I’ve decided to take a brief break from playing Fantasy Life i to write about Fantasy Life i. I’ve just passed the 40 hour mark and I feel like I have some wisdom I can share with those of you just getting started in your Fantasy Life adventure.
First of all, if you’re not familiar with Fantasy Life i, it is essentially Animal Crossing meets Zelda with a side of Final Fantasy. You will take on various “lives” like cook, woodcutter, hunter, paladin, miner, tailor and so on. Each one of these lives can be leveled up through harvesting materials and making stuff or via combat with monsters. You can use the stuff you make to build out and decorate your own town full of townspeople that you will collect as you play. These NPC characters will also all have a “Life” and you can use them to build out a party of 3 characters that will follow you around and back you up either in harvesting skills or combat. The game is a perfect mash up of town building and an action adventure RPG. I feel like there’s always at least half a dozen things to do and I am constantly torn between pushing the story forward and fucking around with my town.
I’ve played for over 40 hours now and I figured I’d drop some tips here for new players.
- You can fast travel pretty much everywhere. Use the map to fly around from location to location. You can even leave dungeons!
- You are introduced to a place called Ginormosia relatively early on in the game but it’s not well explained. It is a massive open world area populated with puzzle shrines to explore. It’s a great place to gather resources, fight monsters and explore. You’ll find recipes for advanced tools and weapons as well as dungeons full of treasure. I did not return here until I was almost level 40 and I regret it because I was way overleveled for the early zones. Be sure and spend time exploring Ginormosia every so often, the rewards are well worth it.
- When you first get the ability to build your town, the land will be hilly and full of little rivers and ponds. You can start working on your town right away, but don’t spend too much time on it. Eventually as you push through the main campaign you will get the ability to manipulate the terrain and build or remove water features. This comes pretty late in the story but it makes setting up your town just how you want so much easier. If you have a lot of stuff already built it can be a pain to move everything around so keep that in mind.
- You can and should equip your party members with gear!
- If you want to make a lot of money, I recommend becoming an Artist and building treasure chests. You can get the materials from fighting mimics and the blueprint can be purchased from a vendor in the Tropica Isles. One of these sells for 34k and they are not difficult to make. Details here!
- Many vendors will have a special tab where they sell blueprints so keep an eye out. I did not notice this at first and had to go back and buy a bunch.
- Don’t forget to spend your skill points. Especially if you are working on leveling up a bunch of Lives at once it can be difficult to remember to spend all the points you are earning. Each Life has its own huge skill tree and as you fill it out you’ll get to abilities to make crafting, harvesting or fighting easier.
That’s all I’ve got for now. I’m honestly still discovering stuff about the game. Like I said before, it is a truly dangerous mixture of base building, crafting, harvesting and classic action RPG mechanics. I can’t recommend it enough if you’re into any of those ingredients.
-Gabe Out
