Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time - Breath Of The Mild (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- Jun 1
- 11 min read
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
Released: May 21st, 2025
Developer: Level 5
Publisher: Level 5
Systems: PC, PS4/PS5 (reviewed), Switch, Xbox Series
Copy provided by publisher
The conceit of Fantasy Life has always been intriguing - pick a job and forge a distinct career in a fantasy world. I was especially interested in how many choices weren’t related to combat, as I’m always up for engaging in RPG worlds from perspectives other than the usual adventuring archetypes.
It was a nice idea, at any rate.
Over a decade later and the sequel couldn’t be more excited by that concept, introducing itself by making a huge deal out of the future you’ll build with your unique and meaningful lifestyle. From the outset, it promises a world navigated on your terms, a buffet of tantalizing careers laid out for the blazing of your trail.
Yeah… maybe Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time shouldn’t have made that promise. Not when each “career” represents a fragmented shard of a single competent RPG character, and a third of these “unique” choices all boil down to the exact same game of Bop It. Peter Molyneux would be proud of Level 5’s exaggerations for a game that has barely moved on from its 2012 predecessor.
So yeah, Fantasy Life’s main deal is its focus on character archetypes, known literally as Lives, which players develop by doing a certain job and fulfilling a list of objectives. Lives fall under three general categories - fighters, gatherers, and crafters. When you sweep away the pretense, what you actually have are basic RPG skills dressed up to look important. Because of this, not only is there zero point in trying to live a “fantasy life” in the purest sense, you’re actively cutting yourself off from most of the game should you leave skills on the table.
Switching between Lives is unrestricted in Fantasy Life i, freely available as soon as you’ve done a bit of introductory story. You can activate as many as you like, manually doing so by repeating the same admin process every time, and because you automatically switch between Lives depending on the activity you’re performing, the entire gimmick’s facade is shown up for the illusion it is. So-called “Lives” are just basic skills that other games let you have by default, presented here with many extra steps.
It takes less than thirty minutes of playing to realize there are only downsides to not activating everything immediately. You’ll need a fighter Life for inevitable combat scenarios because otherwise you’re defending yourself with a literal stick. Crafting Lives use resources that are far harder to obtain if you don’t just go ahead and pick up all the gathering abilities. Why wouldn’t you undermine the entire gimmick of the game and get a full suite of functions? You absolutely will not be rewarded for roleplaying your chosen profession.
Jobs inevitably feed into each other because, again, when you combine them you end up with the functionality of exactly one videogame protagonist.
Why can’t the crafters and gatherers have unique ways to defend themselves using their tools as weapons? That would be fun, and encourage sticking to a class. Why do none of these Lives have quests or activities tailored to their professions? That’d be better than every single Life pulling from a busywork list consisting entirely of “kill this many things” or “make this much stuff.” Why is there zero roleplaying difference between a Paladin and a Mercenary beyond weapon choices and basic battle commands? The idea of fighting for heroism versus fighting for money is simply too nuanced for this thing.
Why is the Alchemist so fucking shit? God, I wish I hadn’t gotten myself excited for that Life the most.
While you could throw some of the same criticism at the original game, that one came out a decade ago for the 3DS. This sequel should have taken advantage of contemporary advancements and made good on the first game’s potential. Instead, it’s thrown out the same archaic content and had the temerity to charge $60 for it.
As taboo as it is to use the “L” word, I feel compelled to invoke it and say Fantasy Life’s committed refusal to live up to its own ideas is creatively lazy. So much wasted potential is more than a shame, it’s borderline offensive.
It may sound like I hate the game - and it’ll keep sounding like that throughout this review - but I do want to make the point that I don’t. I’ve poured dozens of hours into it and not had a terrible time. I just get more disappointed by it the more I consider how little has been done with a premise that didn’t need to be so flimsy.
The Girl Who Steals Time nonetheless has its charms. A simple and breezy tour of basic RPG adventuring that offers an accessible, if unevolving, routine of battling, collecting, and building. Things are also spiced up with management sim elements and gameplay that pinches more than a little from both Animal Crossing and latter day Zelda sequels.
