We've spent hundreds of hours on games like Animal Crossing, as we wile away the hours talking to villagers, digging up fossils, and plotting the devious Tom Nook's eventual demise. We've spent hundreds of hours on role playing games too, from hunting out familiars on Ni No Kuni, to the less mentioned 360+ hours spent on Pokemon Pearl on the DS. Imagine, then, quite how much of a social life black hole you'd create if you mixed the fantasy role playing of a game like Ni No Kuni, with the social experience of Animal Crossing. That, in a nut shell, is Fantasy Life.
For fans of the recently-deceased Rune Factory series, as well as those of you who love the likes of Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon, Fantasy Life should be right up your street. A game by Ni No Kuni and Professor Layton studio, Level 5, it's a game that follows a familiar path, mixing the variety of a social life sim with the depth of a fantasy role player, giving you a massive world to explore as you work to carve out a life of your choosing. And with the developers recently announcing the game has a staggering 21,000 pages of story to play through, bursting with characters to befriend, quests to complete and items to collect and craft across the land of Reveria, "massive" may be an understatement. To top it all off, it's a game where you can do what you want, easily spending hours simply chatting with the locals, doing a spot of fishing or dabbling in interior design.
Ohhhhh I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok, I sleep all night and I work all day.
There's twelve different character classes to choose from, split into three broad categories - those who simply want to smash some bad guys can opt for a mercenary or paladin, whilst those who like to craft potions, weapons and armour can opt for a blacksmith or alchemist. There's also various foraging classes for those folks who really, really like wondering around and picking up rocks. But the best part is that, once you've made your decision, you're not locked into playing as that one class for the entire game - you're able to mix and match whenever you fancy, with no penalties whatsoever. In fact, being indecisive is actively encouraged, when, for example, your blacksmith character needs a particular item to forge his next piece of armour - a material that can only be got through smiting a certain powerful enemy, making that previous training you had as a paladin come in pretty darn handy.
Combat itself is fairly basic button-mashing stuff, in which you run around, smash guys with swords or pelt them with magic from a distance, avoiding any incoming attacks. The more you use a move, the better your character will get at using it too - this means, for example, that should you use the dash skill often enough, the 'cost' of using it each time will decrease, letting you use it more often. But using your skills repeatedly isn't the only way to become more powerful - each character class has its own separate set of 'Life Quests' to complete, earning you points towards levelling up with each one you complete.
There's a variety of mounts you can ride around on too. Fingers crossed for a unicorn!
But, with two-thirds of the character classes being decidedly non-combat-based, your Fantasy Life is likely to be about much more than simply smacking monsters. There's cooks, anglers, and lumberjacks, and of course, blacksmiths too - each with their own unique sets of skills. Those that rely on 'crafting' items, food and equipment do so through a number of simple minigames, relying on careful timing of button presses to make better stuff. These can then be sold for cash, or used to deck out your character, with weapons, clothes and equipment, all of which look markedly different when worn, much like in the equally amazing Dragon Quest IX for the DS.
Customisation is the name of the game in Fantasy Life too, from designing your character, to decorating your house. Much like in Animal Crossing, you have a plethora of wallpaper, furniture and décor to choose from, as you complete the various interior design quests found in each town. Those expecting an ever expanding abode and oodles of stuff to put in it may turn out to be a little disappointed though, as it seems the home customisation takes a bit of a backseat to the rest of the game. You can have cats and dogs living in your house as pets though, so its not all bad.
Think those bed sheets have seen better days...
Taking cues from Dragon Quest IX once more, Fantasy Life also has a fairly substantial multiplayer too. Friends with the game can jump into your game and lend a hand taking down a particularly devious boss, help you defend a treasure chest from a bad guy onslaught and much more. But your friends don't have to be real either, as Fantasy Life also lets you add some computer-controlled companions to your entourage too.
Bought to life by Level-5, the brains behind the Professor Layton series, some stellar Dragon Quest instalments, and PS3 RPG of the century, Ni No Kuni, we have high hopes for Fantasy Life when it launches in Europe on the 26th September.
