaction between them all where the magic happened, and I was impressed by the way all Fantasy Life i: Everything but the Girl's gameplay loops fed into each other like a bunch of snakes eating onion rings. You blacksmith better cooking equipment to make better sandwiches so you can dungeon-crawl to get more stuff to bring back to your village and improve its ratings, so you can go safari in Breath of the Wild land for more villagers to form a complete human pyramid to help you reach the shelf with the can opener, so you can feed the cat that's been sitting in front of the path to the rest of the story campaign for the last hour.
A campaign which culminates in the aforementioned craft-a-thon, for which I had to scour Breath of the Wild Land for an alchemist, and as I was power-leveling them in a high-level dungeon, I thought, "Boy, this is hitting all the right receptors! I'm glad it doesn't have too much evil grindathon business that games use to trick you into getting obsessed." And then after the final boss and credits rolled, the game was like, "Hey, we unlocked a bunch of new objectives requiring a fuckload of additional grinding; feel free to get obsessed with it." Uh, you know what? I'm good, game. This isn't my fantasy life anymore; in my fantasy life, I leave the grinding to the girls with big bums.
Addenda[]
- The boy who steals your productivity: Yahtzee Croshaw
- Man I'm sick of all these inevitable prologue shipwrecks I'm just gonna buy a helicopter