izigame.me

TLDR: Very polished and expanded sequel to Fantasy Life 3DS. Great gameplay loop centered around collecting materials, doing quests, and exploring. Definitely gonna be overlooked, can't recommend enough.
So I had dabbled with the original Fantasy Life on 3DS every so often in the last five years or so, and I remember seeing at a Nintendo Direct a new entry in the series was releasing. Many years later after some delays, here we are! I was pleasantly surprised to see this was releasing multiplatform, since I vastly prefer my Steam Deck over my OG Switch. Here are my general thoughts about the game after being so hyped that I paid for the "Advanced Access" version and everything.



Gameplay:
Fantasy Life i takes the already excellent gameplay loop of the original game and extends and enhances it. The general gameplay loop in this game revolves around:

Playing as many different classes that specialize in specific aspects of gameplay. These jobs, called "Lives" typically fall under combat oriented, gathering resources, or crafting focused, and they all synergize with each other. This game adds some quality of life stuff that really promotes eventually dabbling in every Life, but we'll get into that later.
Exploring multiple maps, most notable of which being Ginormosia which is a huge open world map that features tons of distinct biomes to explore, resources to collect, dungeons and caves to loot, monsters and bosses to fight, and more.
Crafting tons of different things with the resources you collect, including weapons, armor, clothing, gear, potions, food, and even furniture. New to this entry in the series, this all ties back into the town building mechanic as well, and I'll update my review once I've done more of that.

Some awesome notable "Quality of Life" updates in this game include:

An overhaul to how switching your "Life" works. In the 3DS game you had to travel to the guild and switch your Life before doing the associated activities in order to reap the best reward, but in this game it's all automatic and wonderful. Any time you start doing a task that has an associated Life the game automatically switches you to it, including all your gear. This vastly improves the flow and feels of the game, and makes it a no brainer to eventually just have every Life to reap the most rewards. Combat is pretty much the only one left where you probably will fall into one more than the others.
A significant streamlining of the crafting system. It used to be that for every specific type of crafting you had to go to the building that housed the associated work bench. Now in the new game you are able to initiate any craft from any work bench which is super handy since all recipes are now viewable at the same time. You can also view your recipes in the pause menu rather than having to walk all the way to the actual building too. These overhauls combine to make crafting feel so much better.

- I do want to mention that certain skill levels are recommended for certain crafts and it seems to matter a lot more in this game than the old one. I tried to immediately jump in to crafting a greatsword after I finished the black smithing tutorial and I kept failing the craft even though I was successfully completing the minigame. It's not made at all obvious that this could happen and I thought it was a glitch. Hopefully they patch this to make it clearer.

The combat has been vastly improved. It's hard to tell how much of this is just the fact we are playing on modern smooth high res displays, but besides that they have also changed some of the abilities each combat life has. They also introduced skill trees for each life (including the non combat ones) that allow you to kinda build out the Life how you prefer to play and for the combat lives this means you can kinda customize how you fight to match your play style. Specifically I'm loving how Hunter plays in this game, and I can't wait to experiment more with the status effect arrows that they added.

There are also a lot of small quality of life features that are not as easily noticed, but if I notice any more major ones I will come back and update the review.



Technical Aspects:
First off, this game uses Epic Games online services and features kernal level Easy Anti-Cheat just in case you care about those things. I personally don't mind having Epic's services installed, but I would have preferred not having kernal level anti cheat in a game where I feel most people are likely going to play solo or with a trusted group of friends. I'm so glad the industry made this the standard.
I was also concerned seeing the "Unreal Engine" splash screen due to some good awful PC ports coming from that engine recently, but I'm happy to report that despite this being a (current year) UE5 title, it runs excellent on my fairly old PC. (Ryzen 5 3600, RTX 3060ti) Maxed out, I am easily able to get right around that 120fps sweet spot, with some slight drops in heavier areas that I definitely could iron out with some settings changes, but it doesn't bother me that much.
Steam Deck support is excellent! First boot takes a little while, during which a bunch of prerequisites are installed. After that it's a little bit longer than your average game, but still decent enough. Performance is really great. At the default settings I am 100% locked at 60, no drops. I suspect Valve will rate this game once the official release date passes and I have no doubt it will be marked Verified.
For this game I highly recommend controller because it seems like KB/M would just be awful. The game detects my PS5 DualSense right away and displays the correct glyphs which is always great to see.
Overall this is a pretty good PC port that really shows that art style is vastly superior to photo realism. This game's charming cartoon aesthetic doesn't even make UE5 or my PC break a sweat. It should be noted that this game doesn't feature any of the bells and whistles of most modern releases, this includes no DLSS (or equivalent) and it also doesn't include Frame Gen. If for some reason you do need or want DLSS or Frame Gen, I highly recommend "Lossless Scaling".



So yeah, that's my review for Fantasy Life i so far. I will be back to update this review as I get further into the game, but I felt the need to post this one as soon as possible since this is a new entry from a pretty niche series that I feel needs more exposure. If this game seems at all interesting to you, please try it. LEVEL5 really has something special here that I think could appeal to a much wider audience than they currently have.
Thanks for reading,
~ Hyrulian