FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time was provided by LEVEL5 for review. Thank you!
The Life/Farming Sim genre has been pretty active over the past 10 years, likely as a result of Stardew Valley revitalizing the genre, especially for indie developers. But LEVEL5 has brought something a little different to the table with FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time, and it's a welcome change from the usual state of affairs.
Don't get me wrong, I love life sims like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and Rune Factory. But FANTASY LIFE i takes a different approach to these games. In a reversal of the status quo, FANTASY LIFE i puts the story at the center of the game, with life-sim elements revolving around it. In fact, if you want to, you can pretty much just focus on the storyline, completing quests, and progressing through the world at quite a pace, but that's not really how the game is designed to be played.
You can easily branch off from the main quest line and take on a wide range of side quests, or just explore the world and level up your various "Lives", which are the professions you can choose from in the game, ranging from a chef to a miner, and various combat roles too. You can change these on the fly once you have obtained the license for each one, which opens up the ability to perform various tasks. Each Life is leveled up separately and has its own skill tree, so progressing along the skill trees and leveling up each Life is really where a lot of your time will be spent.
If that isn't your cup of tea, then the main questline doesn't really require you to do any grinding. In fact, the game is surprisingly short. If you don't go for any side content, like optional quests or decorating your own island (more on that later), you could complete the main storyline in less than 10 hours. There are a couple of "hiccups" where you'll need to find additional friends to live on your island with you, and you'll need at least basic skills in each of the "Lives", but other than that, you can pretty much do quest after quest to progress the story.
While combat isn't really a focus of the game, there is a decent amount of it, and the mechanics in place work well enough, even if they are a bit basic. You have the ability to dodge, light attack, heavy attack, and, if you have a shield, block attacks too. Difficulty is on the easier side, although some bosses do put up a fair fight. Again, grinding usually isn't a requirement unless you're going for 100% completion, just make sure you have the right equipment and some buddies to fight alongside.
As for the story itself, as you might imagine, given the game's full title, it revolves heavily around time-traveling and time manipulation. There's not so much in the way of twists in this story; the antagonists and protagonists are revealed almost as soon as they appear, and while there are some interesting premises, there's nothing that really sets the game apart in terms of its storyline.
Shortly into the story, you'll be introduced to an island, which eventually becomes your "Home Base". A place where you can build houses, decorate your village, and gain villagers by saving them from the dark energy used by the antagonists.
This village represents a fairly significant portion of the "side content" in the game, and you'll be able to do things like accept requests from your villagers for certain items in exchange for rewards, complete guild activities to unlock more decorations, and expand your island further. It's reasonably fleshed out, and the customization, I would say, is similar to that of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, although the personalities of each villager are much less detailed and interesting.
Really, it's all about what you're buying FANTASY LIFE i for. It does have a storyline, and that's a nice rarity in the game like this, but it's not an especially deep one, and if you focus on it, you'll be done in no time. It has a fair amount of side content, but much of it revolves around grinding experience points and doing various tasks like mining, cooking, and fishing.
It lacks the close personal relationships you can build in something like Stardew Valley, as well as the fun daily systems in place in games like Animal Crossing. But you can still have plenty of fun with leveling up your jobs to get new gear and leveling up your island to get more villagers and new decorations, which is what you will spend most of your time doing, so if that does sound appealing, then FANTASY LIFE i is worth your attention.
FANTASY LIFE i is a great game to play on the Steam Deck; it has good controller support for both menus and gameplay, the game actively mentions supporting Remote Play Together for the simple co-op mode, and it has the graphics automatically configured for the Steam Deck.
The graphics preset generally falls around "Medium" settings, and targets 60 FPS, which it reaches almost 100% of the time, with the odd dip into the high 50s here and there, but not enough for me to suggest changing the settings, so leave them as-is.
Power draw does vary according to your location, but it is generally around 14-18W, so it's not too intensive on the battery. You should expect around 3.5 hours on a Steam Deck OLED and around 2-2.5 hours on a Steam Deck LCD. Temperatures were in the 65 °C - 70 °C range.
FANTASY LIFE i has limited accessibility options. All dialogue is subtitled, even voiced lines. You can enable auto-targeting of enemies when you draw a weapon, and controls are rebindable.
FANTASY LIFE i definitely has its good points. It has a decent storyline, albeit a short one, and it has plenty of side content in the form of levelling up your "lives" and enhancing your island, but it caters towards players who enjoy that grind. If that doesn't describe you, then this game might not be for you.
As for Steam Deck support, you can't really fault FANTASY LIFE i. Great controller support and a graphics preset already in place for the device mean that you can't really ask for more in terms of how well it runs on the Steam Deck.
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FANTASY LIFE i caters more to players who enjoy the "grind", but those players will get a kick out of this game. Plus, it runs very well on Steam Deck.
