Have a wee look at the trailer below. Ain’t it peaceful? Fantasy Life evokes a laid-back, cheery existence in a green and pleasant world where every character has a smile. It’s like Harvest Moon with knights. Originally, this collaboration between Level-5 and cult Nintendo studio Brownie Brown was going to be coming out on Nintendo DS, but it’s now made the switch to 3DS, and it’s out in Japan just after Christmas. It’s got lovely watercolour Ghibli-esque art and animation and Animal Crossing-like town-life gameplay mixed in with adorable RPG questing; you start by picking which fantasy life you want (fisherman, knight, carpenter, cook, blacksmith, wizard, lumberjack, miner and many more), and then live it out however you please.
For my first adventure, I pick the Knight profession – the demo begins by letting you customise your dumpy little avatar’s appearance and asking you a few questions about yourself (whether you want to be a hero, whether you prefer fighting or creating), and then suggests what path might work for you. Around the town, mentors for each of the twenty professions await your knock upon the door, ready to inculcate you in their way of life.
I was given only the briefest taste of the Knight way of life: a single quest, which I embarked upon accompanied by a sidekick who was always ready with helpful advice about pressing X to defend myself from monsters. A few fields away from town, there’s a pasture with a few monsters that need clobbered, culminating in a mean-looking purple panther. Once he’s clobbered, that’s it – I’m sent back to town, and invited to try out one of the other professions on a new playthrough. The fisherman’s life sends me to the same area and gets me to catch a rare fish for my mentor, and as an archer, I’m given a slightly different selection of beasties to kill with my electric, poisonous or super-charged arrows.
Given that the actual game is open-world, it feels strange to be funnelled so determinedly through these super-linear quests instead of being given free rein to explore and see what more the game might have to offer. When it’s released Fantasy Life will let you team up with up to three other people to explore its world. It looks like you can have pets, too, whose character design invites further comparisons to Ghibli and Disney.
Fantasy Life appears super-simplistic from this admittedly brief playthrough, with all of its many different professions reduced to a series of one-dimensional tasks, but the Animal Crossing-style town, furniture and clothing customisation, wide range of environments and co-op adventures shown in the trailer suggest that there could be much more Fantasy Life than it first appears. By the looks of it, though, Western gamers may never get to see whether it develops into anything deeper.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on Twitter and IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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