Fantasy Life i, The Girl Who Steals Time
When the first Fantasy Life came out of the Nintendo DS, I was tired of gaming. I thought that I didn’t enjoy playing as much as I did as a teenager, but this game proved me wrong. I poured over 100 hours into it and did everything there was to do. It is not surprising that I was very happy to hear a new Fantasy Life was underway, and I jumped on it as soon as it got out. If I didn’t like it as much as the first one, it still is a very good and enjoyable cozy game, and I’m looking forward to the updates they do.
The game as been kinda watered down: the different jobs do not have their own storyline to follow which I thought was a real bummer. You do get a whole island you can customize and build around. They even updated regularly to make several parts more user-friendly and less tedious to change. There is also online play, and playing with friends is actually fun.
But the thing I really didn’t like was the RNG-part involved in this. You have different jobs that you can level up, the crafting jobs do need materials that you get by gathering. All pretty normal stuff. But when you get to the high-level recipes, they will ask rare materials and ingredients. Most of them can be found on the big island where you can farm almost everything. But that’s it: almost everything. The rare materials and ingredients that aren’t there can be found in the treasure grove, aka, the dungeon I call the “gacha tree”. On the big island, you can find mimics. Mimics will run away from you, but they can drop saplings. These saplings can be used on your island to plant a treasure grove. Those are dungeons you can complete with a lot of rooms and stuff to do in order to advance. Each Treasure Grove as a theme. You can get a combat one with a lot of enemies, you can get a woodcutting one, with a lot of wood to cut, etc. And always a fitting final boss. There are woodcutting, mining, farming, fishing and combat treasure groves, which can have a bunch of different final bosses. I needed a Belzeebub Tuna. I was unable to get a treasure grove with a Belzeebub Tuna for over two weeks, playing daily, farming around 50-100 saplings. I did also check the online play to try to find someone playing through a Belzeebub Tuna and I finally found one after more than two weeks. Thank you, stranger, for finally putting an end to my ordeal. Suffice it to say that this did dim my enjoyment of the game. I do believe that the chances to get everything are pretty fair, but if you’re not lucky, you’re not lucky.
So yeah. I do not like RNG. After Blue Prince, I am pretty done with RNG.
