Fantasy Life Review

Man about town.

As a consumer of video games, I think it’s up to both developers and those buying and playing games to figure out what works and what doesn’t, even if the channels for that discussion range from slim to “I’m not swimming through this river of sh** on Twitter.” Perhaps more importantly, consumers need to vote with their dollars above all else and it’s for that reason that I’m a little concerned Level 5’s Fantasy Life will fly too far below the radar for Nintendo 3DS owners.

This exclusive fantasy-themed action role-playing game actually offers twelve different and well-thought-out branches of gameplay with opportunities for switching between quests for a warrior-minded Paladin or even a gamer who just wants to make soup for the townspeople of Riviera. It's the extreme level of depth in all of these options that really impresses me, even if Fantasy Life’s largely cutesy veneer wears thin for anyone with a tendency for mature gaming. For those consumers, the challenge will reside in stomaching the occasional tailor quest as doing so provides the right kind of balance against combat-oriented classes.

Fantasy Life starts out with an extensive character creation suite in which you’ll choose your first job, outfit your character, color his or her eyes to your liking, select a hair style, skin tone, and more. Differentiating your character from the townsfolk only gets easier as new clothing options, armories, questlines, and loot drops provide more and more options for stylishly walking the walk in Riviera. The story goes that large, purple doom stones have dropped from the sky and while some would ask you, the hero, to collect and help investigate these mysterious gems, it’s far too easy and rewarding to get distracted.

I started the game as a Paladin and inched forward slowly, paying attention to the wealth of characters and everything they had to say. In the pantheon of games that require a fair amount of time to get started, I’d say Fantasy Life rests somewhere behind Fallout 3 and somewhere in front of the likes of even a Persona game given that each offer far fewer opportunities for saving and quitting. Not once did I worry that I was going to lose data as save points and menu pop-ups always kept my file at a fresh point, almost to a fault.

My Paladin character soon met a few fellows in the guild office, learned about how bounties work, and then took off for adventure outside of town, though the game’s map expands far beyond what you’d expect from its more obvious influences. In addition to large, varied terrain, Fantasy Life offers some truly challenging, yet mechanically shallow, combat. Low-level bandits forced me to use health potions at an early level, though capturing one for a huge bounty satisfied like little else.

I can’t tell what Fantasy Life wants to be, however, even if that seems to make up "the point" of the game. Mercenaries, Hunters, Mages, Miners, Cooks, Carpenters, Tailors, and Alchemists all have lengthy job trees with bonuses, special abilities, unique equipment, and class-specific questlines. The townsfolk seem sleepy one second and bursting with energy the next, depending on your own progress and their surroundings. Even a butterfly character that accompanies you through much of the experience seems to take a lackadaisical approach to life, though the game does endear you to voiceless individuals with exceedingly charming dialogue.

No, you won’t find Quentin Tarantino exchanges between the hero or heroine and the landlady living underneath your flat. There’s no blood in the game and while you can hack-and-slash enemies and hunting game alike, damage and special ability points seem to be the shallowest mechanics in the title. Fantasy Life presents a largely open world, but it does ask you to pick certain avenues and then requires a lot of patience both in navigation and slight repetition. Sometimes advanced readers need to flip back a few pages in a storybook and Fantasy Life does that for you in some cases.

Still, I’d lay waste to claims that it remains firmly in “kids gaming” territory as the writing winks and nods at adults just as frequently as it leans on slapstick humor or dramatic action driven by a guard looking for a specific chicken or whatever the day’s MacGuffin is. For handheld gamers this holiday season, the pickings remain slim, but Fantasy Life offers an idealized imaginative antithesis to all-out action like you’d find in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS.

Code provided by publisher. Exclusive to Nintendo 3DS.