Hot the heels of Paria, the wonderful life sim that just consumed dozens of hours of my life. In fact, I can’t believe I was sucked into yet another thing just a few days later. With her witty writing and a supply of seemingly endless charm, Fantasy Life I: The Time-Tracking Girl has already stolen many mine. The characters and stories so far are surprisingly goofy and far more substantial than you’d see in this genre, and RPG-like life systems that level out different tasks really get lost. It’s still quite early to start to look like a rather long adventure, but I’m already heading to my heels for this fun, light romp filled with birds and time-traveling dragons that I’m already talking about. I have plans for my weekend.
Fantasy Life I am an interesting Hodge Podge of chill game mechanics, lovingly placed on one killer mixtape that has repeatedly surprised me. At one moment, you create an iron ingot and think, “Oh, it’s fine. You’ll get what this game is,” and then mine the ore with the ore. It finds you walking in a moment of time that leads to a long, open world trekking filled with combat with brightly colored monsters. It can be a bit uncomfortable at first, but after a few hours I began to appreciate how you can keep things fresh by captivating you to jump between that different attractions.
If you’re a bit bored with villagers helping out with random requests, you can run around the desert behind camels looking for hidden treasure chests and fire-breathing lizards, or bite them with a title entitled “Imitation.” What brings together these different activities is that they all have a low impact atmosphere. I have never felt the need to worry about leaning on a chair or setting up a character’s loadout. It’s some life sims, some action-adventure RPGs, all unified by universally mellow tones.
I’m particularly amazed at how quickly they started caring about the cast of characters. It’s Edward, an archaeologist seeking adventure, a musically wrapped princess Rem who appears to enjoy banging it with travel, a talking bird who loves the Sass, or our average people. Humorous dialogue and larger personality than living things gave me much more laughs than I usually do from my Sims in life.
It is surprising and impressive how much this goofy life does, and how much it is immediately appealing. Of course, there is absolutely a chance that some of its appeal will fade away as I become familiar with the system and proceed to grinding. It could be a fantasy life where I have an incredibly strong opening, but even if it turns out to be true, I really enjoy my time and feel pretty good that it will catch my attention.
I’m still early in my adventure, not yet trying out the multiplayer features (including both online and local cooperatives of up to four people), reaching later stages with either my job path, or finishing some chapters of the story. I can almost certainly say more on a sleepless weekend when I’m Shanking the Wolves and helping merchant bears heal the wounds of the bees. But for now, he has to help this cat with his personal issues.
