5/5 ★ – midori's review of Fantasy Life.

If I could choose only one game I'd called my favorite is this one. I poured 300 hours into it. Now that a new one has been announced for the Switch, I'm over the moon! I unfortunately haven't been able to play the DLC for weird regional restriction but the base game in itself is just incredible, amazing, you name it. I haven't played it in years but I can remember everything about it: - The amount of content you can do whenever you want in whatever order that you never feel bored neither overwhelmed; - For a 3DS game, the map is huge and all the locations are so beautiful that I would go back and forth to them with great pleasure, there's not just the big "cliché" areas but smallers spread all around Reveria and beyond you can travel to and explore, each more beautiful than the other; - The art style is so cute and beautiful without getting into the barfing-rainbow-kawaii zone. Everything is colorful but more in pastel tones than vibrant eye hurting, character design is cute and some are genuinely funny; - As said in the first point: you're never bored. Switching between lifes at will, fighting, gathering, crafting at you heart's content. The side quests for each life don't feel like artificial filling and even if it was, I happily filled them up just for spending more time in Reveria; - Ties to the above point, reaching the end of the storyline doesn't mean reaching the end of the game, not at all. You'll spend more time paying outside of the storyline than within it; - Gameplay for each life type (fight, gather, craft) are fun even if you like one type less than an other, they really made it so is a fun game inside a game; - Plenty of other great things I surely forget to mention but I'll still be there tomorrow if I keep going lol. This is the only game I don't find any cons. Of course this a japanese RPG so you'll eat up some long dialogue at the beginning but the balance between freedom of doing whatever you like and following the story is so well-made that it didn't bother me at all. This isn't a life-sim (and I don't understand people comparing it to Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley but it seems this had been a recent trend to compare absoluely everything to those two) but I feel like I was genuinely in there, in Reveria with its colorful population. ──────────────────────────────── 🐸 Midmidori, played at release I'm not a native English speaker but I write reviews to improve.