There’s a story, but I couldn’t care less about it - a twee narrative guided entirely by overexcited NPCs who are more invested in things than I could ever be. Plus the dialog all comes with repetitive stock voice lines that have nothing to do with what their text boxes are saying. I hate that shit only slightly more than I hate the annoying voice acting.
I swear, if I have to hear that bird say “gotcha” in his smarmy voice one more time…
Aside from begrudgingly playing it to access features reliant on progression, I avoided engaging with the plot and its insipid characters as much as possible. I had a lot more fun just doing my own thing, and would honestly prefer a version of this game that tossed the writing out of the window. I wouldn’t normally say that as a writer, but this title truly would lose nothing.
Lives in each of the three groupings are mechanically similar, and I mean they’re really similar. Woodcutting and mining are literally the same thing, where you rotate around the resource in question to find its “sweet spot” before chopping/picking its health down. Fishing has a few tweaks, but when you really look at what you’re doing, it’s only slightly more varied than the other two gatherer jobs.
Every crafting Life uses the same minigame with some cosmetic differences - it’s set up like Bop It or Whack-a-Mole, where you hop between three workstations and hit or hold buttons when directed. You’ll be doing this minigame a lot, as it's pretty much the sole function of crafters and you’ll need to do it for refining your materials as well as making actual items. When you level up a crafting Life and invest in its skill tree, you can choose to automatically craft lower level items, but doing so grants less XP and will only achieve a basic result without performance bonuses.
In fairness, it’s actually quite a fun minigame, with cute animations that make it feel energetic and at least visually relevant to the Life being used. Whether it’s fun enough to justify exactly how much you’re expected to repeat it is going to vary by user. I was fine with it to a point, but found myself no longer wanting to craft before the end of every play session, exhausted by the idea of going through the same unvaried routine.
Fighting classes are a bit more mechanically diverse, even if combat’s as repetitive as anything else.
The Paladin is classic sword-and-board, able to unlock a counterattack to complement its blocking proficiency. The Mercenary is pure offense, armed with a slow greatsword and capable of applying damage buffs. Magicians use both projectiles and close range AoE attacks, charging their inputs to either increase damage, buff defenses, or restore HP. The Hunter, my favorite, uses a rapid-firing bow that can create a rain of sleep, poison, or paralysis arrows, and trades in defense for a very useful quick-step dodge.
As with all Lives, there’s nothing stopping you from acquiring every fighting class at once - you’ll auto switch to whichever one you’ve set as the default whenever engaging in battle. I find that having them all to hand and cycling them out can add a sense of much needed variety. A modicum of it, at any rate.
Combat is about as rudimentary as it gets, with a lock-on system that constantly disengages itself and enemies that mindlessly throw out one or two moves. It’s quite unchanging, like every other gameplay element, each class’ gimmick defining the one or two things you’ll be doing with it for hours on end.
If you get into it, this samey loop can be a relaxing time. The world’s bright and colorful visuals make for pleasant exploration that, while never deep in any way, offers some casual and chilled out activity. With all the Lives activated, you’ll receive plenty of positive feedback from the many things you’ll be leveling up and improving.
Perhaps the most common aggravation with this otherwise chill process is an oppressive stamina meter that takes an absurd amount of time to refill and stays drained even when switching Lives. Especially early on, not having restorative items on hand equals a lot of standing idle. There’s no need for the meter to fill as sluggishly as it does, not to the point of giving me FarmVille flashbacks. It seems to do so purely to justify the crafting of stamina potions, to support a gimmick that falls flat the moment you realize it can and should be circumvented.
As noted, there are three separate maps that emphasize a particular play focus. These emphasized elements are where I’ve found my fun, as they provide just enough sidecorn to keep me invested.
The “past” map is where much of the plot unfolds, concerning itself with the inhabitants of Mysteria island. It’s also where you’ll pick up your Lives and report to each Life Master for class progression. As you get through the story, you’ll open up surrounding islands and unlock additional gameplay features.
The “present day” map is Mysteria in ruins. This now abandoned island is where you stake a colonizing claim, having renamed it to Pubis or something less majestic than Pubis. Here, you’ll get to build homes and populate them with the NPCs that you inevitably discover and rescue from elsewhere.
