Fantasy Life: Review

From games that try to simulate some aspect of life, you always expect something special. The difficulty of the task is obvious: who would prefer growing cucumbers to performing feats?? Therefore, developers of role-playing projects insert elements of everyday life as side effects in relation to the storyline filled with exploits. Company Level 5 when creating Fantasy Life decided to shift the emphasis somewhat and set out to provide freedom to the user specifically in the field of his career and “everyday” development.

The scope for creating a character image is quite large. Here is a politically correct hipster with a pink mustache.

Life or tin?

Fantasy Life meets the player with exactly this message: your life is in your hands, do with it whatever you want. You are the creator of your destiny – train your free will already at the embryonic level: join the symbol of Venus or Mars, stick on a hipster mustache or grow a wise old man’s beard. The character editor will be followed by choosing a life path. Become a warrior or mage? Cook or alchemist? Fisherman or woodcutter? In total, we are offered twelve classes to choose from, and such diversity inspires hope.

Inspired by the prospects, we put the pan on our heads in full readiness to bear the gastronomic cross and contribute to the development of culinary art. After the preparatory procedures, we are greeted with open arms by the fantasy world of Reveria, which in an isometric perspective represents the twin brother of the latter The Legend of Zelda. The novice cook goes straight to the palace of King Eric, who blesses the hero and once again pompously announces the paths that he has to go through.

This is where all the joys of freedom and independent life end. After your first walk around the city, you notice that the NPCs inhabiting it stand like idols, and any attempt to talk to them leads to the playback of the phrase recorded behind them. However, there is no need to lament the lack of choice of dialogue lines, since the main character is completely speechless, and all communication functions are performed for him by a magical butterfly named Flutter.

Three dots occasionally light https://noaccount-casinos.co.uk/review/magic-win/ up above the heads of some residents of Reveria. This is a signal that the idol has experienced a need for either five chicken legs, or ten cedar logs, or some other item out of the thousands that exist in the world Fantasy Life. Such vagaries are called additional quests here. Where to find the requested item is not an easy question, because you won’t find any marks on the map. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of the famous army “challenge”, when in barracks conditions a soldier must get something for the commander. Where and how are your problems. This is exactly what ninety-nine percent of non-story missions look like in this game.

Pacifist’s Paradise

But with the plot, things are much sadder. If NPC tasks at least present us with a problem and motivate us to explore the world in search of the missing item, then the main line literally drags us by the handle throughout the entire passage. The game can be easily completed by a hero of the first level, because all that is required of us is to run from one character to another and listen to their mournful monologues.

You can’t call them anything else: the fairy-tale atmosphere obliges the residents of Reveria to express themselves in a naive, childish style. There is a constant feeling that we are being told a fairy tale for toddlers: here is a good dragon who turned evil because his children were kidnapped; here is a princess who has to escape from imprisonment in a tower through a window; and here’s a story about pirate treasure. The situation could have been saved by a bit of self-irony, ridiculing genre clichés, but there is not a shadow of it here. Maybe, Fantasy Life and there is a game for kindergarten regulars, but who are the kilobytes of text for then??

Fantasy Life will never make you tense, will never present a surprise, will not surprise you with an intricate quest or an unexpected plot twist. The monotonous narrative reveals a clear structure that repeats throughout the game. Once in a new city, we communicate with three characters and find out what trouble prevents them from sleeping peacefully. Then we have a dozen conversations with NPCs who know how to solve these problems, after which the conversation binge is crowned with a “battle” with the “boss”. You can’t do without quotation marks: here too you manage to get away with little loss of life by attacking the cursed stone that feeds it instead of the terrible dragon.

If you wish, you can complete the game without engaging in battles at all and completely ignoring the insignificant attempts of ordinary monsters to harm you. And in “hot” plot points, where it would seem impossible to do without fists, the situation can be left to our butterfly, who has a high level of diplomatic skill. Sometimes very funny scenes happen: a pack of angry wolves attacks us, and Flutter says: “Guys, let’s come to an agreement…”, after which the creatures simply disappear. It is not appropriate for a fisherman or weaver to fight dragons, and the developers solved this problem very “exquisitely”.

The passage does not require any intellectual or physical effort from the user. The primitiveness of the storyline is so amazing that it begs the question: how did my pacifist cook, who had never killed a single creature in his life and never uttered a word, managed to become a hero who saved the whole world??

Firemen, carpenters, high-altitude assemblers

In connection with all of the above, it becomes unclear why the game needs character parameters, the ability to buy real estate and develop it, a considerable bestiary and hundreds of different items. All this diversity makes sense only if the user sets out to get all the “achievements”, complete all the same quests and acquire the “master” badge in all existing professions.

Classes are the only thing that somehow justifies “life” ambitions Fantasy Life. In addition to the main plot and additional quests, there is a separate career path for the hero. Unfortunately, she is completely closed, that is, your choice will not affect either the world’s attitude towards the character or the ending. By completing tasks specific to each guild, we advance from “apprentice” to the highest levels.

For our chef, everyday work consists of finding the necessary ingredients and subsequent cooking. However, here too you quickly become disappointed: the process of creating food is the same simple mini-game, with which you get fed up already by the third dish. It’s no better with other classes: in any activity, be it cutting down trees or catching fish, you will find only monotonous actions that will have to be repeated more than a hundred times to succeed.

For most professions, the main task is to find missing items and materials. So, our cook can buy most of the ingredients for his dishes at the market, but he has to look for the most exotic ones himself. The problem is solved thanks to the ability to change the class. For example, we are allowed to temporarily master the craft of a fisherman, catch a goldfish in a pond, then dress up again as a cook and make a dish out of it. But in order to organize your own production network, you will have to change your profession several times, spend dozens of extra hours “leveling up” your character and talking with townspeople. And in a dead world that does not respond to our achievements, I don’t want to do this at all.

It would seem, Fantasy Life offers many traditional activities for high-quality RPGs: saving the world, moving up the career ladder of your guild, helping numerous characters. But in reality, it all comes down to one test – to break through dozens of hours of monotonous work reading dialogues and looking for objects. The target audience of such entertainment is narrowed to those who like to fill out lines in an endless list called “Achievements.”. Most people don’t need such a “life,” even if it’s a fantasy one.

Pros: a huge variety of items, monsters and professions; nice visual style.
Cons: dull quests; “toothless” story campaign; endless boring dialogues; the “uniqueness” of professions comes down to repetition of the same operation.