Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time knows which side its bread is buttered.

The original Fantasy Life on 3DS is a cult favourite, but not a bestseller by any means — yet its dedicated fanbase has been proselytising about the game for well over a decade, and it's those fans that have been hoping for this sequel for just as long. As a result, FLi isn't afraid to borrow heavily from what the original laid down — but luckily, far from being a shallow, pale imitation of its predecessor, Fantasy Life i manages to update and revitalise the formula for the modern 'cosy' gaming era.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

After a rather long and hand-holdy tutorial, you'll be thrown into the meat of what the series has to offer: choose a Life (a class) and start doing stuff with it. Crafting classes let you make tools, furniture, weapons, clothing, armour, potions, food, etc. Gathering classes are all about finding the materials to feed into the Crafting classes, which becomes easier the higher level your tools are. Combat classes, which use weapons and armour made by the Crafting classes, let you defeat monsters to gather their parts for — you guessed it — the Crafting classes. It's a beautifully woven ecosystem with plenty of synergy, and swapping between Lives is what most of the game is about.

So far, this is more or less exactly how Fantasy Life was. You'd be forgiven for thinking this was just the original game with a fresh coat of paint and a new story – and, well, yes, in a lot of ways that matter, it is.

But also, no! It's been over 10 years since the original, and in that time, we've had Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, both of which have heavily influenced two new sideplots: Ginormosia, a BOTW-like open world with towers and shrines that work exactly like you expect them to, and Mystery, a New Horizons-like village that you can terraform and decorate to your heart's delight.

Does that sound derivative? Sure! But they did a great job with both, and be honest: who doesn't want a Zelda-meets-Animal Crossing that's actually good? If Level-5 has struck upon a winning formula, we can't fault them for it, even if we are a little surprised by the gall of the similarities. Green glowing shrines with strange, unpronounceable names? A giant elderly tree-being who begs you to climb into his mouth to fight off the bad guys making him sick? Come on, Level-5, you didn't even try to change the homework you copied.

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There are plenty of excellent quality-of-life changes over the original, too — the ability to swap Lives at any point, rather than having to schlep back to the Guild Office, is a particular highlight, but there are also rideable mounts, fast travel, and swappable companions. All in all, it's a much smoother game to play than the original Fantasy Life.

Unfortunately, the new Lives — the most original addition — aren't quite as good as we hoped, and it's actually because they don't copy enough. Artist, which is another Crafting Life, blends seamlessly in with Tailor, Blacksmith, et. al by being a rhythm-ish button-mashing minigame, but the Farmer Life is inexcusably rubbish for a game that neatly fits into the 'Cosy' genre, where so many good examples of farming minigames exist. It's slow, it's fiddly, it's player-unfriendly, and worst of all, it's boring. The other Lives have some sense of progression, but not Farming! There should have been skills that allowed you to plant multiple seeds, or water an entire patch in one go, but nope. It's tedious all the way to the end of the game.

Thankfully, the rest of the game doesn't suffer for Farming being a dud. Fantasy Life i is the kind of game that lays out 10 billion choices in front of you and says, "Go wild," and one of those choices is 'use cash farming exploits to buy everything you'll ever need, and never touch a hoe again.' Hooray!

Those 10 billion choices have the ability to overwhelm, especially with all the inter-dependencies between Lives, but remarkably, it all feels quite zen doing your little minigames and slowly crawling your way up the (new!) skill tree.

Besides, if you fancy a break from the Lives, you can just switch over to the almost-entirely-separate Ginormosia to wander the lands, find towers, do shrine puzzles, complete sidequests, and just generally gain a colossal pile of XP, none of which has any bearing on the main story. You could also head over to Mystery and your little village, and terraform to your heart's content, decorating your lands with fountains and benches like a benevolent city councillor with an infinite budget. You could crank out tools and clothing to fulfil villager requests, or make fat stacks of money. Or, ask your friends to join in with the new online play feature, and ignore the story entirely! Each one of these options is a lot of fun and incredibly broad, with a level of player agency and freedom that just doesn't exist in most cosy games.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Admittedly, that breadth of freedom does come at the cost of Fantasy Life's signature personality. The original game had just one line of exploration, rather than FLi's three, but that meant that it was much more fleshed out: the NPCs were dripping with character, the Lives had their own game-spanning plots, the areas were more distinct and self-contained, and there was just a lot more life in the world, partly because it didn't have a fast-travel system so you spent a lot more time in one area.

In FLi, because you're always on the go with the extremely generous fast-travel system, the areas feel more like service areas on the motorway: you're only there to get things done before you hop back in the car and leave again. It's a good payoff, in terms of value — the game is more accessible and vastly more broad, but a little more shallow — but it seems a shame to lose that distinct weirdness that made the original so beloved in the first place.

It's hard to cover everything that FLi does well, because there really is so much to see and do. It's beautiful, it's robust, it's got multiplayer, it's got three fully-fleshed-out areas to explore, it's got crafting and foraging and cooking and fishing and minigames and beautiful music and sidequests and more. And it's all really, really good.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Admittedly, there will always be a slight sadness in our hearts that it's not quite Fantasy Life. But FLi is a triumph, and we've never been happier to see a sequel pull it off.

Conclusion

Vastly expanding breadth at the cost of depth, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a worthy sequel to the 3DS original, even if it does lose some of that signature Level-5 weirdness in the process. Taking its cues from Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing might seem pretty unoriginal, but synthesising those ideas into a Fantasy-Life-flavoured version actually works, and we can't really fault Level-5 for giving the people what they want.