Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time Switch 2 Review

Back in 2012, developer Level-5 released a game called Fantasy Life on the Nintendo 3DS. The game later came to the West in 2014, where it quickly became a beloved RPG and is still remembered fondly by most of those who played it. Now, the follow-up to that successful game, titled Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time, has been released across not only Nintendo Switch / Switch 2, but also PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. 

History of Fantasy Life

Back in 2021, Level-5 were at a high in popularity. Not only had they released Fantasy Life, but they were also regularly developing new entries in the Professor Layton and Inazuma Eleven franchises. Plus, they were on the cusp of releasing Pokémon competitor, Yo-kai Watch. However, the Level-5 we see today is a company that has considerably dropped its output and had gone completely silent in the West for several years after the release of Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl - Gold in 2020 until the release of Megaton Musashi W: Wired last year. 

Fantasy Life I was officially revealed in 2023 and slated for a release the same year, but went through several delays before making its eventual release in May this year. With the delays and Level-5’s CEO Akihiro Hino admitting to a troubled development for the game, many were worried that it would fail to live up to the joy of the original. 

Thankfully, despite the rocky road to release, the finished product is everything you could hope for from a sequel to Fantasy Life. 

Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time

Our story follows an unnamed player character, who, alongside archaeologist Edward, has set out to investigate an uncharted island that they’re being led to by the light coming from a fossilised dragon. Unfortunately, just as they near their goal, the group is attacked by a Dark Dragon, which leads to a shipwreck, but you’re at least saved by the fossilised dragon who comes back to life as the Bone Dragon and takes you through time into 1,000 years in the past. 

While the island you were trying to reach in the present is completely desolate, here in the past, there’s a thriving kingdom led by King Ranoah, who encourages you to find yourself a job (or a ‘Life’ as they’re known here) before he’ll help you figure out a way back to the present! And this is really where the meat of the game comes in. 

Fantasy Life I, like the previous entry, sees players take on 14 different lives (there are two new additions in the form of Farmer and Arist compared to the first game), which are divided into three categories: Combat, Gathering, and Crafting Life. Taking on these lives gives you the ability to fight, gather, and craft in numerous different ways, and each Life complements the others. To craft, you need materials, which are usually gained from gathering or monster drops, and to stay safe while gathering, you need some kind of combat Life to defeat the monsters you’ll encounter on your journey. It’s a satisfying gameplay loop that holds your attention simply due to the sheer amount of things you can find to do at any given time. 

As part of the story, you will return to the future where you get to set up a base camp. Here, the game takes on more of an Animal Crossing style approach, where you can design the island however you feel like (with more ways to make changes unlocked as you progress through the game). You’ll also gain residents through the course of the story and from exploring Ginormosia, an open world island that has plenty of mysteries all of its own! While exploring Ginormosia, you’ll come across shrines that house Strangelings, which are people who have been transformed into inanimate objects. Once you rescue them and turn them back into humans, they’ll stay in your camp and help you out as party members or offer assistance while crafting. And for those of you who played the first game, you may even recognise some familiar faces… 

One downside of Ginormosia is that it was not what Level-5 initially set out to produce for Fantasy Life I, and was an idea that they decided on much later in development. This means that in several ways it feels somewhat disjointed compared to everything else; it’s almost like another game within a game. This isn’t helped by the fact that you aren’t told to go there as part of the story, so if you’re not careful, you can end up ignoring it until much later in the game, when ideally you should be exploring it alongside moving the plot along. The main benefit of it is that it gives you access to some rare materials much earlier than you’d otherwise see them, and it can be a nice change of pace due to the open-world exploration. 

The new lives offer plenty to freshen things up, too. Farming can be a little finicky as you use the A button both to sow seeds and water the plants, which I often found doesn’t want to work if you’re not standing in the right position. But it does offer you plenty of materials for cooking, which is something you always had to buy largely in the previous game. And now that there’s more of a focus on designing your own home and island, the Artist Life also feels like a natural progression for the game. 

In many ways, playing this game felt like stepping back into the first one, just newer. It plays the way you’d expect it to with very few changes to the core gameplay (which is a good thing!), and the character writing is just as quirky and entertaining as it was before. The story overall is rather typical of an RPG like this, the twists are fairly obvious, and I wouldn’t say it has a lot of surprises. However, due to the characters, it is charming and certainly never dull. It had more direction than the first game, which was rather light on plot and left you to your own devices quite a lot. 

Frankly, it’s impressive how much Level-5 has crammed into this game and how seamlessly it all comes together. This was true of the first game as well, of course, but given the development circumstances, there was certainly a world in which something just didn’t fit. It’s also a game that, despite the scope, doesn’t overstay its welcome. You can finish the story within 25-30 hours, or, like me, you can pour significantly more time into it if you want to explore or raise the rank of your Life’s to the highest level. The developer has also announced that there will be free DLC coming in the future, and they are planning to release an update in June with some additional camera angles and some other quality of life improvements. There is voice acting for the characters this time as well, but it's largely in the form of one or two words rather than fully voiced. This is also a nice improvement compared to the first game.

I initially bought this game on the original Nintendo Switch and was very impressed with the performance overall. There wasn’t a great deal in the way of framerate drops or technical issues. I have heard that playing online (the game supports crossplay) or local multiplayer does cause more slowdown, but I never tested that to confirm. 

With the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2, I bought the Switch 2 upgrade and was pleasantly surprised to see the visuals were a lot crisper and sharper, and that the load times had been reduced. They weren’t awful on the original Switch, but it’s still a worthwhile upgrade, especially as it’s very inexpensive. 

In Conclusion 

Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time is an excellent follow-up to a beloved game. It makes for an excellent portable offering due to how easy it is to dip in and out of, and it’s a perfect title to pick up now for Switch 2. Level-5 may have gone through some hardships, but it’s clear that they still hold all the same magic they did before and have delivered something that doesn’t reinvent the wheel and will pass the test of time because of it. It’s another unforgettable adventure, but at the same time, it’s simply more Fantasy Life, which is all we needed.

For this review, our reviewer played the game on a Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 console.
© Level-5