You won’t find yourself switching Lives and single-shot killing everything in sight, and the monsters of new kingdoms feel appropriately challenging once the areas become available. While the game certainly supports focusing exclusively on picking up a sword and going to town on the local wildlife or just hanging around the city selling handmade furniture, the full experience of Fantasy Life lies in developing a well-rounded character that can craft his or her own armour and weapons, potions, stat-boosting foods, and more.Īll of this may sound like you’re building a personal mobile weapons platform that can knit its own ammunition during recoil phases, but the game’s difficulty is handled surprisingly well. Special Skills, unusually powerful or useful techniques, can only be used as part of the character’s current Life.

When enough stars are earned, the player ranks up in the Life they are currently living and gains access to new skills or recipes that also mostly remain usable when a character switches Lives, with one exception.

In addition to gaining XP and earning Dosh (the in-game currency) for littering the landscape with creature corpses, each Life has its own series of challenges which award stars. Now that Fantasy Life is finally arriving on western shores, does it deliver on the promise of its formidable creative staff? Absolutely.Īt first blush the action RPG elements of Fantasy Life seem almost par for the course - the medieval fantasy setting, a dragon threatening the land, a race of cuddly creatures called the Plushies who haven’t yet grasped that their name doesn’t form the basis of the Queen’s English but the game excels by expanding the scope of the adventurer’s journey by integrating it with the game’s life sim features. Most notably, Fantasy Life is the final game developed by Brownie Brown - before a restructuring and name change to 1-UP Studios - a company that holds a special place in JRPG fans’ hearts for, among other things, its involvement with Mother 3, a game that was never officially released in the West. In addition to Level-5, legendary character artist Yoshitaka Amano and early Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu are also credited on Fantasy Life. Originally announced in Japan for the Nintendo DS/DSi generation of consoles back in 2009, it spent three years in development, seeing a platform upgrade to the Nintendo 3DS, finally releasing in Japan-only on 27th December, 2012.įantasy Life was closely watched by the western gaming press as the companies and staff involved in its production reads like a who’s who of Japanese games industry RPG notables.

Fantasy Life, Level-5 and Brownie Brown’s life sim and action RPG, is a game with a long and storied history.

Fantasy life ds