Potential citizens are first found as Strangelings, people who at some stage ended up transformed into a sentient inanimate object. You can turn them back into people by collecting the magic flowers that grow on Pubis Island every day and giving them to a statue of a goddess. Each NPC has their own Life and can boost your activities accordingly. They can also accompany you on your adventures, with up to three allies forming a party.
Useful as it is for getting buffs and adventuring efficiently, there is a gigantic catch with putting a party together - your allies will never, EVER shut the fuck up.
They repeat the same inane dross over and over, sometimes saying a thing within literal seconds of having already said it. It’s quite genuinely unbelievable how bad it is, possibly the worst case of NPC parroting I’ve ever seen. Gathering tasks are especially maddening, as this seems to set their pull strings into overdrive and stock lines become maniacal mantras.
Characters have a single response per prompt, saying the same thing when they level up, the same thing when encouraging you to gather, and the same thing when they decide to idly chatter, which is fucking always. Idle quotes do the “voice line unrelated to text box” thing, their meaningless nonsense accompanied with spoken phrases like, “you got a sec?” to make you think something of importance might be happening. It’s never anything important. It’ll be some dumbass shit like asking if I’ve seen any trees while we’re surrounded by fucking trees, and it’ll be asked on a downright clownish loop.
Seriously, Level 5, what the fuck were y’all thinking? How is it in any way good to hear “show me what you’ve got” repeated at least five times with every single tree you chop, every single fish you catch? Somebody needs to tell game developers to fucking stop it with NPCs behaving like stuck fucking records, it should never have gotten this bad, and it is supremely bad.
Suffice to say, I ain’t a fan.
I’m quite fond, however, of the discount Animal Crossing content. It wouldn’t sustain its own game, but as an additional feature it works quite nicely. Terraforming the Isle of Pubis and building homes is easy stuff, and you can furnish your own house as well as expand its size. Every Strangeling you assign to a house decorates their home in a way befitting their personality, such as the pirate whose house is full of treasure. It’s a cute touch.
As you acquire more friends, you’ll be able to use them to clear debris both on the island’s surface and in an underground cave network with plenty of stuff to collect inside. By having them in your party and exchanging gifts, you’ll build bonds that improve their buffing potential, and you’ll get free items as presents when you see them in town.
The third map takes you away from Mysteria and Pubis to visit a significantly larger expanse of land, the untamed Ginormosia. It’s a place I almost instantly labeled Breath of the Mild, for that is indeed what it is - the Legend of Zelda’s contemporary outings repackaged in a much more humble format.
No weapon degradation though, so it’s superior in at least one avenue.
Ginormosia is an open landscape full of resources, treasure, and monsters, and it’s where Fantasy Life comes into its casual own. It’s certainly where I spent the most time, lightly entertained as I scoured for ore deposits, discovered towns inhabited by friendly monsters, and partook of various combat or gathering challenges to acquire extra rewards.
It’s split into regions that use an old school “radio tower” system to uncover their details on the world map. Each tower - a sentient pillar with a big eye on top - can be interacted with to raise the level of the area they govern, making things harder to fight or break in exchange for higher yields.
Shrines found throughout the map feel very much like the ones found in Breath of the Wild, even sharing similar color schemes and aesthetics. Well, except for the fact that Fantasy Life’s shrines are deliberately shaped to resemble big curled off poops. A majority of Strangelings are found in these big shits, awarded to players who win the combat challenges or puzzles contained within. The fights are pretty high level but the puzzles are comparatively easy - even if the memory games can fuck off. Sorry, but memory games are literally exclusionary puzzles that I’ve no regard for.
For a game I’ve not had a terrible time playing, I sure have had a ton of complaints about it. This is one of those reviews where I didn’t quite appreciate exactly how much is wrong until I collected all the criticisms together. All these issues are worth bringing up, however, because for whatever enjoyment there is to be had from the game, there’s a lot more that needs to be tolerated.
Fantasy Life’s biggest problem is a complete lack of ambition, being interested only in replicating what was done ten years ago despite how much should have been done to update the gameplay and make something truly worthy of a promising concept. It’s definitely got its enjoyable side, and its aping of Nintendo games gives it some longevity, but otherwise this is a so-so retread of an archaic game that was always far too limited compared to what it claimed to be.
And its NPCs need to just glue their mouths shut. Stop. Fucking. Talking.
6/10
