[COLUMN] Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time Is 2025’s Most Dangerous Game | by Marty Sliva

It dawned on me at some point around 2am, in the middle of going through my mental checklist of tasks that I could currently be completing in Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. My woodcutter life skill was finally high enough to chop down that new type of tree, which I could use the wood from in conjunction with my blacksmith skill to craft a powerful new bow for my hunter life, meaning I could pass on my current best bow to my party member who I’ve almost maxed out my relationship with, and together we could go make the rounds of fighting tougher boss spawns, who might drop the loot we need to be able to craft a new pickaxe, which means I could mine for more valuable ore, which would allow me to blacksmith that new great sword for my mercenary, which means…

Yeah, it was sometime around then that I realized that Fantasy Life was 2025’s most potently dangerous game for anyone with even the slightest penchant for getting lost inside the quagmire of a constantly rewarding ouroboros of a game loop. 

The new Fantasy Life from Level 5 is a follow-up to Nintendo 3DS original. The games are billed as “role-playing life simulations,” which is pretty spot on. You accrue over a dozen different jobs, or “lives,” each one with its own missions, progression path, and skill tree. These fall into the buckets of combat (like a paladin or magician), gathing (like a miner or fisherman), or crafting (like a cook or an artist). 

You’ll constantly be swapping between these jobs on the fly to deal with any given situation. One moment you’re in a dungeon blasting enemies with arrows, the next you’re chipping away at a hunk of copper. Combat is a simple-but-satisfying hack-and-slash that’s aided by a ton of gear, a big skill tree, and having three other NPC party members roaming around with you. Likewise, gathering resources and crafting items have their own minigames that lean on finding your target’s sweet spot or quickly inputting the right combination of actions. Again, nothing incredibly deep, but each one is satisfying to do on their own, and the game is constantly rewarding you with loot and frequent level ups.

As you can probably tell, a session of Fantasy Life often unfolds like one of those dreaded “everything” games. An hour of play can feel like part Animal Crossing, part Stardew Valley, part Diablo, and part Breath of the Wild. I’m 20 hours in at this point, but it wouldn’t surprise me down the road to discover a roguelike deckbuilder or cozy photography minigame tucked somewhere inside this Russian nesting doll of genre. While games that promise “everything” often crumble under the weight of their own ambitions, each slice of Fantasy Life stands strong on its own, and more importantly, creates a potent synergy with each and every other facet of the game.

The main story has you discovering the mysteries of what happened to a once-prosperous ancient society by traveling back and forth between the past and the present. Along the way, you set up shop in a small hamlet that you’ll slowly transform into a community of your own, complete with all of the Animal Crossing bells and whistles like inviting NPCs to move in, terraforming the grounds to your liking, plopping down all sorts of tchotchkes, and addingi job-specific elements like fields of crops, ponds with fish, and crafting tables.

And finally, a third layer alongside the overarching story and your own personal homestead is the sprawling open world map known as Ginormosia. Gameplay here feels like diet Breath of the Wild, complete with different biomes that seamlessly blend into one another, region-specific towers to awaken, puzzle shrines to complete, and these legally distinct Koroks to track down.

I’m relatively sure I don’t have ADHD, but any 30-minute stretch of Fantasy Life inevitably has me questioning that. Say I set a singular goal of exploring a dungeon on the far side of an archipelago. I land in town, and start making my way straight there, but I spot an NPC with a new available quest, so obviously I have to snag that first. Who knows, maybe I already have whatever they need, and can complete it right away.

I make it down to the sand and encounter a few enemies, so I should swap to my magician class and take them out, since it’s currently at a lower level than my other three combat classes. Okay, with them gone, I press on through the lagoons, and look at that, there are some fish swimming around that are just a few levels higher than my fishing skill, so I should snag some of them to raise that, plus they’d make good ingredients in cooking recipes. 

Oh, that reminds me, I wanted to check a few of my current quests and see if I picked up anything I could use for crafting the items I need to complete them. A few of them have a nice reward, and I could use that extra money to expand a few of the buildings back on my island. Now that I think of it, I actually haven’t been back there this afternoon, maybe I should see if I have enough villagers to be able to clear the rest of the rubble, which would let me build more houses and raise my village level.

Shit, why did I even go to those islands in the first place?

Yep, this is a pretty standard series of thoughts during any play session of Fantasy Life, which is hopefully a clear sign of whether you should buy this game immediately, or start running in the polar-opposite direction. Part of my attachment to it has been that it runs excellently on Steam Deck, making this a perfect second-screen game to putter around in while watching something on TV.

There are a lot of quality of life features across Fantasy Life that make these extended play sessions much more palatable. Complex menus become easy to navigate once you’ve wrapped your head around them, with neat features like the ability to batch-equip gear to each of your 14 jobs. This means that if I find a rad scarf that gives me gradual SP regeneration, I can plop that on all of my lives at once, instead of doing it one at a time. Along with that, seeing as how you’ll be ping-ponging not only across the map, but across various time periods and dimensions, the ability to fast travel from anywhere plus the ample fast travel points makes navigating the world a breeze.

That said, Fantasy Life isn’t perfect, but who’s life is? I wish that the game was just 20% stranger. The world can sometimes come off as a bit saccharine and generic, and maybe it’s the Stockholm Syndrome of recently playing six straight hours of Dokapon Kingdom on stream, but Fantasy Life could use some of that game’s bizarre absurdity. Likewise, a few of the jobs that you unlock through main story quests like farmer and artist have really great NPCs at their heart, filled with character and charming little moments. I wish this depth of pal existed in the other 12 jobs, which would make earning and progressing through each one feel a bit more memorable.

But those are relatively minor complaints in an otherwise lovely experience. It’s awesome to see what an immediate critical and commercial success Fantasy Life i has been right out the gate. Level 5 announced that it passed 500,000 copies sold in just three days, compared to the 3DS version’s lifetime sales of 2.5 million. This is undoubtedly partly due to wisely moving away from the initial plan of it being a Switch exclusive, and instead releasing it on every platform including Steam, where it has already hit an impressive 65,000 concurrent users. Level 5 celebrated these achievements by announcing free upcoming DLC for all players.

I think the biggest praise I can give Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is that I’ve already put in close to 20 hours in five days, and when I’m not playing the game, I’m thinking about it. Is this going to be my “forever” game? No, probably not. But it landed at a great time, after a deluge of big sprawling bangers like Clair Obscur and Doom: The Dark Ages, and before the Switch 2 and Death Stranding 2 arrive to take over my life. But even if it’s just a fling, Fantasy Life has proven to be the most dangerous game that I’ve played in 2025.